such phenomena as coughing, scratching a place bitten by some kind of insect, or blowing your nose (this was one of the first lessons for me, because I seem to constantly catch colds and suffer several times from prolonged bouts of hay fever) must have been part of such contemplation of the body, which lasted all day. It began with the words “I am waking up, I am waking up”, and ended with: “I am lying down, I am lying down”; this was followed by a focus on the areas where the body was in contact with the bed; and this occupation continued until sleep came.
So, here there was a complete restriction of the activity of the mind, which is required by the method of satipatthana; its effectiveness lies partly in the fact that it uses the field of activity that is closest to it, and also in the ease with which this method is consistently introduced into practice. Once a new habit of thinking has been developed, sitting and walking exercises continue all day; it is only in the brief intervals between these exercises that "bodily thinking" comes to the fore. There was one more option allowed to the mind during this all day long созерцания: это было особенное настроение, чувство данного момента, – if для изучающего такая классификация оказывалась достаточно ясной,—в особенности когда его настроение было готово вторгнуться в упражнения и нарушить их. Since the principle in this case was the same as in the contemplation of the body, I need not say much about it. Elevated or depressed mood was consciously noted by mental repetition: "Elevated (or depressed) mood." A few minutes spent contemplating the mood in this way was usually enough to prevent him from interfering with the normal exercises. Of course, the term "mindfulness" implies observing whatever activity the mind and body are engaged in; and this sense of the state of the observer grew stronger and stronger as the continuity of "awareness" improved. (Insight, intuition and receptivity)
Although the mind never completely stopped its attempts at deviance, by this time its tendency to deviate had clearly diminished, and it was much easier to detect and stop it. The scope of his activities turned out to be limited, and the temptations became less. The task of holding the mind firmly now began in earnest, especially during the sitting exercises, when physical activity was reduced to a minimum. Keeping the mind on the breath-induced movement of the abdominal wall slowed down the breath itself, and this, in turn, made the movement more superficial. At the same time, the mental effort required to follow the movement of the abdominal wall became progressively more subtle until it reached the point where only a small part of the mental potential was used. And only when at last a certain stability was achieved, and the mind calmed down, released from effort and became completely receptive, did it become possible to interfere with the process of insight, or intuition, or awareness. But at first the mind tried to take advantage of this quite noticeable decrease in physical activity in order to elude the control, which gradually became more and more effective. Day after day the mind went on with its tricks and fled to some interesting subject of its own; but each time it was returned back. Just at the moment when a series of exercises one morning you feel that you have approached the ultimate stillness of the mind, the afternoon exercises show you that the end is not yet in sight, and the mind is as frisky as ever. There were days when I felt that I was losing ground under my feet, and I spoke about this to the sayados. But he invariably replied: “That was to be expected; don't worry, but just keep stopping the mind gently and firmly without impatience or irritation, and in the end you will succeed. Indeed, by the end of my course, I achieved it. Like a lighthouse beam, the mind fell on the object of its contemplation and remained there in a state of rest, where time disappeared. Although it was the will that brought him to this state, when silence filled the mind, there was no deliberate effort of the will left. Now it was necessary to make this silence permanent, to make it a state that could be called up again and again until a passage was opened through which insight could reach the conscious mind and fill it. This stage, to my infinite regret, I have not reached. But I have no doubt that it is quite achievable.
In one of the conversations, Sayadaw explained to me the reason why intuitive awareness is so rarely able to reach the conscious mind. Although in everyday life we ​​think that we are consciously directing the mind from one object to another, in reality there is always a kind of frame of "fluttering" thoughts, whose activity is completely uncontrollable. These thoughts invade the conscious mind as soon as they have the opportunity to do so; therefore, when the mind is released from tension, they immediately successfully drown out the intuition, which recedes before them, because it needs a calmer and more orderly entrance.
In fact, we only half believe in intuition; men consider it the cause of female inconsistency, and women see it as a sign of their inherent superiority. But in fact, it is available to everyone who consciously develops it and contributes to its manifestation. For most of us, however, this is a rare, fickle, and timid process that is so easily blocked in the form of more urgent thoughts related to immediate concerns. Но if развить способность расчищать дорогу для интуиции, это осознание может стать привычным для нас состоянием, и мы будем получать intuitive experiences in the form of direct sensations, and not just as information about things. Intuition will become "knowledge" that comes from direct contact with the "knowable", somehow bypassing the five external senses; and the certainty which accompanies the content of such knowledge is strikingly different from the certainty which we associate with knowledge acquired in the ordinary way.
Closely connected with this limitation of the field of mental activity, which the method of satipatthana imposes, is the effort to perceive all sensory impressions in the form in which they are received by the senses, while avoiding any interpretation of them by the mind. It is mental constructions of this type, immediately applied to any sense impression, that lead the mind away from the necessary attention to bodily activities. We immediately recognize the ringing of a bell as such, and we create in our mind the image of this bell, then immediately add the direction from which it is heard - and then the fact that it probably came from some temple that we imagine with its pagoda gleaming in the rays of the setting evening sun. All this happens without any apparent conscious effort to analyze a mere sense impression. To take this impression as received is to try to leave the sound as just sound and not allow the mind to start weaving a whole sequence of interpretations. This can be done by focusing on the sound within the mind; and we watch it until it fades into silence. The same must be done with smells, with touches that open up to the sense of touch, although in this case, whether it is a breeze caressing the skin or the touch of clothes on the body, we need to draw attention to those things that would otherwise go unnoticed. I have already mentioned my daily break by the lake early in the morning; it was there that I spent ten minutes, as it were, moving along the sense impressions I had received and enjoying the new intimacy of simply perceiving them without the polluting effect of constructive analysis. It was so natural to classify a sound as "the sound of a bell in a temple" and, having learned all there was to know about it, to quickly dismiss it from the mind. But now I became much more aware of the characteristic chanting of the temple bells with their golden tones; it remained in the air until it turned into a light sound web. The sound filled my entire consciousness, became a part of myself, and finally was lost inside the ear, and at the same time I felt that I was losing something precious. It was a source of surprise for me to find how much pure pleasure I get from simple things that I had hardly paid attention to before. And I found a new appreciation for all sounds and touches, even visual impressions, although it was much more difficult to capture these sense impressions before interpretation polluted their magic. However, this was possible just at that morning time, when the light was just beginning to activate the interpretive activity of the mind. Hidden from me in the fog, the tree on the other side of the lake remained just a form, and its color, as it gradually appeared, was just a color, and not leaves or flowers. I found that this practice gave much deeper meaning to sensory perceptions—especially auditory and tactile ones—and at the same time, I experienced simple pleasure, free from association and reasoning. 9. ENTERTAINMENT
Limited success in meditation was all I knew I could expect. And this success came almost imperceptibly at a time when I seemed to be busy with the usual wandering thoughts. A minute ago, I was still diverting my attention from wandering around, doing so with the