Inner Strength - Access to Insight

47in. When mental labels stop, there’s nobody running. And when everyone hasstopped running, there’s no pushing and shoving, no colliding, no conversing.The heart looks after itself in line with its duties.As for the properties, khandhas, and sense media, each is independent in itsown area, each is in charge of its own affairs. There’s no trespassing on anyoneelse’s property. And once there’s no trespassing, what troubles will there be?Like a match left lying alone in a match box: What fires can it cause? As long asits head isn’t struck on anything abrasive, fire won’t have a chance to arise. Thisdoesn’t mean that there’s no fire in the match. It’s there as it always was, but aslong as it doesn’t latch onto anything combustible it won’t flare up.The same is true of a mind that no longer latches on to the defilements. This iswhat is meant by nibb›na. It’s the ultimate good, the ultimate point of thereligion, and our own ultimate point as well. If we don’t progress in the threefoldtraining—virtue, concentration, and discernment—we won’t have any chance toreach the ultimate. But if we gather these practices within ourselves and advancein them, our minds will develop the knowledge and awareness capable ofpushing us on to an advanced point, to nibb›na.* * *Noble disciples are like people who realize that rain water is the vapor thatheat sucks up from the salt water of the ocean and then falls down as rain—andso that rain water is ocean water, and ocean water is rain water. Ordinary run-ofthe-millpeople are like people who don’t know what rain water comes from.They assume that rain water is up there in the sky and so they deludedly wait todrink nothing but rain water. If no rain comes, they’re sure to die. The reason fortheir ignorance is their own stupidity. They don’t know enough to search fornew resources—the qualities of the noble ones—and so will have to keepgathering up the same old things to eat over and over again. They keep spinningaround in the cycle of rebirth in this way, with no thought of searching for a wayout of this mass of suffering and stress. They’re like a red ant that keeps probingits way around and around the rim of a bushel basket—whose circumferenceisn’t even two meters—all because it doesn’t realize that the rim of the basket isround. This is why we keep experiencing birth, aging, illness, and death withoutend.As for the noble ones, they see that everything in the world is the same oldstuff coming over and over again. Wealth and poverty, good and bad, pleasureand pain, praise and censure, etc., keep trading places around and around incircles. This is the cycle of defilement, which causes ignorant people tomisunderstand. The world itself spins—Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then back to the same old Sunday all over again.January, February, March, April, May, etc., up to November and December, andthen back to January. The year of the rat, the ox, the tiger, all the way up to theyear of the pig, and then back to the same old year of the rat all over again.Everything is like this, night following day, day following night. Nighttime isn’tfor sure: Our daytime is other people’s nighttime, their daytime is our nighttime.Things keep changing like this. This is called the wheel of the world, which causes