Inner Strength - Access to Insight

are the ones made of skin. The inner ear is the ear of the heart. The ear of theheart doesn’t appear for the same sort of reason: It’s full of earwax. You neverclean it out. You don’t build up any goodness in the area of the mind. The mindisn’t centered in concentration. When it’s not in concentration, and hears anattractive sound, it can’t stay still. Your ears are full of wax. You hear peoplegossiping or cursing each other out, and you love to hear it. This is a humongoushunk of wax stuck in your ear. As for the Dhamma, you’re not really interestedin listening, which is why there’s nothing but earwax: earwax stuck in yourmind, earwax all over everything outside. This is why your powers ofclairaudience don’t arise.Clairaudience is really refreshing. You don’t have to waste your timelistening. If you feel like listening, you can hear anything. What the hungryghosts are talking about, what common animals are talking about, what thedevas are talking about—how fantastic it is to be in heaven—you can hear it all,unless you don’t want to listen. Like a radio: If it’s turned on, you can hear it loudand clear. If it becomes a nuisance, you don’t have to keep it on. If you have thisskill, you can turn it on to listen for the fun of it; if you don’t want to listen, youcan turn it off in an instant. This is called clairaudience, one of the skills ofconcentration practice.Another skill is cetopariya-ñ›˚a, the ability to read minds, to see if people arethinking good thoughts or bad, high, low, crude, evil: You can use this insight toknow. This is called cetopariya-ñ›˚a, an important skill.Then there’s pubbeniv›s›nussati-ñ›˚a, the ability to remember previous lives,and ›savakkhaya-ñ›˚a, the ability to clean out the mind, washing away all theignorance, craving, and clinging inside it. You can keep ignorance from arising inthe heart. You can keep craving from taking charge of the heart. You can makesure that there’s no clinging or attachment. When you can let go of yourdefilements—k›ma-jaho, when you’re not stuck on sensual objects or sensualdesires; di˛˛hi-jaho, when you’re not stuck on views and opinions; avijj›-jaho, whenyou don’t mistake ignorance for knowledge and can let it go without anyattachment—when you don’t latch onto evil, when you don’t latch onto yourown goodness, when you can spit out evil and goodness, without holding ontothem as your own, letting them go in line with their nature: That’s called›savakkhaya-ñ›˚a, the knowledge of the ending of the fermentations in the mind.This is the third noble truth: the truth of cessation, achieved through the practicesthat give rise to knowledge and skill.These are the skills that arise from meditation practice. They’re uparima-vijj›,higher learning in the area of the religion. When you’ve got them, you can be atyour ease—at ease if you die, at ease if you don’t. You don’t have to build arocket to go to Mars. You can live right here in the world, and nothing will beable to harm you. In other words, you know what things are dangerous, whatthings are harmful, and so you leave them alone and don’t touch them. This wayyou can live in safety and peace. The heart can stay blooming and bright like thisat all times.This is why we should be earnest and strict with ourselves in the practice, sothat we can achieve the aims we all want. Here I’ve explained the eight86