Simply This Moment - Buddhist Meditation and Theravada ...

to talk about what is deeply within us, we never say that there’s nothing there. Thereis that mysterious – but not mystical – misty, uncertain something, which people taketo be a ‘me’. However, when we see that fully it reveals itself as a process. This iswhy Theravada Buddhism and the Buddhism of accomplished meditators disagreewith people who say it’s just empty and that there is nothing there. There issomething there. There is this process that you can feel as being something. Our realproblem is that we take it to be something it isn’t. That which is there is just a processand that process is beautifully described by the Buddha: with the arising of this, thatarises; and from the cessation of this, that ceases.By understanding this whole process you realise the root cause of sasāra: theillusion of this ‘being’, this ‘self’, this ‘me’. As meditators we look deeply into thenature of our minds, but the only way we can really see that nature is to clear away allthe undergrowth. A simile that I like is the simile of the Emperor clothed from headto foot in five different garments. He has a hat on top of his head, a scarf around hisface, and a jacket over the top half of his body; he has trousers on the bottom half andis wearing high boots. So his whole body is covered up with these five garments, thehat, the scarf, the jacket, the trousers, and the boots. Because he is covered up in thisway you can’t actually see what or who the Emperor truly is. You don’t know what’sactually underneath all those clothes or who it is that’s walking along. You don’tknow who is speaking from behind the mask or who is feeling all these things andresponding to them. In that simile the five garments covering the Emperor are thefive senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.We often take those five senses to be me, to be the ‘self’, and that’s why we think thatthey are so important to us. We are very concerned with what we see and don’t see.We are very concerned with what we hear and don’t hear. We like to hear praise, wedon’t like to hear blame. We like to hear beautiful sounds and, if we don’t like crows,we don’t like to hear the crows. Some people like to hear the cement mixer working,some people don’t. It is the same with smells. You all know that one of the smellsthat I delight in is the smell of bat pooh. The reason for that is because I lived forthree months having lovely meditations in a cave populated by bats and so I always217