Exercising Spiritual Muscles
It is truly wonderful to hear about Steve Smiths’s exploration and playfulness in the realm of Dhamma described in this excerpt from our recent podcast interview. Steve’s unwavering trust and willingness to follow Sayadaw U Pandita's guidance allowed for a range of experiments and resolutions within the practice of mindfulness, enabling him to delve deeper into the elemental nature of the body, the changing feeling tones, the nature of consciousness itself, and the phenomena that arise from it. This portrayal of exploration and playfulness in the Dhamma inspires a sense of curiosity and encourages a flexible and adventurous approach to one's spiritual journey!
“I felt like he was exercising all these spiritual muscles of my system that could be activated, and then to just let them form on their own.”
“Because of my trust in him and my complete faith and willingness to do whatever he asked, I experimented. Sayadaw U Pandita experimented with me a lot, in the sense that he would give me little resolutions, for example, to take the Four Foundations of Mindfulness that I might resolve to primarily pay attention to the body, the elemental nature of the body for a period of time, hours or days, up to a week.
And then he followed that by going to the next Foundation of Mindfulness, feeling tone, vedanā. The same thing, just noticing the changing velocity of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feeling tones with regard to the physical stream of sensations, and the mental stream of thought formations and ideas, emotions. Without zeroing in on that realm primarily, leaving other phenomena in the background, but moving along the third [Foundation of Mindfulness], cittanupassanā, with the similar resolve to watch consciousness itself. Maybe focus attention around the solar plexus area of the body, which is regarded as the seat of the heart-mind in Buddhist psychology, and just observing the citta nature. Right down to the subtlest, most subtle stream of consciousness itself.
And finally, dhammanupassanā, where the phenomena that arise out of citta are noticed and known. For example, ‘six sense door awareness’ could fall under this category of noticing, abiding in the awareness of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, as they appear in the moment that they appear, at that sense door, unfiltered by mental commentary. Just as the phenomena enter that sense door, in the moment of that seeing consciousness, hearing consciousness, sensing consciousness, knowing consciousness, be right there.
At other times he would have me do other kinds of resolves, to re-experience something I had experienced before, or to experience the Dhamma or sīla-samādhi-paññā that had not yet been experienced. I felt like he was exercising all these spiritual muscles of my system that could be activated, and then to just let them form on their own. Let them just come together and converge like the different rivulets that contribute to the river. So, there was always something that would be offered like that.”