Page 47 - Dhamma Practice

whether the conscious phenomena that impact our six apertures—are they beneficial or harmful? If beneficial— for example, the sound of dhamma teachings—what should we do? We should humbly absorb the sound— listen and understand so that we could use them for our vipassana practice. But, if the noise is undesirable, causing agitation—when it impacts us, it makes us feel uncomfortable. We cannot prevent this noise from emerging. Hence, what we need to do is to extinguish in our mind this feeling of dissatisfaction, this feeling of annoyance.
The observation is easy. Whenever the feeling of annoyance emerges, ask whether there is “self”? Is there a feeling of “us”? Our mind at that moment feels enlarged or narrow? The key to addressing this is to extinguish the feeling of “us”. Remove the feeling of “us” or enlarge our mind to be bigger than the noise. This is called “separating the physical phenomenon from the mental phenomenon”. The noise is a physical phenomenon but the mind that experiences is a mental phenomenon. Just enlarge our mind to be bigger than the sound, the agitation would cease. In the future, the noise is just something that we hear, it emerges then ceases.
Better still, instead of rejecting the noise, we should have the awareness to contemplate the emergence- cessation of that noise. Take that noise to be a meditative phenomenon, to use it for vipassana. When we raise our
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