Exploring Fabrication: Thanissaro Bihikkhu Dhamma talk:
"The Venerable Ananda talks about using craving and conceit on the path. It has to be a skillful craving and it has to be a skillful conceit. But these process which eventually we are going to have to let go of, we first have to learn how to handle skillfully. The Buddha talks about papanca where you think of yourself as an object. And ultimately you do have to let it go but there are some uses for papanca on the path like a sense of samvega.
You think about all the suffering you’ve had in past and all the suffering you’re going to have in the future. It’s a really good motivator. This is how we learn about things. This is how we gain insight into things, is by working and playing with them, by manipulating them. Manipulating is not all bad. If we didn't manipulate these things, we wouldn’t learn anything about them.
How do you think scientists learn anything about anything at all? They play. They fool around. They poke this and they change that and they set fire to this, explode that. So you can learn exactly what’s a cause and what’s an effect and how are they connected.
And we are exploring here too. Always trying to take this attitude of exploration. Use your powers of observation. Use your ingenuity to figure out how things work both in the body and the mind and see how far this process of fabrication can take you. You are not really going to let go of fabrications until you’ve pushed them as far as they can take you. That is what the last tetrad is all about. You begin to realize that the raw material from which you’ve been building these things has its limitations. It can provide only a certain amount of ease but because it’s inconstant that ease is going to wobble. And an ease that wobbles is not necessarily a very comfortable place to be.
Think of a chair with uneven legs, you’re sitting in the chair. You can’t really relax into the chair because the chair might tip over. You've got to stay tense at least a little to maintain your balance. That is the way it is with all the ease and pleasure that comes with anything fabricated. It requires a certain amount of tension to keep your balance.
There will come the point where you ask yourself is it worth. As long as the path hasn’t been fully developed, yes it is worth it. But as these factors get more and more developed you begin to realize this is as far as fabrication can take you. And you begin to lose your taste. You’re feeding on these fabrications, that is where dispassion comes in. You lose your passion for fabricating and because you lose that passion, the process of fabrication begins to fall apart because after all it did depend on factors coming out of the mind, the mind’s hunger for these things, its thirst for these things.
When it’s no longer hungry or thirsty, it just stops. And when it stops, everything else stops. That is where you let go of everything, even the path, even the discernment that got you there. This is how we understand fabrication. This is what insight is all about. Not just watching things arising and passing away but realizing the extent to which the mind causes them to arise and to pass away.
You've got to dig down into this deep level. That is why we work with the breath because the breath goes really deep into your awareness both of the body and of the mind. When you are close to the breath you are close to the sources of fabrication that is where you can see how these things come about. As you manipulate them you get a sense of their range. How far they can go and how far they can’t go.
This is why all of the great meditators of the past where not people who just got really tired of things and got really world weary and just stopped with a sense of depression. That is not how enlightenment is found or awakening is found. They really actively pursue it. How far can you go. What can you do to bring about true happiness. They used their ingenuity, they used the powers of observation. They actively explored. That is what brought them to the edge of fabrication and how they got beyond.
So try and approach the meditation as a process of exploration. You are exploring this process of fabrication in body and in mind. And the breath is a good place to start. A good foundation for your experiments.
Remember the Buddha’s basic approach throughout is practice. I’m doing this and I’m getting these results. Are they good enough? Well, no. What could I do that’s better? And then he tried something new using his powers of observation and ingenuity. And setting really high standards for himself. Really high standards for the type of happiness that would leave him satisfied. Because only when you aim high that you can actually hit high. You never hit any higher than you aim." Thanissaro Bikkhu
Freedom From Buddha Nature By Thanissaro Bhikkhu
"The determination to train for peace helps maintain your sense of direction in this process, for it reminds you that the only true happiness is peace of mind, and that you want to look for ever-increasing levels of peace as they become possible through the practice. This determination emulates the trait that the Buddha said was essential to his Awakening: the unwillingness to rest content with lesser levels of stillness when higher levels could be attained. In this way, the stages of concentration, instead of becoming obstacles or dangers on the path, serve as stepping-stones to greater sensitivity and, through that sensitivity, to the ultimate peace where all passion, aversion, and delusion grow still.
This peace thus grows from the simple choice to keep looking at the mind's fabrications as processes, as actions and results. But to fully achieve this peace, your discernment has to be directed not only at the mind's fabrication of the objects of its awareness, but also at its fabrications about itself and about the path it's creating. Your sense of who you are is a fabrication, regardless of whether you see the mind as separate or interconnected, finite or infinite, good or bad. The path is also a fabrication: very subtle and sometimes seemingly effortless, but fabricated nonetheless. If these layers of inner fabrication aren't seen for what they are — if you regard them as innate or inevitable — they can't be deconstructed, and full Awakening can't occur." Thanissaro Bhikkhu