พระอาจารย์อธิบายว่าความหวั่นไหวและความกลัวล้วนเกิดจากมลทิน การนั่งธรรมะคือการชำระมลทินไปสู่ความบริสุทธิ์แห่งศีล สมาธิ และปัญญา ซึ่งเป็นเป้าหมายที่แท้จริงของชีวิต ไม่ใช่ความร่ำรวยThe teacher explains that both agitation and fear arise from impurity, and that meditation is the process of clearing that impurity toward the purity of virtue, concentration, and wisdom — the true goal of life, not wealth.
A lay follower asked the teacher to expand on a teaching from a late revered elder: "Unshaken, because I meditate. We came for this purpose; we cannot abandon it. Sitting in meditation brings us to our goals, both coarse and refined."
Agitation and Fear Both Arise From Impurity
The teacher explained that agitation, and the fear it produces, is entirely a result of im. Take someone afraid of ghosts: alone in the dark, alone in the forest, alone at home — they feel afraid, yet with someone else present, the fear disappears. This fear arises from impurity haunting the mind; without impurity, there is nothing to haunt it, nothing to fabricate the fear. A sound that's actually just a mouse or a gecko gets seized upon by the mind's impurity and turned into something alarming. Humans fear only two things — suffering and fear itself — and both rest entirely on impurity as their cause. Simply clearing that impurity away removes the very thing that produces both suffering and fear.
Meditation Leads to Knowledge Paired With Happiness and Purity
The teacher explained that the true goal of meditation is paired with and purity — the foundation for reaching the Triple Gem within. Once reached, we abide within system, which grants knowledge, happiness, purity, and the fulfillment of wishes both coarse and subtle. We were not born into this world for wealth — wealth or poverty are simply results of causes generated in the past; wanting or not wanting to be rich makes no difference, since everything follows a pattern already laid down. What we actually came here to do is build merit and perfections, which requires the foundation of knowledge, happiness, and purity.
Ordinary people pursue knowledge for worldly happiness — earning money for excitement and thrill — but never come to know purity at all, because they were never taught about it. True happiness is peace, solitude, dispassion, liberation, purity, and nibbana — an entirely different path from worldly happiness. We must therefore learn the kind of knowledge that leads to the purity of , concentration, and wisdom. Without understanding this purity, reaching liberation and the knowledge-and-vision of liberation is simply impossible.
The Purity of Virtue, Concentration, and Wisdom Builds From a Tiny Point Into Something Vast
Keeping precepts should aim at the purity of body and speech. Once undertaken and kept with this purpose in mind, purity begins to appear — at first no bigger than the tip of a needle — and the stream of merit flows in, expanding that purity wider and wider until it stretches as far as an outstretched arm. Purity of mind, meanwhile, depends on concentration — simply holding awareness lets the sphere of knowing flow in and clear away the impurity of hindrances and completely. As ignorance and impurity thin, we pass continuously from one dimension into the next. This awareness must be directed toward purity itself, not toward wanting this or that — otherwise it contradicts the principle of : "Monks, you should hold clear awareness of body, feeling, mind, and mental objects, in order to eliminate covetousness and displeasure toward the world."
Connecting With the Inner Knower Once the Obscuring Elements Clear
Once concentration has cleared away and ignorance, connection with the inner knower becomes possible. The inner knower then guides the development of wisdom — whatever we wish to know, we hold focused awareness on it; the sphere of knowing, free of hindrance, draws in the energy of merit that clears the obscuring elements. Once cleared, the knowledge already present within us appears. A revered teacher once said that all forms of knowledge already exist within us — we need only reach the knower responsible for that particular field. When we set the wish to know something, the knower helps refine and transmit that understanding to us, revealing the danger of and of impurity in general. Seeing that danger clearly, we wish to be free, and the sphere of liberation carries out that freedom for us — but if we still take delight in greed, aversion, and delusion, liberation remains difficult to reach. The spans 84,000 sections, yet all of it relies on virtue, concentration, and wisdom as the vehicle for progressing, one step at a time.