Hi Alan,
alan... wrote:i have too many questions for one book to answer and reading more than one book to answer a question ends in conflicting ideas so i'm back to square one.
Seems like you rely on books a lot. The book knowledge need to be delicately balanced with inner knowledge.
It goes like this - at the end of each meditation sitting, and at the end of each day, you reflect what happened, and learn from it, posing new questions to explore in the future.
This seemingly simple practice evolves with time into the inner knowledge.
For example:
"Suppose that anger is interfering with your concentration. Instead of getting involved in the anger, you try simply to be aware of when it's there and when it's not. You look at the anger as an event in and of itself — as it comes, as it goes. But you don't stop there. The next step — as you're still working at focusing on the breath — is recognizing how anger can be made to go away. Sometimes simply watching it is enough to make it go away; sometimes it's not, and you have to deal with it in other ways, such as arguing with the reasoning behind the anger or reminding yourself of the drawbacks of anger. In the course of dealing with it, you have to get your hands dirty. You've got to try and figure out why the anger is coming, why it's going, how you can get it out of there, because you realize that it's an unskillful state. And this requires that you improvise. Experiment. You've got to chase your ego and impatience out of the way so that you can have the space to make mistakes and learn from them, so that you can develop a skill in dealing with the anger. It's not just a question of hating the anger and trying to push it away, or of loving the anger and welcoming it. These approaches may give results in the short run, but in the long run they're not especially skillful. What's called for here is the ability to see what the anger is composed of; how can you take it apart."
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/auth ... cmind.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I can give more examples if you are interested.
"Therefore, Ananda, be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves, seeking no external refuge; with the Dhamma as your island, the Dhamma as your refuge, seeking no other refuge."
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka ... .vaji.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Best wishes, Dmytro