Reading Highlight

As practice develops, we naturally experience times when the quality of mindfulness is relatively stronger and more continuous than at other times, and we are able to pay closer attention to things, inner and outer. Then, as has been mentioned, it is possible to begin to see that what at first blush looked so solid in fact has lots of gaps in it. More than this though, we can begin to get a little sense, at a certain level, of how the perceptions of solidity are fabricated. Just as in those children’s ‘dot-to-dot’ drawing books – where you follow and join the numbered dots with a pencil line to get a picture of something or other – close mindfulness can show that the mind joins the fragmented ‘dots’ of momentary experience, and thus fabricates some ‘bigger’ and more solid-seeming experience. And as explained, the bigger and more solid an experience seems, the greater the clinging and the dukkha it involves. This ‘joining of the dots’ happens in thinking about an impending experience in the future, and also while we are actually experiencing it.