Meetings with a Dhamma Master: Insights from Luang Por : หน้า 40/164

Meetings with a Dhamma Master Meeting #5 March 5, 2009 – Panawat Retreat Center Right before the Peace Revolution Conference ended, several of the participants and I decided to attend another retreat in a beautiful meditation center in northwestern Thailand, above Chiang Mai, called Wat Kiew Lom. If there is a Heaven on earth, this is it — at least this is what I want MY Heaven to look like. The meditation hall sits high on a mountain top in a sleekly pristine facility overlooking the avocado orchard that the Wat has growing on their grounds. The hall is encased with glass, just so you can remember in your meditation that you are, indeed, in Heaven. The Abbot and the resident monks obviously love this spot, and it is carefully tended each day. Luang Por just happens to be at a nearby retreat center called Panawat, which is as close to Heaven as Wat Kiew Lom, but much larger and designed for groups of 500 people or more to come and listen to Dhamma talks in the cool environment of the northern part of this country. I happen to have some questions for Luang Por about the conference, so I call to ask if he is available to see me. “Of course,” comes the answer. And so, I am now sitting in a beautiful room, also encased in glass, with large comfortable chairs. There are several people here in the room with me, but I am the only female, and the other four are monks: Luang Por, his personal assistant, LP Josh, and one other. We are speaking in English. We greet one another cordially, and he answers the questions that I have on my mind. Of course, he knows what I have on my mind, but he is too polite to simply state the answers to the obvious. So he allows me to skirt around the topics while he sits patiently and smiles. The one thing that I have learned about Luang Por is that no matter how busy he is, he always has time to talk Dhamma. Perhaps that is what makes him a master. And so, he begins. “There are two parts of the human: the body and the mind. The body is composed of four physical and coarse elements perfectly mixed together. Earth is the solid matter – the flesh, skin, and bone. Water is the liquid material – the blood and so on. Wind is the air and gas throughout the body. And Fire is the energy, or the warmth and heat. “But what is the mind? The mind is a refined element and is invisible to our physical eyes. It has the ability to know because it is the element of knowing element inside of the