"My space, me, mine! How dare they interfere with me and what I want?" It's all this huge selfishness. You know, you might see it here a little bit, but we're too busy talking probably for you to notice it. You see it in the meditation hall; maybe when somebody puts their towel a little close to our knee, "My space!" Or "The mosquitoes are interfering with my space!" Yet the buzzing itself, really, the buzzing is nothing but sound!
Why is it that we can't just note, "hearing, hearing" and return? Often it is because the mental noting is not being done properly. Now I just said to note, "hearing, hearing" and return, but what normally happens for many people is that when they hear the buzzing of the mosquito they note, "mosquito, mosquito" and return. Sometimes here in the meditation hall, it's really quiet for a while, the train shoots through on the line, you get distracted and you note, "train, train." Wrong! We don't want to note, "train, train", we want to note, "hearing, hearing" and come back. If the bird sings loud while you're doing the walking meditation, we want to note "hearing, hearing" and come back. We don't want to note, "bird, bird."
This is what gets us away from having aversion to the mosquito. If we're only noting, "hearing, hearing" then there's no perception of a mosquito. Now this doesn't negate relative reality; when you're walking down the street, you want to make sure that you listen when the trucks are coming and whatever else. It doesn't negate putting the story around sound, but while we're in training, in particular, we don't need the story. And for much of our life, we don't need the story either, we really don't need the "story" much of our life. We want to stop building a story around the sound, we want to note, "hearing, hearing."
It's classic that when somebody just simply does something that you don't particularly think is smart or wise or whatever, you see this and the mind builds a story. But can we just note, "seeing, seeing", and just drop it and come back? And not even worry that that person did an odd thing. In Thailand, there are so many young travelers and we get every kind of hairstyle you can imagine, and we get metal here and there and everywhere. Quite frankly a lot of those people simply don't come to a retreat, but I'd say every third retreat we do get somebody whose outward appearance makes other people look at them. So what? If we build a story around it, we will also look at them like that. But if we just note, "seeing, seeing", and it's just another human being with different fashion, we don't build the story. We don't have to build anything about them.
Yet we're trained to build stories. As little kids, in our little clique group or whatever, we'd talk about the other kids. And if we were a loner, then in our mind we were talking about the other kids. We're always doing this, and the TV shows do this and the movies show this, and we're comparing with everything else. And as we're walking through a supermarket and we're checking out, there are all of those magazines of people who look much more handsome than we do, much more beautiful than anyone else, and there's all this comparing, comparing, and building a story around lots of outward stuff. The practice of the mental noting technique itself is not to get caught up with the outward, but just what's happening in here. "Seeing, seeing", "Hearing, hearing", "Tasting, tasting". The minute we say, "Oh, this is delicious, I want some more" we're in the story, and we create desire, greed, aversion, whatever. But if we just note, "tasting, tasting", "pleasant, pleasant", "unpleasant, unpleasant", whatever, then it doesn't matter what it is. This is part of this aspect of just seeing things as they actually are.
Going back to the mosquitoes: it's great practice. I mentioned a few days ago someone had heard that Unpleasant Physical Sensations from mosquito bites are a great place to practice. Especially here where there's no malaria. And really most mosquito bites are absolutely harmless for most human beings. The mosquito asks for one drop of blood, and the human being asks for the mosquito's life. That puts it in perspective I think.