About This Teaching
Ajahn Chah compares the mind at the level of access concentration to a chicken shut in its coop: it still walks about and is not asleep or dead, but its movements now have a limit.
From there he gives two lines of practice. Once the mind is pacified, investigate the body and its thirty-two parts. If the mind is still agitated, keep watching the thoughts and emotions it fabricates and see them as impermanent, impersonal and without a lasting self. He says it is not necessary to know many things, only to keep awareness at this point until disenchantment and dispassion arise. Letting go of attachment to the five hindrances is, in his words, the goal of meditation.