Head-in-the-Sand is door to Profound

Someone once said to me during a messy divorce that he felt much better if he just didn't think about it.

It turns out on investigation this is true for literally everything.

Ah say the detractor, but burying your head in the sand does not make it go away, it just puts it off. You will need to bring your head out of the sand one day and face it.

But the advocate will ask, but how does not thinking about something change anything? Doesn't that suggest the problem is not in the thing, but in the thinking!

Oooo wow!

Turns out on investigation something Buddha said in the first line of the Dhammapada. Translated here as

“All experiences (dhammā) are preceded by mind (manopubbaṅgamā), having mind as their master (manoseṭṭhā) created by mind (manomayā).”

 Now thoughts are a tricky thing. They are really, really, really convincing. We take "thought" to be as real, in fact more real than reality. What we think about things really does seem to be them.

But what we see above is that the moment the thought goes peace returns. Reality is Peace, it is the thought that causes the disturbance.

Although that is complex cos the probability is we think Peace and we think Catastrophe, to really uncover Peace we don't think.

So that enters the whole cess pool of "not thinking" with people trying to clear there minds, and sit in blank minded meditation. Hui Neng castigates this attitude saying if there is nothing in a heads it just makes room for bad things to come in. Being brain dead is no solution. That is "head in the sand."

The real approach is this above of see "thoughts" for what they are. Its as simple as entering a movie and spending a hour or so absorbed into the story of someone quite different from us. Leaving the cinema is just returning to another story of another person we call ourselves. They are all "thoughts" we live in the movie of ourselves and there is no way out. We join the monastery and start a new film for ourselves.

Anyway they teach in English classes at school these days to be aware of the impact of your writing on the selected audience. This applies to thought too. We should observe the impact of what our brain says on ourselves, but importantly not to identify with that Ourselves.

There are two "ourselves" there. The small ourself is the one in the cinema at the whim of the mind creating all its ideas about the world. The one in fact absorbed into what is said here. The Big Ourself is the one reading this! Only the small one gets us affected, the big one is quite outside all of this. That Ourself could never fit inside the cinema cos the cinema fits inside it!

When my friend said that he felt better when he stopped thinking about it, his Big Self started to gain the power not to get dragged in. As that progresses the Big Self will not just not think about it, but be able to think about it and stull not be affected. That is Moksha, letting go and freedom.