Someone said to me recently how can you see deeply if your mind is disturbed.
And unfortunately the primary source of disturbance is desire. We either want something we cannot get, or we have something we do not want.
Now I am lazy and the simplest way to deal with this is just to stop wanting. You would think this would provide the clarity needed for deep appreciation of the nature of reality.
But it is not that simple.
Why do we desire? Well whatever the reason it is not something we chose. Ultimately Buddhism says it comes down to ignorance and karma. If we are not mindful we can develop all kinds of desire which gradually over take our mind and fill us with disturbance.
So it does seem important to adopt an attitude of abstinence and frugality to try and calm these disturbances.
But how far do we go. This is very much a central theme of this blog. How far into poverty can you go in pursuit of clarity, peace and happiness?
Well it turns out I think that you can go too far. Buddha found this through his extreme austerity of eating just a grain of rice and day. He literally almost killed himself. We can be sure we will not pursue such extreme austerity by accident.
However the Middle Path is actually quite subtle and for some even taking to dressing in monastic robes, being celibate and living in a monastery may actually cause more disturbance than if they didn't!
Buddha says he who searches for me in sights and sounds has strayed off the path. Indeed thinking that living like a monk will give you VIP tickets into Enlightenment is actually just part of the delusion!
So we need carefully watch our mind and find the path that gives it peace, ease and reduces disturbance. If we really want to take an expensive holiday perhaps it is possible just doing it may lead to greater peace than constantly trying to resist it.
However there is a Middle Path here too. Sometimes the distress from resisting something pays better dividends than doing it. My go-to for this argument is giving up cigarettes. This is a battle, a full on war and must be treated as such. And there will be moments of complete despair, frustration, loathing, bitterness and misery. But they are moments and they do not last forever (in fact usually no more than 5 mins - time it if you giving up cigarettes). It is worth this type of disturbance for the greater peace that inevitably lies ahead when we no longer need cigarettes to find our happy place.
In the extreme we have Evil. In a small way smoking is evil. Would we make someone else smoke knowing it may cause them cancer? How would we feel if they got cancer because of us? Well we should feel the same if we give our self cancer! There is probably a sense of self-hatred and hostility to oneself if we don't care about our own health. Hostility and hatred directed to anyone is evil. It takes its extreme case in abuse and violence. But we can do this to ourselves as much as anyone. The goal is peace, freedom from distress and care.
But perhaps we have a circle here. Suppose a drug like cigarettes is what we need to get through a tough patch. We have nothing in a our lives except profound grief, loneliness or anger and the only solace we have is a cigarette periodically to pick up our mood. What if we quit now! This is confounding the badness. So take those moments of relative peace that the cigarette gives us but plot our escape! Time is a great healer and right now we may not see a way out and things look helpless. But stay with it and moments of peace will come about when we will see more clearly. That clarity is what we want: our head above the waves or the trees just long enough to try and see where we are and where we are going. Often going back under the waves after a moment of clarity is the worse. Then we feel the distress all the more painfully. But just remind ourselves we just came from here, and the moment of peace was a reward for our hard work and an encouragement of what lies ahead. So gradually we can dig ourselves out and restore some peace. Obviously as we become more peaceful the pain seems worse! The quieter we become the louder things sound. Never get tricked by that. Feeling profound pain means we are still alive and there is hope! And for that reason never be afraid of being disturbed. We need that in order to get moving out of where we are.
So the path to peace and clam is often very tortuous and often very unclear. Being a monk is not necessarily the solution at first. and sometimes giving yourself what you want does more than abstaining with gritted teeth and determination. However caution that the body is lazy and doing anything mindlessly can be counter productive. That one cigarettes we take as a reward for abstinence can break our resolve and we need rebuild that resolve again. No must mean NO when we decide to abstain. But we need be mindful that if everything is NO we can start to do harm to our self. Look for things that support peace and learn what disturbs this.
So it is true if you are always disturbed in the mind, running to this and running from that, how can you ever gain the clarity of vision to see clearly and understand how the world really is.
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I mean to link an old post about extreme meditating when the mind simply will not settle. I decided to get an analogue clock and force myself to count the ticks. It was a complete unpleasant struggle.
How far is this from useful meditation!
Meditation should be pleasant and enjoyable and encourage the mind to settle and absorb into the present moment in peace and growing tranquility.
Meditation is not a work out. If we record the minutes meditated like a jogging journal this is potentially more to do with Ego than progress.
HOWEVER any meditation is good. And what is good meditation at one stage in our life is eclipsed by more subtle meditation in the future. So there is no "right" meditation, as what we get in meditation is right for us at that moment. It is like asking what is the "right" weather? There is no "right" weather, we just get whatever is going on. Same in mediation. When we meditate we get the mind we have right now! And that is exactly what we should have and what we should work with.
So yes perhaps to get us to meditate a jogging journal is useful. At least we can tick off our schedule and show we are achieving "meditation". Perhaps a ticking clock is useful, we can at least mark time and show we have paid some attention to something for a while.
If it is miserable doing these we need note that and not avoid it. Noting we are not liking meditation is meditation. It is also a clue that perhaps we need soften up and look for something pleasant in our mind. We can try Metta meditation to encourage feelings of loving kindness. There are others. At the start we could invent some in the pursuit of positive objects and types of mind that are less jumpy and disturbed.
Ultimately though we are looking for subtle states of mind that are pleasant and encouraging that lead us away from things that disturb us like all the things we have to do, or all the things we can not done, or all the things we have done. All this should eventually not be more attractive than meditation itself. But like giving up cigarettes its a long path with a combination of effort and ease, bad times and good.
Down this road lies they say Liberation and Enlightenment.
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