When you are in an emotionally rocky state, the most skilful response may simply be to receive what you are feeling at the present moment with some clarity and sympathy; to sit quietly and allow things to blow through.
Whatever the state, the initial response has to be to stay present and cultivate spaciousness.
But the way that cause and effect work is that even five minutes of not acting on or suppressing the present mind-state results in some kind of ease or diminution of pressure. Then we begin to recognize a natural sanity, a seed of Awakening that’s there when the doing stops.
It’s not far off. But we do need to get in touch with and encourage it.
It’s always possible
The most significant realisation that comes from a five or ten minute break from aspects of being and becoming, is that things stop by themselves.
This isn’t to say that a few minutes of just chilling out is the end of kamma and the dawning of Ultimate Truth, but it does
show us that the mind can have a different direction from zigzagging forwards (or backwards).
The mind can open.
And in that opening, the whole scenario changes: mental awareness is experienced as a field within which thoughts, moods and sensations come and go.
And we can witness, rather than act upon, that mental content.
Furthermore, a good amount of mental content just whirrs to a halt when there isn’t the view that one has to do, or fix or even stop, and there isn’t the buzzy urgent self keeping it going.
This in a nutshell is a description of how the kamma of cultivation leads to the end of kamma.
But it’s a subtle process to undertake. Thoughts and moods don’t stop through trying to make them go away - that trying is more volition, more kamma.
They stop when the identification program, the basis of becoming, is not switched on.
This is worth remembering because when one considers the complexity of the feedback loops of cause and effect, it’s easy to imagine that a very complex process of unwinding would be needed. But a glimpse at how ceasing happens -through not supporting the view and energy of identification
- shows us that the way out of dis-ease and stress is direct and simple.
And that encourages us to set up occasions wherein we can take non-identification into deeper levels of our psychological activity.
This is through the ongoing process of meditation; but we all need to, and can, back that up in our daily life. We don’t have to drink the water we’re swimming through.
To not drink in the ocean of samsara means checking and restraining the pull of the senses, checking and putting aside the programs of the mainstream, and cultivating full attention and awareness.
In other words, it’s a whole-life path, the Eightfold Path. And that proceeds from right view and right aim, not from views of self, fate or through automatic systems and techniques. Through following it, you realise that you’re not as embedded in samsara as it might seem.
For a start, you never actually become any-thing for very long. Sure, you seem to go through periods of agitation and tension, but with practice there are periods of joy and humour - and as you get more skilled in attending to the mind, the habit of holding on to particular states
loosens up. You find yourself identifying with this or that state less and less; and that reduces the stress and turmoil.
[Excerpt from "Where There’s a Will There’s a Way" from the book Kamma and the End of Kamma]