Freedom to Begin
What is it to be free?
In the Buddhist sense, "free" means to be free from all suffering, to reach inner freedom where suffering ceases to be. This is, of course, an ideal state of mind - but how do we reach it? To reach inner freedom we must search for freedom with a "free mind." It is like the saying, "to catch a thief one must think like a thief." The sort of freedom one is trying to find is an absolute state - nothing less - infinite, unbounded and limitless. We are starting out with a mind that is finite, intellect-bound and already limited in itself. If we crowd this with all sorts of ideals, concepts, doctrines and judgments, the mind - which is already weighed down by its own burden - can never be free enough to experience truth in its entirety. It can only accept the truth or experience within the limits of doctrines, beliefs and concepts, which are products of the intellect. The mind can never break out of the intellectual conditioning we are trying to transcend. By clinging to a specific system or format in the search for inner freedom, we will be able to experience only that which the system or format allows. But Truth is infinite, unpossessed, unbounded. It does not belong to any religion, sect or system. All religions, all methods, all systems improvised by humankind are attempts to guide us on the path to Truth. Often, though, the "way" is mistaken for the "Truth."
The mind in search of its own freedom must first of all assume an impersonal attitude, which leaves it free to explore, investigate, examine and, most important of all, to "experience." Most of us start with a personal need to find an inner freedom. In this state it is rather difficult to assume an impersonal approach, but such is the paradox of the inner path. As soon as we become personal, we tend to be judgmental and opinionated. Judgments and discriminations arise out of an intellectual and conditioned mind. As soon as one makes a judgment and discriminates, the intellect is at work. So long as the intellect is at the forefront of one's mind, it will always obstruct one's ability to experience fully one's own inner depth and essence. This is the reason that all the ways and means to liberation - the inner paths - transcend the intellect and move into the realm of the intuitive or the spiritual, for only the intuitive aspect of our mind can experience and realise Truth or freedom in its entirety. Different religious systems have developed methods and styles particular to their own historical, cultural and emotional backgrounds. Each of us is left to find the right path for ourselves.
Whichever path one may adopt, the greatest danger is the accumulation of emotional possessions. These are "my" guru, "my" beliefs, "my" progress, "my" experience. Here again, one faces a paradox. A teacher's guidance is invariably necessary for one to proceed properly on the path, but it presents a hindrance if one is not careful. The most common problem is personally clinging to gurus and teachers. In fact, this is one of the most difficult hindrances to overcome in all quests for inner freedom. Letting go of beliefs, doctrines, gurus, ideals and judgments is extremely difficult, because one holds them very dear to oneself. They become one's possessions, like material wealth and power, and then one is not free and does not proceed further.
So what should one do? The only appropriate way is to view everything with equanimity, be it gurus, doctrines, ideals, and even one's own practice and progress. Only then can one view everything with objectivity. Freedom is not just an end result. It is not something that awaits us at the end of our endeavour. Freedom is instantaneous, right now, from the very beginning. We can be "free" in the very process of the search, in experiencing, in every step along the way.
To achieve freedom requires only two things: a silent mind and an open heart.
Peace Of Mind
If you just stopped thinking for a while and sat back to reflect on your own mind, you would be surprised to realise that you are at peace. Even if you agree with me, you might argue that this peace is only temporary. So be it.
But let us look into this peaceful tranquil state, temporary or otherwise, since it is already with us - without our having to make any effort at all at being peaceful.
You were born with this peace-nature of the mind; otherwise you would not be what you are, would you? You did not run around meditating to bring about this peace to yourself: you did not learn from someone or some book to make possible this peaceful state in yourself. In other words, "you" had nothing to do with it. Peace is a natural mind-state in every one of us. Peace has been there since the day we were born and it is going to be there till the day we die. It is our greatest gift; so why do we think we have no peace of mind?
Experiencing peace is like looking at our hands. Usually, we see only the fingers - not the spaces in between. In a similar manner, when we look at the mind, we are aware of the active states, such as our running thoughts and the one-thousand-and-one feelings that are associated with them, but we tend to overlook the intervals of peace between them. If one were to be unhappy or sad every minute of the twenty-four-hour day, what would happen to us? I guess we would all be in the mad house!
Then why is it that we supposedly never are at peace? It is simply because we never allow ourselves to be so.
We enjoy battling with ourselves and our emotions so much that the battle becomes second nature to us. And we complain that we have no peace of mind.
Why don't we leave aside all these complicated ideas for a while and simply contemplate this peaceful nature of ours - since we are fortunate enough to have it - instead of frantically trying to find peace of mind some place else. How can we find something elsewhere, when it is already in ourselves? Probably that is the reason why we often do not find it.
We do not have to do anything to have this peace, do we? Mind is by itself peaceful.
But we do need to do something to our minds in order to be angry or sad.
Imagine yourself enjoying a moment of quiet. Suddenly something disturbs your enjoyment. You start up at once, annoyed or angry at the disturbance. Why? Because you dislike the interruption. Your mind "acts." It dislikes. It sets up thoughts of dislike, followed by annoyance, anger and a whole series of reactions.
Thought moments are extremely fast, so you don't notice the moment of the mind setting up thoughts of dislike. We generally think that the outside situation is what is responsible for our annoyance. But even during the most durable and miserable experiences of our lives, we find moments when our minds are distracted from the cause of misery and we are relatively free from the devastating emotional state. Once we set our minds back on the event, the unpleasant feelings come rushing in again immediately. When these emotions subside, what happens to them? We seem to take it for granted that they end up or phase out somewhere outside of us. But if they had their origin in the mind, they must surely end in the mind. If they had their origin in a peaceful state, then they would surely end in that peaceful state also. It is only logical.
Let us contemplate this peaceful state. We recognise it before emotions have set in and also after they have disappeared. What about the in-between times? Is peace destroyed during the time that we have been angry or sad? We are so used to implying that this or that destroys our peace of mind that we have come to assume that peace of mind is a contrived state that can be arrived at or deleted at will.
But this is not the case. Peace and tranquillity are part and parcel of our own mental make up. If they are destroyed during emotional upheavals, our minds might as well be destroyed too. Peace is the essence of our own innate nature and can never be destroyed.
Peace is with us every single moment of our life, but we do not recognise it. This is because we are ignorant about peace - most of the time we are too preoccupied with the external world and our own running thoughts and emotions to be aware of it. We have lost touch with our inner selves, with what is the best in us. We frantically try to find the answer outside when all the time peace is sitting there, silently waiting until we come home to it.
Non Peace Mind
If we agree that have innate peace, what do you think gives us non-peace? From the standpoint of peace of mind, thoughts by themselves are neither good nor bad. It is only when the concepts of "I" and "mine" arise that the mind is thrown into conflict. Likes and dislikes quickly follow these concepts of self. This where the real trouble begins.
A thought by itself is okay. Let's say you've lost your keys. It happens. The problem begins when you start judging the fact that you misplaced your keys. "I dislike it when I lose my keys.... I like it so much better when I have my keys and I can continue my busy schedule." You might go on with your thinking: "Why am I so careless? It must have been because the children were rowdy." Then you might put your thoughts into words: "Look what you made me do - I was so busy with you that I lost my keys." You might put those thoughts and emotions into physical actions by rushing around looking for the lost keys.
All this commotion stems from your reaction to a couple of misplaced keys. Let's go back to what prompted the commotion. When you had the thought, "I lost my keys," you weren't able to let go of that thought. Instead, you immediately jumped into likes and dislikes. Feeling, conflicts and frustrations are born from this dichotomy of likes and dislikes. You allowed yourself to be swept away by your judgments, your feelings, your frustrations.
But let's look at the thoughts for a moment. They arise, and by their own accord they fall away. That is, unless we cling to them. If we allow thoughts to continue their normal span, they will naturally fall away. All thoughts are subject to the universal law of impermanence, anicca.
For those of you who are familiar with Buddhism, you know this law of change. You accept it in many aspects of your lives. But can you apply it to the most important area of all - your mind? Can you watch thoughts and emotions as they arise in your mind? Can you allow them to naturally fade away, without clinging to them? Or do you indulge in letting the "I" grasp onto a thought, an emotion?
By their nature, thoughts are transient, unless the "I" interferes and refuses to let them go. By clinging to thoughts and emotions, the "I" prolongs the emotion-span - on and on. It is the "I" which insists on clinging to thoughts and emotions that creates non-peace.
Peace has nothing to do with the "I." It is not "my" peace. As long as you think you own peace - as long as you think, "I like my peace" - then you will not experience peace.
A friend of mine, a spiritual educator, came up with a metaphor that may hel explain the process. Let's take the phrase, "I like peace." If we eliminate the "I," then we are left with "like peace." If we go further and eliminate the "like," then all that remains is peace. Peace is something that can be felt but not owned. Peace can be experienced when we eliminate our ideas of likes and dislikes about peace.
Maditating Peace
Many have asked how to go about finding inner peace. Once you have recognised that
peace is not an induced state, but an innate-natural state,
that is exactly where you begin. There is absolutely nothing to do but look within yourself and recognise peace this very moment. When you recognise peace in your mind, you have in fact already experienced peace.
If you do recognise your own peaceful moments at times, then you are already started. Never mind if this recognition is very brief. You can make this peace-moment the base from which to investigate your own mind. This can be the focal point from which to launch your investigation. And surprisingly, you will find this is also the home base to which you return.
You may find that it is not easy to come back to this peace-moment. That is not important. It is more important to decide that you want to pay attention to your own mind. We are so conditioned to looking outward that our minds have fallen into a kind of mental groove. It is difficult to rise up and leave that groove because it is easy and comfortable there. To turn outward attention inward is difficult unless one has the "will" to do it.
In your initial attempts to see peace-moments, they may be very infrequent and brief, but that is all right. It may even be that the more you try, the more difficult seeing peace or peace-moments becomes. If that is the case, just let go. Very often the awareness of peace-moments is unforeseen; it comes when you least expect it.
You may ask whether there is a specific method to "see" these peace-moments. And I would say no - not beyond the "will" to pay attention to the mind. Paying attention requires no particular time or place. It goes on while you go about the daily business of living, playing, doing the one-thousand-and-one chores of what is called life. There is nothing to do beyond this. There is just something specifically you should not do and that is to let opinions, judgments and discrimination crowd your mind. The mind watching itself needs to be whole so that it can pay complete attention.
When you start discriminate, your mind becomes preoccupied with making judgments. Your mind ceases to be free. Then you cannot see or experience the peace within yourself.
In order to understand how things move in space, you must be able to see the whole panorama of space as well as the objects in it. Without space, objects cannot have motion. Objects may be affected, but the space will never be affected. The objects may disintegrate in space, but the space remains.
Your home base - the peace-nature of the mind - is just like physical space outside your body. Within you is the space of consciousness where thoughts and emotions move about. As with the outside space, it is because of this space-mind that thoughts and feelings can arise freely and also cease freely. If your mind is already crammed, there is no room for anything to arise in it.
If you can "see" this space clearly in yourself, you also see what is rising and falling more clearly. At first, you may notice only the falling -- because it is more obvious. You will find yourself less involved with your own emotions and thus more at your home base. And the more you are at your home base, the more at peace you will be with yourself and with the world.
You may not have found perfect peace as yet, but at least you will find a breathing space in yourself, a respite. This is the time you learn to be friends with your own mind and your emotions. You will find that you no longer wrestle with them as before. The beautiful part is that you will find yourself loosening up inside. This loosening up may not appear important to you, but actually this first step is always the most important. When you are not in a tightly bound, self-inflicted tangle, you can look at yourself more objectively.
Never mind, if you do not see the rising. There is time for everything. Even when you "see" the falling away, you will notice a change. You will already experience peace. Keep on "experiencing" this peace as you would experience a good cup of coffee or a scoop of ice cream. After a while, you will find that you can "experience" your emotions without getting involved in them. Since you are more at home base, you will find that your feelings are in and of themselves fleeting.
For example, you may be surprised to find that feelings do not stay for a long time without your own invitation and your clinging to them. You will also see that they are part of the natural phenomena of the mind. In Buddhism, all phenomena are impermanent, are not of the self, and are themselves the basis of suffering.
Becoming aware of your feelings in this way is like discovering a new friend. When you realise that these transient feelings have no power of their own, they cease to threaten you. This realisation gives you a positive feeling, because you are no longer overwhelmed.
As you find out more about yourself in this way, you will also find that you reside more and more in your own peace home base. You will also realise this peace has always been there. It is just that you were so engrossed in trying to get rid of your frustrations that you had neither the time nor the skill to see this peace that is already there. In fact, peace-mind has been there all along for you to rediscover.
The path to inner peace is quite simple. You complicate it by thinking that the method should be difficult. You are conditioned to achieving this, accomplishing that. Your mind is in perpetual motion. Of course, you must earn a living, feed your family, make friends, take your children to school. That is the business of living. But if you perpetuate this frantic mode as the mode of your search for peace, you won't find peace.
What we are concerned with is slowing down ... so you can understand yourself, and experience what is already there. When you are already at the home base, do you need to do anything to stay there?
You need only to wake up and realise you have always been home.
We must be aware that this kind of meditation is a way of investigating and understanding ourselves, of awakening to our actual state of mind, to all the mental formations that arise and fall. It is an entrance to ourselves. We will discover the bad things as well as the good, but in the end the investigation will pay off. For now we can find an opportunity to discover our own wondrous inner depths and draw upon the essence of what is the best in us.
What is it to be free?
In the Buddhist sense, "free" means to be free from all suffering, to reach inner freedom where suffering ceases to be. This is, of course, an ideal state of mind - but how do we reach it? To reach inner freedom we must search for freedom with a "free mind." It is like the saying, "to catch a thief one must think like a thief." The sort of freedom one is trying to find is an absolute state - nothing less - infinite, unbounded and limitless. We are starting out with a mind that is finite, intellect-bound and already limited in itself. If we crowd this with all sorts of ideals, concepts, doctrines and judgments, the mind - which is already weighed down by its own burden - can never be free enough to experience truth in its entirety. It can only accept the truth or experience within the limits of doctrines, beliefs and concepts, which are products of the intellect. The mind can never break out of the intellectual conditioning we are trying to transcend. By clinging to a specific system or format in the search for inner freedom, we will be able to experience only that which the system or format allows. But Truth is infinite, unpossessed, unbounded. It does not belong to any religion, sect or system. All religions, all methods, all systems improvised by humankind are attempts to guide us on the path to Truth. Often, though, the "way" is mistaken for the "Truth."
The mind in search of its own freedom must first of all assume an impersonal attitude, which leaves it free to explore, investigate, examine and, most important of all, to "experience." Most of us start with a personal need to find an inner freedom. In this state it is rather difficult to assume an impersonal approach, but such is the paradox of the inner path. As soon as we become personal, we tend to be judgmental and opinionated. Judgments and discriminations arise out of an intellectual and conditioned mind. As soon as one makes a judgment and discriminates, the intellect is at work. So long as the intellect is at the forefront of one's mind, it will always obstruct one's ability to experience fully one's own inner depth and essence. This is the reason that all the ways and means to liberation - the inner paths - transcend the intellect and move into the realm of the intuitive or the spiritual, for only the intuitive aspect of our mind can experience and realise Truth or freedom in its entirety. Different religious systems have developed methods and styles particular to their own historical, cultural and emotional backgrounds. Each of us is left to find the right path for ourselves.
Whichever path one may adopt, the greatest danger is the accumulation of emotional possessions. These are "my" guru, "my" beliefs, "my" progress, "my" experience. Here again, one faces a paradox. A teacher's guidance is invariably necessary for one to proceed properly on the path, but it presents a hindrance if one is not careful. The most common problem is personally clinging to gurus and teachers. In fact, this is one of the most difficult hindrances to overcome in all quests for inner freedom. Letting go of beliefs, doctrines, gurus, ideals and judgments is extremely difficult, because one holds them very dear to oneself. They become one's possessions, like material wealth and power, and then one is not free and does not proceed further.
So what should one do? The only appropriate way is to view everything with equanimity, be it gurus, doctrines, ideals, and even one's own practice and progress. Only then can one view everything with objectivity. Freedom is not just an end result. It is not something that awaits us at the end of our endeavour. Freedom is instantaneous, right now, from the very beginning. We can be "free" in the very process of the search, in experiencing, in every step along the way.
To achieve freedom requires only two things: a silent mind and an open heart.
Peace Of Mind
If you just stopped thinking for a while and sat back to reflect on your own mind, you would be surprised to realise that you are at peace. Even if you agree with me, you might argue that this peace is only temporary. So be it.
But let us look into this peaceful tranquil state, temporary or otherwise, since it is already with us - without our having to make any effort at all at being peaceful.
You were born with this peace-nature of the mind; otherwise you would not be what you are, would you? You did not run around meditating to bring about this peace to yourself: you did not learn from someone or some book to make possible this peaceful state in yourself. In other words, "you" had nothing to do with it. Peace is a natural mind-state in every one of us. Peace has been there since the day we were born and it is going to be there till the day we die. It is our greatest gift; so why do we think we have no peace of mind?
Experiencing peace is like looking at our hands. Usually, we see only the fingers - not the spaces in between. In a similar manner, when we look at the mind, we are aware of the active states, such as our running thoughts and the one-thousand-and-one feelings that are associated with them, but we tend to overlook the intervals of peace between them. If one were to be unhappy or sad every minute of the twenty-four-hour day, what would happen to us? I guess we would all be in the mad house!
Then why is it that we supposedly never are at peace? It is simply because we never allow ourselves to be so.
We enjoy battling with ourselves and our emotions so much that the battle becomes second nature to us. And we complain that we have no peace of mind.
Why don't we leave aside all these complicated ideas for a while and simply contemplate this peaceful nature of ours - since we are fortunate enough to have it - instead of frantically trying to find peace of mind some place else. How can we find something elsewhere, when it is already in ourselves? Probably that is the reason why we often do not find it.
We do not have to do anything to have this peace, do we? Mind is by itself peaceful.
But we do need to do something to our minds in order to be angry or sad.
Imagine yourself enjoying a moment of quiet. Suddenly something disturbs your enjoyment. You start up at once, annoyed or angry at the disturbance. Why? Because you dislike the interruption. Your mind "acts." It dislikes. It sets up thoughts of dislike, followed by annoyance, anger and a whole series of reactions.
Thought moments are extremely fast, so you don't notice the moment of the mind setting up thoughts of dislike. We generally think that the outside situation is what is responsible for our annoyance. But even during the most durable and miserable experiences of our lives, we find moments when our minds are distracted from the cause of misery and we are relatively free from the devastating emotional state. Once we set our minds back on the event, the unpleasant feelings come rushing in again immediately. When these emotions subside, what happens to them? We seem to take it for granted that they end up or phase out somewhere outside of us. But if they had their origin in the mind, they must surely end in the mind. If they had their origin in a peaceful state, then they would surely end in that peaceful state also. It is only logical.
Let us contemplate this peaceful state. We recognise it before emotions have set in and also after they have disappeared. What about the in-between times? Is peace destroyed during the time that we have been angry or sad? We are so used to implying that this or that destroys our peace of mind that we have come to assume that peace of mind is a contrived state that can be arrived at or deleted at will.
But this is not the case. Peace and tranquillity are part and parcel of our own mental make up. If they are destroyed during emotional upheavals, our minds might as well be destroyed too. Peace is the essence of our own innate nature and can never be destroyed.
Peace is with us every single moment of our life, but we do not recognise it. This is because we are ignorant about peace - most of the time we are too preoccupied with the external world and our own running thoughts and emotions to be aware of it. We have lost touch with our inner selves, with what is the best in us. We frantically try to find the answer outside when all the time peace is sitting there, silently waiting until we come home to it.
Non Peace Mind
If we agree that have innate peace, what do you think gives us non-peace? From the standpoint of peace of mind, thoughts by themselves are neither good nor bad. It is only when the concepts of "I" and "mine" arise that the mind is thrown into conflict. Likes and dislikes quickly follow these concepts of self. This where the real trouble begins.
A thought by itself is okay. Let's say you've lost your keys. It happens. The problem begins when you start judging the fact that you misplaced your keys. "I dislike it when I lose my keys.... I like it so much better when I have my keys and I can continue my busy schedule." You might go on with your thinking: "Why am I so careless? It must have been because the children were rowdy." Then you might put your thoughts into words: "Look what you made me do - I was so busy with you that I lost my keys." You might put those thoughts and emotions into physical actions by rushing around looking for the lost keys.
All this commotion stems from your reaction to a couple of misplaced keys. Let's go back to what prompted the commotion. When you had the thought, "I lost my keys," you weren't able to let go of that thought. Instead, you immediately jumped into likes and dislikes. Feeling, conflicts and frustrations are born from this dichotomy of likes and dislikes. You allowed yourself to be swept away by your judgments, your feelings, your frustrations.
But let's look at the thoughts for a moment. They arise, and by their own accord they fall away. That is, unless we cling to them. If we allow thoughts to continue their normal span, they will naturally fall away. All thoughts are subject to the universal law of impermanence, anicca.
For those of you who are familiar with Buddhism, you know this law of change. You accept it in many aspects of your lives. But can you apply it to the most important area of all - your mind? Can you watch thoughts and emotions as they arise in your mind? Can you allow them to naturally fade away, without clinging to them? Or do you indulge in letting the "I" grasp onto a thought, an emotion?
By their nature, thoughts are transient, unless the "I" interferes and refuses to let them go. By clinging to thoughts and emotions, the "I" prolongs the emotion-span - on and on. It is the "I" which insists on clinging to thoughts and emotions that creates non-peace.
Peace has nothing to do with the "I." It is not "my" peace. As long as you think you own peace - as long as you think, "I like my peace" - then you will not experience peace.
A friend of mine, a spiritual educator, came up with a metaphor that may hel explain the process. Let's take the phrase, "I like peace." If we eliminate the "I," then we are left with "like peace." If we go further and eliminate the "like," then all that remains is peace. Peace is something that can be felt but not owned. Peace can be experienced when we eliminate our ideas of likes and dislikes about peace.
Maditating Peace
Many have asked how to go about finding inner peace. Once you have recognised that
peace is not an induced state, but an innate-natural state,
that is exactly where you begin. There is absolutely nothing to do but look within yourself and recognise peace this very moment. When you recognise peace in your mind, you have in fact already experienced peace.
If you do recognise your own peaceful moments at times, then you are already started. Never mind if this recognition is very brief. You can make this peace-moment the base from which to investigate your own mind. This can be the focal point from which to launch your investigation. And surprisingly, you will find this is also the home base to which you return.
You may find that it is not easy to come back to this peace-moment. That is not important. It is more important to decide that you want to pay attention to your own mind. We are so conditioned to looking outward that our minds have fallen into a kind of mental groove. It is difficult to rise up and leave that groove because it is easy and comfortable there. To turn outward attention inward is difficult unless one has the "will" to do it.
In your initial attempts to see peace-moments, they may be very infrequent and brief, but that is all right. It may even be that the more you try, the more difficult seeing peace or peace-moments becomes. If that is the case, just let go. Very often the awareness of peace-moments is unforeseen; it comes when you least expect it.
You may ask whether there is a specific method to "see" these peace-moments. And I would say no - not beyond the "will" to pay attention to the mind. Paying attention requires no particular time or place. It goes on while you go about the daily business of living, playing, doing the one-thousand-and-one chores of what is called life. There is nothing to do beyond this. There is just something specifically you should not do and that is to let opinions, judgments and discrimination crowd your mind. The mind watching itself needs to be whole so that it can pay complete attention.
When you start discriminate, your mind becomes preoccupied with making judgments. Your mind ceases to be free. Then you cannot see or experience the peace within yourself.
In order to understand how things move in space, you must be able to see the whole panorama of space as well as the objects in it. Without space, objects cannot have motion. Objects may be affected, but the space will never be affected. The objects may disintegrate in space, but the space remains.
Your home base - the peace-nature of the mind - is just like physical space outside your body. Within you is the space of consciousness where thoughts and emotions move about. As with the outside space, it is because of this space-mind that thoughts and feelings can arise freely and also cease freely. If your mind is already crammed, there is no room for anything to arise in it.
If you can "see" this space clearly in yourself, you also see what is rising and falling more clearly. At first, you may notice only the falling -- because it is more obvious. You will find yourself less involved with your own emotions and thus more at your home base. And the more you are at your home base, the more at peace you will be with yourself and with the world.
You may not have found perfect peace as yet, but at least you will find a breathing space in yourself, a respite. This is the time you learn to be friends with your own mind and your emotions. You will find that you no longer wrestle with them as before. The beautiful part is that you will find yourself loosening up inside. This loosening up may not appear important to you, but actually this first step is always the most important. When you are not in a tightly bound, self-inflicted tangle, you can look at yourself more objectively.
Never mind, if you do not see the rising. There is time for everything. Even when you "see" the falling away, you will notice a change. You will already experience peace. Keep on "experiencing" this peace as you would experience a good cup of coffee or a scoop of ice cream. After a while, you will find that you can "experience" your emotions without getting involved in them. Since you are more at home base, you will find that your feelings are in and of themselves fleeting.
For example, you may be surprised to find that feelings do not stay for a long time without your own invitation and your clinging to them. You will also see that they are part of the natural phenomena of the mind. In Buddhism, all phenomena are impermanent, are not of the self, and are themselves the basis of suffering.
Becoming aware of your feelings in this way is like discovering a new friend. When you realise that these transient feelings have no power of their own, they cease to threaten you. This realisation gives you a positive feeling, because you are no longer overwhelmed.
As you find out more about yourself in this way, you will also find that you reside more and more in your own peace home base. You will also realise this peace has always been there. It is just that you were so engrossed in trying to get rid of your frustrations that you had neither the time nor the skill to see this peace that is already there. In fact, peace-mind has been there all along for you to rediscover.
The path to inner peace is quite simple. You complicate it by thinking that the method should be difficult. You are conditioned to achieving this, accomplishing that. Your mind is in perpetual motion. Of course, you must earn a living, feed your family, make friends, take your children to school. That is the business of living. But if you perpetuate this frantic mode as the mode of your search for peace, you won't find peace.
What we are concerned with is slowing down ... so you can understand yourself, and experience what is already there. When you are already at the home base, do you need to do anything to stay there?
You need only to wake up and realise you have always been home.
We must be aware that this kind of meditation is a way of investigating and understanding ourselves, of awakening to our actual state of mind, to all the mental formations that arise and fall. It is an entrance to ourselves. We will discover the bad things as well as the good, but in the end the investigation will pay off. For now we can find an opportunity to discover our own wondrous inner depths and draw upon the essence of what is the best in us.
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