Living a Balanced Life
In Part 2 of Food for the Heart, Ajahn Chah speaks regarding meditation and its usefulness in helping us
"look after our minds. . . .When the mind has no one to look after it, it's like a child with no mother or father to
take care of it (p. 136)." Meditation is simply a method of training the mind to stabilize it so that we can clearly
see what is happening. It's important to understand that this vipassana, or clear seeing, is not concerned with
observation of external events, but rather the state of the mind at each moment. Knowing the mind in this way is
the condition for tranquility, which in turn is the condition for wisdom to arise.
In any given moment, the mind is under the influence of one of six states: generosity, love, wisdom, greed,
hatred or delusion (ignorance). Of these, the most common mind state (and the most difficult to discern) is delusion.
A deluded mind does not discriminate between direct and conceptual experience; conceptual experience is accepted as
reality or truth. There are many exercises and guided meditations to help us see through this delusion.
Thich Nhat Hanh, for example, asks us to "look deeply" at a flower to transcend the concept of "daffodil."
To look and see the causes and conditions which gave rise to it: soil, bulb or seed, rain and sun, etc.
If we really "see" the flower, we see that our concept of "flower" or "daffodil," while useful in conventional
reality and conversation does not begin to get at the suchness of the object. Consider the Zen koan: "If you
meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." A koan is not a riddle because it cannot be resolved by reason. Koans
are paradoxes which require an intuitive leap to another dimension of comprehension, one ungoverned by conceptual
thought. An electron is a wave; an electron is a particle: a scientific koan. It appears that the world is outside
of us but, in fact, this appearance is mind's projection. And yet, paradoxically, the phenomenal world has its own
reality. Samsara and nirvana, form and emptiness, delusion and enlightenment are one, just as the electron
contains the properties of wave and particle.
The antidote for delusion is mindfulness, or wise attention, to the present moment.
Wise attention, cultivated in meditation, is direct perception of experience before we conceptualize about
experience. To see how the mind leans, work with a paradox from your experience. For example, one of my customers,
whom I had had direct dealings with only once, indicated to one of my co-workers that she really disliked me and
wanted to work with someone else within my company. I could think of no possible reason why this customer disliked
me and she would not respond to me (or to my assistant) when we inquired about the nature of the problem. It
was interesting to watch mind make up a "story" that "explained" the situation, when in fact I had no direct
experience that would validate the conceptual explanation. Confronted with a paradox (on the one hand, the
customer felt a lot of aversion towards working with me and, on the other hand, I could see no obvious reason
for the aversion), mind was uncomfortable with the ambiguity and came up with an explanation which, while it may
be plausible, has no basis in direct experience. The ambiguous area between perception and conception is the
field in which we can experience the Unconditioned. We can recognize it because there is a moment where the mind
is confused and uncomfortable or doubtful. Uncertainty can be very useful if we learn to work it without
immediately jumping to conclusions.
As Steve Hagen says in How the World Can Be the Way It Is, "Truth cannot be conceptualized, but it can be known"
Hagen argues that we must see through our beliefs in concepts and stories; the process usually moves from
belief to doubt to knowing that does not rest on concept. And the best way to do this, he says, is "by
carefully attending to what's actually going on around us and noticing that our stories never fully explain"
our experience.
Offered with metta,
Deb
