The mind can be a cesspool. And, we shall remain mired in this cesspool until we are able to step out of emotional investment and involvement that takes place at every moment of cognition, that arises from, and both feeds on and off the vortex of feelings, emotions, habits, experience and deluded knowledge.
Recognizing this nature of mind can be very helpful in discovering the way forward. The mind does work in inscrutable ways, and distraction, which I talked of in my previous article titled “Self – Deconstructed -Finding Our Self”, is little understood.
The self can be found in the mind, and can be seen in what we do. It can be seen, for instance, in what it does, to remain in our social class and standing.
The middle class will usually remain middle class and survive in the middle class, neither going up nor going down, bound to class by norms, observances and habits, of thought born and shaped within its confines.
It can be said, equally, of those in the classes below the middle class, who likewise will always fight off against the values of lower classes, until the end, the untouchables? And a class above will always be unassailable due to the same reasons with the addition of afflictions from the complex of inferiority and a feeling of inadequacy. It is in our subconscious.
As much as a middle class is defined by money it is also defined by values. Values are the views, the customs, and the observances that have become our nature our habits and us. It determines how and what we think and what we do.
Those who become poor in a particular class will continue to observe their values by which they define themselves. The same can be said of caste.
This is survival, the survival of the ego self.
If you relax, so you sub-consciously relaxes, and blow off the lids that confine you, say blow-off the bottom lid and you can go downwards to lower classes. Likewise blow off the top lid and you can go top wards. Usually it is difficult and rarely happens as we always fight off what is not within our values and ideals.
If you can blow off these lids then you can be in any class without finding resistance from them and within you. You become free and you will observe what goes on for what it is, with an understanding as to why it is so.
And, gaining such understanding will result in spontaneous invocation of compassion in you for all of the actions of those who live in it. You have now divorced yourself from these realities. And you can appreciate the mental objects that portend actions and emotions.
And, when you do understand this it becomes a mantra by which you can predict outcomes of interactions, a prescience that you once thought was only within reach of enlightened beings.
An object of mind must precede every action. The body and form, of yours, of mine and ours does not exist apart from its self as its reflection and of the self, and has no nature or no other nature other than itself, in reality. This is the wisdom of mirror awareness, the awareness of its duality, the awareness without separation in object and reflection, united in object and reflection, just as the reflection in a mirror that does not exist apart from its object; the understanding of simultaneous emptiness and appearance, the awareness of emptiness of illusion, the purified nature of all form, with precision and clarity, without comparison and judgement, without aversion and attachment, remaining untouched, yet beholding the images of all space and all time.
What you and I, and we all perceive in reality as the object, possesses marks of universality and particular, unity and diversity, integration and disintegration, but has no nature or no other nature other than the object or its elements, of fire and earth. This is the wisdom of investigative awareness , the discriminating wisdom of observation of the image.
And what you and I, and we all perceive has no nature or no other nature other than the spectrum of its elements of red and yellow. This is the wisdom of equalization that your image and my image have the same nature.
When you see image, and when I see image and when we all see images we see in it the same image therefore invoking in us feelings of:
- Maitri (goodwill, loving kindness, benevolence), for the images seen by you, by me, and all sentient beings, sans hatred, illwill and personal affection.
- Karuna (compassion, perceive others suffering, wish to remove others suffering), for the images seen by you, by me, and all sentient beings, sans wickedness and passionate grief.
- Muditha (sympathetic joy, happy at others prosperity) , for the images seen by you, by me, and all sentient beings, sans jealousy and exhilaration (pahasa)
- Upekkha (sk. Upesha) (equanimity, view impartially, well-balanced, without clinging or aversion), for the images seen by you, by me, and all sentient beings, sans attachment/passion (raga) and callousness/unintelligent indifference
sans greed and passion from equality in the elements of earth and fire, and their spectrum of colors of white and red and feelings, and the equality in feelings in the elements of water and earth and their spectrum of colors of white and yellow.
This is the wisdom of wonderful realization of equality.
The experience of this wonderful realization in emptiness devoid of self nature is bliss and emptiness. So embrace them, merge into to them, dissolve into them completely, dissolving into the nature of your own mind, as does the arising of mind within that passes into within, experiencing the awareness of bliss and emptiness, which is of clarity and luminosity, of no separation from luminosity, of no duality of subject or object, of I or you, of mine or yours, of inside and outside, a return to oneness, in freedom from attachment, of a liberation, of complete emancipation, in the pure luminosity and be liberated.
This is the Wisdom of the Cosmos, the equality, of all dharma of all beings; the equality of all beings.
When you see me you see you, when I see you I see me, whatever, wherever and whenever we see, we see you and me and all of us, we see emptiness, we see luminosity, we see pure consciousness.
And so you pause, you ponder and you go mute, you become still in body and silent in speech as you observe the mind in what you sense.
We always fight to live, life is a fight, and we fight to live and safeguard our class, our way of life. We were middle class this life, middle class yesterday, and we will fight to remain middle class tomorrow, the day after and in the next life, unless something distracts our mind.
This fight will transcend the realms as it is deeply rooted in our psyche - our mental continuum - our bhavanga as kama bhava. It arises from the past, past causes, rooted in the past, in the past life, and extending to the present and finding sameness within the present with feeling. It is one of the two roots identified as perpetuating sansaric existence in the Buddha's discourse on causation, the Great Discourse on Causation (Manaparinidhana Sutta).
It is a battle, one fight after another, and the greater we are bound by norms and observances, the greater and more numerous our battles become, often the same type of battle being fought at different times against different enemies, arising from the same disagreement – of views and values. Those who see others in Courts of Law seem to do so often and seem to have and had numerous court cases.
This fight continues unless something distracts us, that something distracts us, from the bone we bite, like a dog lock-jawed on bone.
If our values are not passed on to the next generation then there is a likelihood of perfidy in the classes whence the next generation may adopt different values. And greed, usually, is an ingredient that influences the adoption of new ideals, norms and observances, that is one poison, viz. greed, replacing another, viz. of adherence to views and observances.
The word poison I will take to mean greed in the extreme sense, it can also mean morality in a good sense but conceived out of the dualistic mind. And although it is not something that is all bad, I would call it a poison as it is inimical to attaining non-dualism.
This fight to keep ourselves in the middle class is a fight within us versus the other classes. There are 3 things that that will keep us entrenched in the classes. They are self-view, doubts and our habits. The Buddha stated when he defined a sakkaya or a “self being” as one who is constituted of sakkaya ditthi (views), of vicci kicca (doubts), and of seelabatha paramasa (a creature of habit, adherence to rituals and observances).
We have preconceived notions of what is right and not and we will not do this and that. And then if we don’t do something then the chances are we may not be able to go places. We will have all kinds of notions as to why we should not be doing things and we will not do it. Days on end, months, years entrenched in this mind keeps us keeps us within these boundaries. And we fear what lies after we do cross the boundary. It’s a stream of thought from which we have no escape unless we cut through the illusion and jump out of it. It becomes and is our psyche; it is what makes up our life force (bhavanga) that is so corrupted. It is the caged bird syndrome or the fish separated by a glass that still feels separated without it.
This force of ours, which we are, our self, has the ability to work its way, in subtle ways, and leave its mark surreptitiously, and so result in manifestations albeit mysterious, where an effect cannot be traced directly to a cause. For example one can say I don’t want to do business with him or I don’t ant to talk to him, as I don’t like what he does.
On the other hand if you recognize people for who they are, that everyone has their weaknesses, we don’t need to avoid them, not do business with them, for talking to them does not mean, necessarily mean, that we are involving ourselves in the schemes of his mind. We do it without intent (cetana). We just do it as we would do if we did not know about it. We may have seen instances of this in our own actions. One such maybe when we found out that we had done business with a person or talked to a person and found them to be a nice although everyone else said otherwise - I did not find him or her so, he/she was very good to me.
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