Two Different Worlds
Posted: Thursday, December 17, 2009
by e
Dhammabucha Rocksprings Meditation
There are two kinds of mind; a worldly inspired mind and a spiritually inspired mind.
The worldly inspired mind believes that happiness can be found in the various pursuits that we as human beings involve ourselves with, such as pleasure seeking and accumulations.
Pleasure seeking seems to make us happy, both in the pursuit of pleasure as well as the feeling of pleasure when it is experienced. For example; planning a vacation is, many times, as pleasurable as the vacation itself, or perhaps more so if glitches arise during our outing. And even if our vacation goes smoothly, we are usually ready for another one when we get back, exhausted!
When any of these things are missing or taken from us, however, such as family and friends or pleasurable experiences, we can become out of sorts, and even depressed. Since pleasure is addictive, as is accumulating and experiencing, boredom and malaise can set in when we, for some reason or another, either get tired of it all or lose our capacity to continue our zest for life.
From the standpoint of a worldly mind, we either aren't aware of how fragile our happiness is, since it is wholly dependent on things outside of ourselves over which we have no control, such as the death of a family member or friend, or the loss of health or career due to aging. Or, we are actually aware of the gamble we are taking with our sanity and hope that our good luck continues.
There is a third possibility; that we are incapable of finding an alternate way of living that would involve happiness from the standpoint of no addictions or reliance on outside circumstances, because even spirituality falls prey to these things. So in order to cultivate a truly spiritual mind, without the onus of spirituality(!) we have to initially experience and then pursue that illusive, fleeting, intuitive feeling that things aren't exactly what they seem to be.
During this holiday season, somewhere along the line, if we are intelligent at all and perceptive, we will get an inkling that somehow we are being carried along by a grand delusion and fooling ourselves. But we know that we must desperately continue to fool ourselves, in so many ways, because waking up from the fairy tale would be too unnerving.
So we basically continue to live in the worldly mind, with much bravado, but down deep we are as frightened as a baby fawn whose mother has left it in the forest. And we continue to live in the past and the future.
We live in the past by remembering who we are and what we were, and we live in the future by extending the "who" into what we hope are pleasurable type circumstances. But we don't live in each moment; we don't know how to do that. And because we don't know how to live in each moment, we live instead in the dreams of the past and the illusions of the future, but never in reality. Chances are, during our entire lifetime, we have never lived in the reality of the moment, not even once.
You see, in the reality of the moment, we cannot exist. That's key. Once we exist, we are stuck again in the old past and the uncertain future, only concepts of a worldly mind.
When we drop the past, we lose our identity because what is our identity other than what has happened to us in the past? When we drop the future, who is it that will go there - that person would have to disappear as well. And when we disappear, what happens?
What happens is that the iron wall of conflict that separates us from reality is gone, as is the heavy weight of all the responsibility that a self constructs, but just for a moment is it all gone, but long enough for us to taste real freedom for perhaps the first time in our lives.
And in that moment of non-separation, reality is revealed. It's a moment of great insight that has radically changed many lives, but it cannot be achieved with a worldly mind because it has nothing to do with achievement, and everything to do with letting go - of who and what we are.
In that incredible moment between the past and future there cannot be any identification, there can only be what is before us. No longer is there a barrier between a perceived us and what we see, and as a result, what we see is truth, reality, and something that we may have never realized before.
This is truly a game changer, a radical awakening that transforms one's mind into an instrument of true virtue where one's actions are no longer predisposed to a set of rules or some authority, but are based on an intuitive predisposition to do no harm.
And when one no longer does harm, one is on the road to becoming what we can describe as a complete human being.
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