The mind and feeling are just like oil
and water; they are in the same bottle but they don’t mix. Even if we are sick
or in pain, we still know the feeling as feeling, the mind as mind. We know the
painful or comfortable states but we identify with them. We stay only with
peace: the peace beyond both comfort and pain.
Ajahn Chah;
Taste of Freedom
&
The idea that the mind exists beyond the limits of that
computer behind my ears is hard to grasp at first. As much as I don’t like pain, and have spent a good part of my life avoiding it, I have found that all the
remedies for pain cause more trouble in the end than the pain itself. Most pain is temporary and is handled easily with a Motrin or an aspirin. However,
having had a back injury at twenty-two, I have had to deal with persistent pain
for most of my adult life and in doing so I have damned near killed myself
self-medication of drugs and alcohol. Beyond physical pain lurked the invisible
ogre of psychological suffering in the form of despair and depression. Applying
the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous enabled me to tackle the more
pernicious suffering of the spirit… the mind… the alienation of the mind from
the Super-Mind. Deep within each one of us is a concept of God… this is the
Super-Mind. The Heart of Compassion that lives everywhere includes everything
and is the root of all science and mathematical precision beyond the
limitations of the physical world.
Tapping into that Mind is the
goal of every religious practice and spiritual discipline. In the West, we
surrender to it in the form of salvation in Jesus. In the East, it is the
result of practicing the non-practice of meditation towards Buddhahood. It
doesn’t matter a whit to me how anyone got there but get there we must if we
are to break the bondage of suffering in self-obsession.
geo 5,522
No comments:
Post a Comment