Integrated Habits,
Our Mental Baseline If you remember,
In our world equilibrium,
We said that our action and intention go out into the world,
Disturbing it,
Eventually to return to us,
Perhaps in this life,
Perhaps in another future life.
Well,
Mental equilibrium is a little different.
Our intentions and perceptions in our mental environment,
Over time,
Tend to create a kind of baseline mental state.
The more recent intentions have a stronger effect on this state than our older data.
Yet all our mental data contribute to our baseline.
From this baseline,
We view the world,
Process data,
And do our mental cooking.
Different baselines will lead us to cook our new input in different ways.
And remember,
We eat all we cook.
For example,
Imagine two men who see the same beautiful young woman walk past.
One man experiences joy at seeing her beauty.
He notices the dignified poise of her motion,
The freshness of youth in her face,
And the joy and intelligence in her eyes.
He smiles and silently wishes her well.
The second man sees only her outer form.
He experiences a surge of lust and imagines having sex with her.
These two men are operating from different baselines.
These baselines will build layer by layer,
Moment by moment,
From their own intention and mental processes.
So we are all responsible for our own mental environment.
If it is dirty,
Or rusty,
Or dull,
It is only ourselves who can clean it up and make it shine.
In one of the Buddha's most famous sermons,
He simplified his teachings into three simple,
Straightforward admonitions.
Stop doing bad things.
Do more good things.
Purify your mind.
We are mind.
Our moment by moment reality is the reality of our mind.
Our mental world is where we live.
The place we cannot leave,
Where all our experiences exist.
If I put my hand in a fire,
It is my mind,
Not my hand that experiences the pain.
Had the nerve impulses been blocked,
I wouldn't have felt a thing.
But in our natural condition,
With nerve impulses free to flow,
The feedback from our body screams pain at our mind.
In that burning instant,
My mind is in hell.
My mind's connection to the physical is a connection to pain and agony.
Though,
It should be noted,
With training,
One is able to greatly reduce even physical pain by controlling the action of one's mind.
In our dreams at night,
We can feel pleasure,
Fear,
Anxiety,
Boredom,
Or joy,
Or any of the vast array of feelings we experience while awake.
As we dream,
We exist in the reality of our dream.
It is at that moment for us,
True.
Our pulse quickens or slows.
We sweat,
Twitch,
Or mourn.
Yet around our body as we sleep in bed,
All is quiet.
Our mind is on a journey someplace while our physical body remains in bed.
And to our mind,
It is real.
Buddhism suggests that if we look carefully,
We will see the thing we call me is our mind,
The creative human membrane between heaven and hell.
While we have a life as a human,
Our mind works through the physical brain and human form,
Using it as a transducer between the mental and physical worlds.
This productive connection between the human brain and the mind is the reason behind the great power and importance that Buddhism puts on being born human.
Only as a human do we have this wonderful power to put our intention into the physical world.
As a human,
We can exercise our free will and stamp it on physical reality.
As an animal,
While we still have feeling and emotion,
Our free will and intention are so small as to be negligible when compared to the human.
As an angel,
While enjoying bliss and beauty,
We are more or less disconnected from the physical world.
In total,
The Buddhist teachings speak of 31 different realms of existence,
From the lowest hell to the highest heaven,
All of which are subject to the laws of birth and decay,
All of which are on the wheel of life and death.
Humanity is poised at the key position,
The balance point,
Like a membrane between the higher and the lower.
At this position,
Our mind or brain transducer projects all our imbalanced intentions and actions up and down through all levels of creation.
Our divine intentions are projected into the heavenly zones and our hellish intention projected into the hellish zones.
These echoes of intention create structures and forms at the levels corresponding to the quality of the associated intention.
Our human intention is creative.
Moment by moment,
Human lifetime after human lifetime,
Our balanced intentions build for ourselves divine and hellish structures.
We build ourselves heaven and we build ourselves hell.
They are both quite real and they are both creations of our mind.
In this way,
The hell to which a Thai person may go may be quite different from the hell of an African,
European or international traveler.
Our different mental conditions build different structures.
The suffering and woe are the same,
But the implements and settings appear different.
Likewise,
Our heavens may appear different,
But the bliss and joy are the same,
And each structure has been created by the occupant over the course of their many lives.
So,
According to the Buddhist teachings,
The human is the most creative of all possible forms of existence.
As humans,
We create as we please,
And our creation resonates through all levels of existence.
We are responsible for,
And subject to,
Our own creation.
We cannot turn off this creative power.
Whether we are mindful or not,
We are creating at every moment.
Through this mind-to-human form transducer,
We create our own joys and our own sadness,
Our own prisons or ultimately,
Our own freedom.
Being born a human is a truly fantastic opportunity.
We have tremendous creative power.
Don't waste it.
Human bodies are not always available.
In the 4 or 5 billion years that the earth has been around,
Humans have only been here for at best a few hundred thousand years.
We are all immensely fortunate to be here now,
In human form.
Let's make the best of this marvelous opportunity.
This is our chance.
Let's take it.
