When you talk,
You are only repeating something you already know.
But,
If you listen,
You may learn something new.
Notice how everything that happens,
Happens because of something else.
Nothing happens purely by itself.
All our experiences,
All thoughts,
All feelings,
Even our choices,
Happens as effects of various causes.
Nature unfolds according to its own natural laws.
Phenomena,
That is,
All our experiences,
Arise due to certain causes,
Then change due to causes,
And eventually end because of causes.
So,
We can refer to phenomena as conditioned realities.
Conditioned realities are by their nature subject to change.
Don't just take my word for it though,
Investigate your own experience properly,
So as to see for yourself.
This is an important point to understand.
The state we can awaken to in meditation is the unconditioned,
The unchanging,
Sometimes referred to as the deathless reality.
It's here all the time,
All we need is to realise it.
It's here all the time,
All we need is to realise it.
One of the first really strong contemplative experiences I had in meditation was regarding the mind.
I was listening to a cassette tape,
Which does make me feel quite old,
A cassette tape that I had gotten hold of with recordings of a monk talking about the Buddhist concept of not-self.
He explored methodically the different parts of a human being,
Body,
Feelings,
Perceptions,
Thoughts,
Memories,
Sense consciousness,
Mental consciousness,
Examined each and every one in terms of how they are conditioned phenomena,
That is,
How they ultimately are subject to a natural law of cause and effect.
It hit me hard.
At the one hand,
I could see the truth in it.
I could see how all my thoughts basically were like echoes of stuff I had heard,
Read and experienced elsewhere.
But yet the feeling that I am thinking was so compelling.
I felt a tremendous resistance,
A fear of losing myself.
At one hand I could see the truth of it.
On the other hand,
I didn't want to see it.
Not only did I feel the fear of losing free will,
But also all the opinions and preferences and views that I had and that I felt identified me as a person.
If none of that is me,
Then what's left?
The sense was that nothing would be left,
So naturally the thought terrified me.
In the same period of my life,
This was in my late teens or early twenties,
I was dabbling with hypnosis,
Reading about it and trying it out on a few of my friends,
A couple of times with really powerful results,
Kind of like you see in shows on TV.
Just how conditioned and compliant thoughts and will are is so strikingly illustrated through hypnosis.
For example,
I told my friend that when I would snap my fingers and wake her up,
She would look at her clock and realise that she'd be late for work.
This was not true of course,
It was on a Saturday evening,
And that she would have no recollection of me telling her so.
I woke her up,
She looked at her clock,
Startled and jumped out of the sofa,
Rushed over to the fridge and got her usual banana and yoghurt,
Threw it in a bag,
Rushed out the door,
Got her bike and was about to set off.
At that point I put her under again,
I instructed her that when I'd wake her,
She would have forgotten about the whole thing.
Then I snapped my fingers and she was wondering what the hell had happened,
Why she was waking up on the streets with a backpack on her back,
Helmet on her head,
Ready to get onto her bike.
To someone doing things like this,
In or after hypnosis,
The subjective experience is,
I want to do so and so,
I choose to do this and that,
Having no recollection of having been instructed to think like that.
However,
To the outside observer,
It's very obvious that their thoughts and actions were conditioned by the suggestions from the hypnotist.
There's actually no sharp boundary between our hypnotic state and our normal state.
We are quite susceptible for suggestions and influences at all times,
It's just a bit more complex.
Investigate your own thinking.
Where are your thoughts and ideas coming from?
Why do you think the way you do?
Can you think a thought that's not coming from anywhere?
Not conditioned by anything at all?
Playing with words and ideas is like trying to catch rain in buckets.
Just allow your consciousness to receive the rain and the seeds buried deep within will have a chance to be watered.
People like echoes.
Sometimes the mountains are shaped in such a way that the sound is distorted and make the echo sound somewhat different than the original.
The echo is conditioned by the original sound and the shape of the mountains.
So it seems to be with us too.
Our thoughts are not necessarily exact copies of what we've heard,
But echoes conditioned by the complex shapes of our psychology.
Nature won't ever stop returning echoes.
Thoughts are natural,
But seeing them for what they are enables us to not identify with them.
After all,
I am the thinker of these thoughts.
It's just another conditioned thought,
Isn't it?
Just as the dog loves to chew bones,
The human mind loves its problems.
Realizing that our thoughts not always tell the truth can be quite a relief actually.
Some of them are just unhelpful bullshit from elsewhere.
Seeing that it's not our thoughts make it much easier to let go of them.
We can hear a thought without believing in it.
What a liberation to realize that the voice in my head is not who I am.
Who am I then?
The one who sees that.
Who am I?
Who am I?
Who am I?
