
Seeing all things as equally present
is to cease seeing things
through the lens of their meaning and usefulness to myself
Noelle Oxehandler, Buddhist author
The mental and emotional ‘pause’, the open state, allows the topic of one’s expectation to go down like the sun – and arise again in a fresh light. One can then pick up the thread of what one was doing or talking about with a fresh mind and a shift in perspective – or one can decide to drop it. There’s an opportunity for a transformative choice.
Because unless you’ve deliberately paused and released it, a thread of grievance or passion has just gone into storage – and will arise later. Threads don’t drop by themselves when the mind that is holding them moves into the background.
But the possibility that the pause offers is to place a topic under an open timeless light; having reviewed it, its basis can be seen and relinquished. And at other times, having let an idea rest in that aware space, new angles and insights into it arise as the mind re-engages.
Ajahn Sucitto
Time and again, in practice, all we really have to do is see the part of us that is either fearful or reluctant or objecting.
See that part – the one we think is the problem.
Once we can see that part, the one that we ourselves are objecting to, and believe to be problematic, and the origin of our difficulty in practice – once we see it, we can learn to simply be with it.
No need to do anything about it. Be with it.
Henry Shukman