The past few days have dawned quite grey, and this has hardly lifted at all during the course of the day. Like all other types of weather this can be a useful metaphor for the mind. We frequently fall into the trap of thinking that we see things directly and clearly, when rather it is truer to say that we see them through the filters of our mental and emotional conditioning. For example, we often expand a lot of energy worrying about future events, many of which never came to pass in the manner imagined. It is as Mark Twain said, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened”. However this does not prevent us from believing that we see the clearly what is going to happen, when in actual fact we am looking through the fog of our own interests and fears. This means a lot of our energy goes into not what is actually happening in that moment, but into the anticipations of what may happen in the future.
One of the reasons for meditation is the cultivation of clear seeing. We practice meditation to strengthen our ability to pay attention to this moment instead of getting lost in the fog that we’re usually in. It is one way of trying to see the world clearly, and not getting stuck in the wanderings of our minds, no matter what is the changing “weather” of our moods or experiences. To do this we try to sit under all kinds of circumstances, whether we are well or sick, whether we’re in a good mood or down, whether we feel our meditation is going well or is completely falling apart. In this way we develop a consistency. and see that meditation is rather about staying with ourselves, in this moment, no mater what that is like. Clear seeing starts with becoming aware of some of the habitual patterns in our thinking, our defense mechanisms, and the ways we rehearse life, rather than live it directly
“This is an essential discovery: our experience of life and the world is strongly flavoured by our own internal cycles of mental weather – sunny, foggy, rainy, sunny, misty, cloudy – and around and around we go: jealous, proud, anxious, craving, excited, deflated. When we look closely we see that we have deeply ingrained habits of distracting ourselves from the present.”
Gaylon Ferguson Natural Wakefulness
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