Our unconscious organizing principles most clearly reveal themselves when we find ourselves stuck, imagining that our happiness is conditional on having a certain kind of experience, on being or becoming a certain kind of person, or on being treated in some special manner. …Practice allows us discover that our happiness is not dependent on any of the things which we once thought so crucial. The old organizing principles that forever were warning us, “Do it this way or else!” are suddenly found irrelevant. Life offers us the unexpected pleasure in our own aliveness, vitality and responsiveness. Being just this moment, we learn that we don’t have to become anything new, or somehow jettison all those shameful parts of ourselves in order to partake of this newfound bounty.
Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind
I think of moments of pressure and difficulty as like this – as gateways, the beginning of a journey…It’s easy to forget to be curious, and to grab an off-the-shelf knowledge, something like “This is awful”. Not reaching for off-the-shelf understandings, though, is an important skill. The whole of the ancient, master teachings on suffering come down to this: Suffering is the notion “This isn’t it” and its variants, such as “It shouldn’t be happening” and “I have to know how this will turn out”. Freedom, waking up, and fearlessness comes down to the simplicity of “Wait a minute, what if this is it” and its variant “I don’t know”
In each situation, it seems to us that the disturbing emotion or suffering that arises in our mind is very solid and powerful. Since it is so intense, it appears to be more powerful than we feel we are. However, if we actually look and meditate on the mind’s nature, we discover that all the things arising in our mind — thoughts, disturbing emotions, sadness, and misery — are [less solid]. If we scrutinize them, looking to see what they really are and where they really are, we will discover they are empty of substance and location. When we look directly at the thoughts, disturbing emotions, and misery that arise in our mind, we cannot find where they are located, or where they came from, or whether they have a shape or color. We never find any of these qualities that all the objects seem to have.
