Letting the mind find ease
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
One of the things I have noticed during my recent period of ‘letting the mind lie fallow’ is that when you don't feed it a steady diet of dharma, the mind kind of gradually relaxes. Topics to do with books disappear disconcertingly quickly, and the thoughts rearrange themselves into an easy state, a point where it is suited to the day to day, and even when you contemplate the thoughts that come up are not immediately Buddhist or even part of some other form of spirituality.
It makes me wonder how deep the Buddhism has gone, I have spent a good five years looking at it and at my mind and at my heart, I have soaked myself in it at times, and yet I find my mind always ready for something new. During the period of fallowness I have distracted myself at times with the audio lectures of Terence McKenna, who doesn’t have much truck with spirituality but has a wide ranging command of the English language, as a kind of neutral busy-ness. Perhaps in five years you can only acquire a thin veneer of Buddhism, easily scraped away by applying any new thing over the top.
Some things remain, such as the new attitude to letting go and not clinging, so It seems that those kind of lessons stay learnt, and perhaps even influence the process of finding ease in the mind.
Comments
It’s interesting. During contemplation I notice that some Buddhist subjects remain at my command, close to the surface. That shows they did make a fair impact, and have changed what I think and why. Certainly some things that I used to think were important I no longer consider as essential, I am a lot less ambitious than I used to be.
Although I have to give some credit to Advaita Vedanta as well, that was another turning point which showed clearly that some things that were instilled by culture were complete rubbish, and that a lot of the ‘lessons’ peddled through popular culture were merely entertainment.
The whole process of letting the mind find ease has been good, and interesting from a mindfulness perspective. The less you fill your mind up with so-called significant material, the more you detox from what’s considered important or necessary, the more you find a certain lightness.