I feel like I am becoming complacent in my spirituality and I want to change that. I think it's like yoga. If you practice every day you can maintain your flexibility and even improve it. But if you stop, you lose that flexibility. Similarly, I feel like I went through a rapid period of spiritual growth and have now tapered off a bit. This is true of a lot of enterprises: a relatively small initial effort has dramatic consequences, but to go further, one has to expend much more energy. (Weightlifting comes to mind.) I know also that I shouldn't expect overnight changes, and that as long as I keep practicing, my character is bound to steadily improve.
This doesn't have much to do with today's reading, except of course that tonglen practice is a good way to practice improving one's personality. I love the way it transforms objects of my anger into tools for spiritual growth. I have a tendency, as I have remarked many times, not to acknowledge my own anger. When the `object of my fury' arises in my brain, I have two tendencies: one is to immediately banish it; the other is to get into an extended daydream in which I heap scorn on the object. Neither of these two courses is optimal. A third course, which I implement more often nowadays with my Buddhist practice, is to recognize the fury, and rest with its implications. In other words, I might be thinking of something and have an internal mental commentary in which the word "Bullshit" comes to mind. It actually is a new thing for me to recognize this when it happens, and to follow through on the implications. I said "bullshit" so I must feel strongly about this thing. Only when I recognize my own resentments can I be free of them. One of the wonderful things about my Buddhist practice is that it has made me more perceptive to all sorts of things, not the least of which is my own thought process. (I have no idea what other people's thought processes are like, and my perceptions about my own are likely not to be all that relevant to others. Each person has a unique mental construction. )
1 comment:
And there're the lines in my vision again. Like a faint set of blinds.
Maybe our mental constructs are vastly similar. In the way that the manner in whcih we all construct language is vastly similar. What we make out of it is infinitely unique. But the tools and processes may be very much alike. As much alike as our livers or muscles.
Post a Comment