Infinite Freedom

Jim Tarran

Summer is a time of rapid fruition and accelerated growth. It is a time when we begin reaching out to one another, perhaps enjoying more social events and reconnecting with nature at its most abundant. The word abundance here represents not a set of external conditions but an attitude.

If one thinks that one is poor then there is less chance of noticing the riches that life offers. A green leaf, a single dewdrop are rich moments to the mind which is concentrated and receptive. If we believe that we are poor then we might unconsciously presume that the richness around us is not for us but for someone else. A lack of ‘mudhita’, or sympathetic joy, is an example of this sense of self as a distinct and separate state, excluding us from the joy around us.

With sympathetic joy, we can feel glad for others’ gladness and triumphant about others triumphs, we don’t have to feel that this joy is distinct and separate from ourselves. After all, the success of one is the success of all, at least in that it expresses human potential. This is made more difficult when we do not fulfil the personal dreams that we hold for happiness; first these dreams themselves will need a little unpicking.

For instance, the craving or thirst for things that we do not have in our lives is ultimately a craving for contentment, for connection and for security, the irony being that in our preoccupation with what we do not have, we are often not fully aware of that which we do.

An example of this might be walking along a coastal path on a soft, warm, sunny day, with a good friend, the fresh smell of the sea and the waft of scented meadows behind you. But your senses are only receiving minimal impressions of the scene, your skin is not savouring the soft breeze, you are not aware of the fragrant air around you and you are not enjoying the simple company of your friend, because you are to busy railing to them about what is wrong at work this week.

The answer is always the same: mindfulness (pali-sati/skt-smriti). If we relax a little, not actively pushing away our thoughts but encouraging a sense of where we are in a less specific sense, we will find thoughts, maybe remembering feelings from work, thoughts maybe arising from those memories, feelings from those thoughts and so on. But as well as these thoughts and their related feelings, our ears can hear the sea, other thoughts arise and they create feelings. Our skin can feel the breeze; our eyes can see our forms, shades colours, shadows, giving rise to yet more thoughts and feelings. Thoughts and feelings will swirl in and out of us and gradually, quite naturally, our problems at work become diluted by the moment and become changed. It is quite simply a sense of letting life purify us organically all the time.

In traditional Buddhism, there is a practice of scanning our deeper experience for bodily sensations, emotional sensations and the things in our mind and also ‘mind objects’. This will include noticing ‘enlightenment factors’ such as the presence or absence of any tendency to investigate our states or the presence or absence of rapture, joy or equanimity. Mindfulness is absolutely wrapped up with abundance and abundance with our attitude. If we believe that all should be known, or moreover that all can be known, then we will trap our mindfulness in a tiny pocket of our experience. Life is, and will always be, ultimately, a mystery. It is this mystery, this inconceivability that allows life’s richness to flow into us.

Whatever we learn about the world through science, a very useful tool to contact inconceivability, we can realise that the chains of cause and effect that string all the factors of life together are infinite, the combinations of this thing with that mixed with that, diluted with the other, go on without end. The wise the exalted and the happy have long since known this and it is alluded to at length in the Buddhist work the Vimalakirti Nirdirsha and pointed to by Hindu teachers in parts of theUpanishads. Benedictine monks are known to talk in terms of mystery and to emphasise silence as a way of avoiding the quantifications and qualifications of life that words can draw us into. For the Muslims, mystic, God is seen as the unknowable.

The great Buddhist teacher Mahavira Sangarakshitta simply puts it by saying that joyful, positive mental states are states that are expansive and that negative or unhappy mental states are states that are contracted. For the mind to be able to engage with this infinitude before us therefore, it needs to be relaxed and fluid. In the words of Don Juan, ‘detached and at ease I soar past the eagle to be free’.

Quotes

“The heart of the path is quite easy. There’s no need to explain anything at length. Let go of love and hate and let things be. That’s all that I do in my own practice.”

— Ajahn Summedho