DharmaMind Buddhist Group

It is unfortunate that so many dharma practitioners assume their liberation is to found through some sort of mental development process. There may be fruit from this way but you will be only scratching the surface of your full potential and surely miss out on the inconceivable wisdom and wonder that full awakening promises. If instead you take your attention into the physical form and embark upon your spiritual journey from within this place, you will with commitment soon enough discover freedom and boundless treasures by going beyond the confines of a dualistic mind.

This talk begins with a short acknowledgement of the Buddha’s life during this month of Wesak, followed by the importance to focus on fully engaging with life as we learn to contain the habits that cause attachment and dukkha. We learn with a spirit of playfulness and experimentation to redirect our thoughts, speech and actions into a more skilful way of living all with the guidance of the six paramitas, as we slowly come to recognise the selfless engagement and function of our true nature and its aspiration of revealing the true human being.

We are creatures of habit, or looking from a dharmic perspective conditioned beings. This means when we learn something it then becomes a habit in our everyday life and it so often then becomes something we follow without any notion of being present through awareness, and so become like a mindless mechanical thing. The habit learned in the body takes over so that we can get lost in our thoughts and fantasies yet still perform the function that we set out to do. By living like this we are cutting ourselves off from the very source of our true nature and liberation and will be forever unfulfilled. The challenge that we all face is with energy (virya) be alive with ever present awareness and be with all of our daily habits and mundane routine, for it is just being like this that the door to freedom and awakening can only be found.

In this talk Āloka uses the upcoming retreat for the group in Snowdonia as an example of breaking the habit of needless mental projections. Using this retreat as a metaphor for life he encourages the student to rather than spend time creating situations in their mind about the retreat that may or not occur, to instead turn away from this common habit because it only produces burdens and expectations that almost certainly will not take place anyway. Best to arrive at the retreat without any expectations at all and so arrive with an empty fresh openness often described as a beginners mind. This is but an example of how we should approach everything we do in our life.

In our quest to be free we have to look and discover that part of ourselves that isn't. We discover with investigation that so much of our thinking and functioning in life is simply following what we are familiar with, like a machine that we hide behind because we feel we are safe and unchallenged. What we need is to bring natural spontaneity into these situations and so step beyond that safety bubble out into the unknown. This is the path of the unconditioned and the chance to break the shackles that cause us to experience all of our suffering.