Just Connect to the Feeling
Many people have strong beliefs with much certainty. I sometimes envy that. Yet, are any two people who claim to believe in the same thing actually believing the same thing?
There is so much we don’t understand. Yet, we always seem to have the need to know… something. If this leads us to inquisitiveness, then we are opening to an experience of discovery. But if we jump the gun out of anxiety and believe something just to be certain about something, then we cease the discovery. We believe something is so. We have found it. And rather than discovery we are simply iterating. We have found something that becomes a firm, unchanging reference point. While discovery can be said to be an open system once we believe, we close the system.
Buddhism speaks of “non-dual” experience. This is to say, subjective experience is equal to, and concurrent with, external phenomena. Seeing a waterfall is an experience that happens in our mind as it happens in the space before us. If we believed that the waterfall was self-existing and imbued with magical properties, then we might believe the sound of falling water is speaking to us. As we fixate on htat experience as real, we would fail to see how our loneliness and need is driving that belief.
When Buddhists speak of emptiness they are not denying the existence of the waterfall, they are denying the existence of the mental interpretations and elaborations created between the waterfall and the subjective experience.
The mind is very busy. Meditation trains the mind to rest on one thing while allowing everything else to take place around it.
