The mind is a tricky thing. Due to past learnings and conditionings either recent (the last TV commercial you saw) or ancient (childhood history or past lives) our mind adds meaning to almost every event that occurs. We unconsciously add personal meaning to events as a way to defend our personal world view and judge how successful we are in life.
The meaning we create brings significance to some events and discards others. So for example the ending of a relationship is more meaningful than drinking a cup of coffee that turns out to be cold. If I considered a cold coffee as being as important as the ending of a relationship then it would indeed be difficult for me to know how to deal with daily life situations.
However from the Truth Seeker perspective meaning attribution is always limiting. The reason for this is that the mind is often unnecessarily adding meaning to events as a way to defend its own personal world view and NOT as a way to help us find true peace.
Meaning attribution causes us to judge events as being either good or bad. We then try to avoid bad events and have only good ones. Unfortunately not only is this impossible but it would also be detrimental to spiritual growth as suffering through bad events often motivates us to grow and reach for true happiness.
So as a Truth Seeker, we strive for getting to the point of ‘no mind’, ‘beginner mind’ or ‘Zen mind’. What we are doing is developing the ability to stop the mind from applying meaning and thus stop our incessant judging of personal life events.
In the end, as you become more clear you no longer apply meaning to events. You no longer judge events as being either good or bad in order to defend the ego. Events just are.
This then allows one to disengage the mind and move through life events with full openness and little defensiveness. We get the mind ‘out of the way’ so spontaneous freedom can occur.
We then live life more naturally. This is known as the ‘Way of Tao’. We become more present, not less, and become better able to make decisions based on what brings us real happiness and not solely based on what our mind ‘thinks’ should be happening given our current life situation.
Our first step is seeing this as a possible goal. The second step is simply to become more aware of when we inadvertently judge situations as being either good or bad. Just catching that from time to time, is a good start.
