Ch.13 - The Quality of Your Life Reflects the Quality of Your Mind

Much of Our Suffering is Mental Suffering

The Eightfold Noble Path leads to the Cessation of Suffering

The 10 Paramis

It is the make Up of Our Character that Determines how Completely we can Engage with Life

[The quality of our mind defines the quality of our experience of life. This chapter investigates what constitutes a mind of good quality, a mind that is harmonious and can fully enter into and appreciate life.]

Much of Our Suffering is Mental Suffering

I explained previously how in our pursuit of happiness and the cessation of suffering there are those who progress swiftly and painfully, swiftly and painlessly, slowly and painfully, slowly and painlessly. What is the reason for this? One key factor will be the karmic support behind our lives (which is our accumulation of past merit), the other key factor is the inherent quality of our mind. The Buddha identified ten positive aspects of character which, when brought to maturity within us, determine whether our progress out of suffering is swift or slow, painful or painless.

Although most of us have a tendency to look outside ourselves for the causes of our suffering, when we actually pay attention we discover that for anyone who is not living a life of abject misery, most of our suffering is mental suffering, and most of our karma is mental karma.

Karma, as I said earlier, is the volition behind our actions of body, speech and mind. By actions of mind we mean thought processes. As our idea of ourselves proliferates, it prompts ever more elaborate attitudes and reactions to the world and what we experience therein. The way we experience our mind (ie our mental feeling, our state of mind and so on) is an expression of mental karma.

Many of us continue to feel we are suffering from things that have already come to pass long after the event itself. For example, you were once cheated by your partner, and years later you are still suffering from resentment, and on account of that you feel unable to trust anyone. It is clearly the case that you are not currently being cheated by anyone, no one is causing your suffering now but you. Almost all of our suffering is going on in our mind, as an inability to be with our experiences when they are happening, and our inability to let them go as they pass.

As a meditation teacher I meet so many people who are suffering almost entirely in their mind while on paper their life looks to be most fortunate indeed. This suffering is largely produced by what we call pride, which is the comparing of ourself to others as better, same or worse, or comparing our experience to how we think it should be as better, same or worse. This taking everything so personally is the cause for our not letting go of things that have in truth already come to pass.

Every time we are challenged by life we have a choice. We can point the finger of blame at our misfortune and on account of it find an excuse for not getting on, or we can accept that it is what it is and get on, in spite of our challenges. Our challenges are our invitation to evolve; a chance to find something within ourselves that might otherwise be lacking. It is up to us whether our challenges are our undoing or the making of us.

One who is not sick, not struggling for the requisites to support their lives, or overwhelmed by the effort to do so, is not struggling on account of external things, but struggling internally in their mind. The problem is that our ideas of what we want and need and how we think things and others should be are so elaborate that it takes tremendous energy, resource and effort to uphold and fulfil those ideas. This is like trying to cover the world in carpet so we do not stub our toes. It cannot be done. What we need is a sturdy pair of walking shoes. Those sturdy shoes are the base of our mind, or the basic make up of our character.

So when you see how things are, as I have said a number of times, your mind will be free of suffering. When we truly see how things are and the process by which they come to be that way, the mind arises with one of only four responses. The first thing that happens is that we gradually stop being in conflict with things and come to a state of acceptance, which we call equanimity. This equanimity is the state that neither rejects nor grasps the experiences or objects that we encounter.

Once equanimity has arisen, and only then, there may thereafter arise in us three further responses. These are love, compassion or appreciative joy. This illustrates a crucial point regarding the functioning of our minds. And that is this: all of the truly noble qualities of our mind (love, compassion, gratitude, appreciative joy) only arise when we are not in conflict with, or clinging to, the experience itself. This is because both aversion (which rejects) and attachment (which clings) shrink the heart base in a way that prohibits the arising of such positive mental states. What this means is that our mind fails to reach a wholly positive state until it has reached a state of complete acceptance.

We can see how even Jesus went through this process in the minutes before his death. Five minutes before he died, he was confused, he looked out upon the world as he hung upon the cross and saw only hatred, anger, greed and fear. Unable to see beyond that he came to a state of despair. Feeling that he had been let down he turned to God saying, 'Why have you forsaken me?'

Only in the final moments of his life did his insight reach total understanding and thus come to a state of complete acceptance, as he looked again upon those who persecuted him and those who betrayed him. No longer seeing their hatred, greed and fear as the cause of his suffering he saw, as the Buddha saw, that all of these things are only ever rooted in confusion. And in that moment he freed himself from suffering with his final words; 'Forgive them, they know not what they do.'

The truth is we really do not know what we are doing. We do not know how we might be sowing the seeds of our future suffering with the way we meet our experiences now.

The Eightfold Noble Path leads to the Cessation of Suffering

So, the Buddha’s path, the Eightfold Noble Path that leads to the cessation of suffering, is the path that teaches us how to see beyond the veil of appearances to the truths that lie behind them. It teaches us how to ‘see into’ which we call 'in-sight.' Insight means to see into, it does not mean to sit down and have a jolly good think about how things might be. And it is a faculty of the mind that matures gradually as our ability to concentrate and pay attention develops. That is one of the reasons we practise meditation - because it teaches us how to see into life, and it is that ‘seeing into’ that transforms our mind.

However, in order to get to the point where we can see what we cannot see now, we are going to need to put forth a certain amount of effort to clear what the Buddha called the dust that is in our eyes. The dust in our eyes is the the idea of ourselves that we are entangled with and all the attitudes and habit patterns of mind that it has prompted.

The Eightfold Noble Path itself breaks down into three aspects. The first is the restraint of conduct and the refinement of character that is necessary for the mind to become calm and stable, prior to the development of concentration and insight. Once concentration and insight matures the mind begins to purify itself, but prior to that point restraint in conduct and effort are required, until we can actually see for ourselves.

And while we are working to develop this capacity to see, there are certain basic faculties of mind, or what we might call refinements of character, that help expedite the process. The Buddha called these faculties Paramis, which means perfections. What he meant was that it is the perfecting of these qualities within us that ripens our mind so that liberating insight can arise.

There are traditionally 10 Paramis, but of course there are other noble qualities of mind beyond these. The point is that once these are mature in us, the other noble qualities will follow on. It is worth taking some time here to explore the notion of refinement of character and the 10 Paramis in particular. It is fair to say that any effort to develop meditative stability without making the effort to restrain the mind and develop these qualities is actually an act of vanity. So this aspect of refinement of character is absolutely at the heart of any genuine spiritual path and practice.

The 10 Paramis

Generosity

Generosity is the first Parami. Generosity is the willingness to give, or to share. We mean generosity of spirit, as opposed to stinginess or the inability or unwillingness to share or give. Now our good fortune is the result of generosity in the past. So when we are well provided for in the life, it is because our Parami of generosity has been strong in the past. One who has generosity shown towards them and has their basic needs provided for them would have done things that helped provide these requisites for others sometime in the past.

When we develop our Parami of generosity by providing for our children, we create the grounds for being provided for by our parents in the future. When we give or share what we have rightfully earned for the benefit of others, we create the ground for acquiring our basic needs with relative ease in the future. When we fail to support those in our care, be they our children or parents, we sow the seeds for lacking that support in the future.

When we earn our livelihood with relative ease and do not reflect that this is the fruiting of our good fortune, and instead feel proud of ourselves and squander our good fortune in self-indulgence, we fail to renew the field of merit that has supported our lives and so are unlikely to come to such good fortune in the future.

Generosity is the first Parami because when we have little we can still find ways to give of ourselves, be it our time or energy. When we are in a state of real confusion we can find ways to give. To be of service, helping, doing something that is for others, that is generosity of spirit. Doing acts of kindness and generosity is the fastest way to lift ourselves when we are feeling stuck or depressed or shut down, because it starts to open our hearts again and takes the focus off ourselves.

Virtue

The second Parami is virtue, which is understanding what is appropriate behaviour and understanding what is not. It is morality. At its most basic it is unwillingness to harm oneself and unwillingness to harm others.

This unwillingness to harm ourselves or others acts as a tremendous protection, because when we do things that are harmful, not only is that unwholesome in the moment, it opens the mind door through which all our past unwholesome karma can fruit. Karma only fruits through the appropriate mind door for it. When you are feeling expressions of love your unwholesome karma associated with past actions of aversion and anger does not fruit unless it is really strong. But when you are feeling anger or you are feeling greed or craving, your unwholesome mind door opens and the past karma connected to these things can then start to fruit.

This is why getting really intoxicated is so potentially dangerous to us, because we may normally have quite well-composed minds where we know we would not normally do things that would be reckless, inconsiderate, hurtful or harmful. But in that moment of forgetfulness we would do something that we later would regret.

Not only in that moment may we do something that we might regret, we may open the mind door that normally would not open within us because we are reasonably well grounded in virtue. And at such moments our past negligent karma may fruit for us. I have had horrendous stories of people coming to see me who have just got themselves into the most unimaginable state through getting intoxicated, getting into such a state of forgetfulness, and then the whole chain reaction of karma starts to fruit when previously there was no sign in life that it could possibly have happened.

So mindfulness, which is awareness of what we are doing, is our protector. When we get really intoxicated we have lost our mindfulness and if we get really intoxicated we can really lose our way. Here is an example.

One friend of mine whose life was going absolutely swimmingly was out travelling around Australia. He got really high one night and passed out on the steps of the town hall in Sydney. He woke up about 3 days later in a squat with a syringe in his arm; he had been injected with heroin. Within weeks he had a heroin habit which he then found himself completely lost in for a while, completely lost his way, and his life became a total nightmare. He did not know where he was, and he could not get himself out of there. He completely lost all sense of perspective and all control over his life.

From where he was, having the time of his life and loving it, he reached a point where he was in no way able to pull himself back together. He came on retreat about 2 years later having been in a total mess and on that retreat I did some healing on him, and the energy that was smothering him was so dense that had that not been removed he probably would have been living in a stupor for the rest of his life. During the retreat he worked through that energy and cleared the karma associated with it, and today ten years later he is flourishing, loving life, with a successful business and great family.

I have seen a number of cases like this over the years that I have been teaching. The point being that all of that unfortunate karma fruited in a moment of negligence, when before that point there was no sign of it. He went out and got drunk one night and passed out on the steps and then all of a sudden it just spiralled and spiralled and then his mind became unstable and from there he quickly fell into a state of total despair. In the end he could no longer help himself and it took an intervention to get him through it.

Even to receive the help that we need when things are tough requires good fortune. Even that is the fruiting of fortunate intercepting karma. I have known a number of situations like that, where people have got themselves into a horrendous state. You might be out having a good time and then suddenly you just do not know what you are doing and then bang, it all gets really messy.

So the point is, there is a point of forgetfulness, where if you have such messy karma in the background you create the opportunity for it to fruit. This is why we learn restraint in our conduct while we are working to cut off at the root our remaining tendencies to cause suffering. When you have that ability to restrain yourself there is a point beyond which you would not go, that is actually your protection until your mind is purified of any tendency to go completely off the rails and get yourself into a terrible state.

So that is the reason to be careful with regard to intoxication. How much suffering is caused by that, do you think? How many children born of intoxicated lust? How many marriages or relationships broken while intoxicated, in ways that in a sober state would never have occurred? The balance of a human life is maintained by our innate capacity of mindfulness. We so quickly lose that balance when we lose our mindfulness.

Let us return to this idea of 'unwillingness to harm oneself and others'. So if you are battling with greed, or you are battling with anger, but your virtue is strong, your unwillingness to harm others is strong, you will not be prompted by greed to pursue your desire at all costs, at the expense of anyone and everything. If you are furiously angry but you have a sense of virtue, you would not be prompted to pursue your anger or ill-will at the expense of everyone and everything.

So our unwillingness to harm marks a point beyond which we would not go, and it is really important to reflect upon that and try to generate some conviction behind it. Because we might think that there are certain things we would not do, but then if craving arose really strongly and we absolutely had to have something, we might be willing to set aside our willingness to harm.

Now that happens a lot with regard to lust, in the way people pursue each other, in an uncontrolled way, when someone is in a relationship or meets another who is. If there is no restraint to our greed, craving or lust, then we are willing to create no end of suffering in the pursuit of our desire. And on the other side, when you are really angry with somebody and you get really bitter, this is your own mental suffering on account of anger. But if you go beyond that, to point where you would want to see that person harmed, that is when it really gets messy and you start to create real misery for yourselves and others.

When there is no willingness to harm others in spite of how you feel, then your greed and lust or your anger and hatred will only go so far, and it will not go beyond that. This is the importance of unwillingness to harm self or others. The Buddha called the two unwholesome states of willingness to harm lack of moral shame and fearlessness of wrongdoing.

This is the single greatest protector of your mind, what we call ahimsa, or harmlessness, while we are still battling here with our craving and really struggling with our anger and aversion. When there isn't anything we would do that would prompt us to either harm ourselves or harm another then we are protected from our greed and aversion.

When this harmlessness is not present within us then things really start to degenerate, even to the point where we would harm others and ourselves doing things we believed were right. So virtue is our protection from coming to misery on account of past karma and creating renewed misery for ourselves and others.

Energy

The next Parami is energy, vitality, or vigour. Now this is extremely important. It takes tremendous energy to raise your levels of mindfulness, concentration and consciousness up to the point where you can see through what is apparent to what is going on in the background. It takes tremendous energy to find the restraint and determination and patience, particularly in an environment now where everything is geared towards very swiftly getting what we want.

In many ways it does not require much energy or tenacity to get what you want now. Almost everything you desire, you can have as soon as you want it. But happiness is not something you can have just because you want it. The end of suffering and the end of mental affliction, and the end of physical pain, is not something that happens just because you want it.

It takes tremendous energy to raise yourself up and change the direction of your life, because remember, your life now is the result of past choices, and it has a lot of energy and inertia behind it already. So to realign that, particularly if it involves a change of direction, it takes tremendous energy. And this vitality needs to be looked after so that you have enough to skilfully move through life without it being an exhausting struggle. We consume so much vitality with our mental pursuits.

I have explained how 90% of our karma is mental karma. It is likewise very easy to consume almost all of our energy with our mental pursuits, with the way we obsess over things without end. As the mind cools down, a tremendous amount of energy comes back to us. And a lot of our vitality is haemorrhaged through excessive mental activity.

We also lose a tremendous amount of our energy through excessive sexual activity, although this is not as much the case for women as it is for men. The sexual drive is a very deep, instinctive drive. It is very, very difficult to temper and remove the lust from it and to moderate it. Most of the time the only moderation comes from not actually being able to have sex all the time.

This is why restraint is very important, because to surmount our lust to the point where we are not driven by it takes great discipline. If we look around the world, and we look at the causal factors by which it came to be the way it is today, most of what we see expressed around us in the world is the result of lust in one form or another. That is quite a staggering thing when you see it clearly. The display of things, and the way in which the human world presents itself now, most of it is the display of or the result of lust. It is a very strong and prolific energy, and it takes tremendous restraint to not be totally driven by it.

Lust is not something that is easily surmounted, but to learn to claim back some of the energy that it pulls from us returns a tremendous amount of vitality back to us. So there is a balance - when you restrain the obsessiveness of the mind, it stops consuming vitality, and we get a tremendous amount of energy back. When you temper the sexual drive so that it is not pulling on you all the time, you experience a significant increase in vitality that becomes available for other aspects of your life. Actually it is not until our creative force and our mental force stop running riot and the sexual drive is tempered that the central channel opens. When this happens it brings about a quantum shift in the amount of vitality that we have.

This is the process of internal alchemy that brings about the transformation of desire into a positive vital force that supports our lives. It is this that we call spiritual energy. Without it, out mind is scattered and messy, poorly organised and we get exhausted by the daily round.

In truth we get our vitality from two aspects of consciousness. There is the vitality we get from being plugged into source, ie our natural environment and the vast field of energy that it contains. And there is the vitality that is produced by the volitional aspect of our mind as desire, which is karma. Each of us will generate our total level of vitality from a combination of these two sources.

Some of us are very desire driven but may not be that connected to the universal energy field around us. Others may be less driven by desire but more plugged in. Problems arise when we lose our desire for the things that have driven our lives ( i.e ambition motivation, even greed and so on) and fail to connect to source at a deeper level. This is one of the main causes for various degenerative conditions like chronic fatigue and even depression. In a similar way, when one who is not driven by desire but who derives their vitality from connection to nature, for example, finds themselves in an environment where they cannot make that connection, they will also experience a significant drop in their feeling of vitality. This likewise can cause either a chronic feeling of physical exhaustion or mental depression.

So energy as vitality and vigour is very important, because it takes tremendous energy just to sit there and try and break through dullness, sloth, laziness, restlessness and ignorance and develop real concentration and mindfulness. But until we do we cannot start to see what is actually going on or start the real process of transformation beyond the initial refinement of character.

Patience

Patience is the quality of tolerance and forbearance, of being able to allow things to come about in a timely way. It overcomes our growing need for instant gratification. Some things in life we have to work for patiently. We cannot always expect to get what we want just because we want it. Many problems that arise in life will not get resolved quickly, they take time and perseverance, forbearance and patience. Often these things that do not suddenly happen can turn out to be the most precious of gifts.

In a modern world where we are growing used to getting what we want quickly it is easy to develop a sense of entitlement, stamping our feet or getting in a huff when things do not go our way. But with things that are precious and really of value to us, it is worth putting forth effort and being patient.

In nature, when a seed is planted it takes time for it to bring forth fruit. We may have lost touch with this simple truth and become frustrated by things that do not reward us instantly. Life is so much more than an expression of our personal will, and there are deeper currents at work within the fabric of life that we need to be aligned with if we are going to maintain an inner and outer balance. Patience includes the attitude of giving things the time they need to come to fruition and completion.

Unfortunately, many of us have become so used to being able to instantly gratify our needs that we develop real stress when things do not go our way. We want a book, we order it and it arrives the following day. We want something specific for dinner, it is at our fingertips. It is easy to forget that some people still have to walk half a day just to get clean drinking water. Even being able to buy things on credit instead of saving up until we can afford them begins to diminish how we value the things in our lives.

This is particularly important in relation to children. The quality of mind that follows us throughout the life is laid down largely as we grow up. Often after a retreat a parent will ask me what is the best thing they can teach their kids. I will often suggest that they give them things to do that take time, that they do not complete quickly, that they have to walk away from and come back to. And the second thing I suggest is that they teach them to do things where they have to really pay attention, teach them to concentrate.

For example when you take them camping, the fact that it's going to take all day to build the camp and set it up, get the fire sorted and get the food store done and get the tents up - it is not only going to take time to do it, but it is going to take perseverance and concentration and application. Many of the ways kids entertain themselves these days are geared towards hyper stimulation and instant reward. This is one of the reasons behind the growing trend of ADHD.

To teach patience and concentration to children in their early years is such a blessing. For them to learn that we cannot have something now just because we want it prepares us for the life ahead. In a world of constant stimulation and instant gratification, patience is the much-needed antidote. Those who are patient are by nature far more settled and peaceful within themselves than those who expect always to get what they want.

Try to take some time to reflect on your own Parami of patience, and see if you can recognise where a lack of it is limiting and hindering you, and where your life feels enriched by the instances when you have found patience. Think about including things in your life that will bring reward on account of the patience you find. Reflect also on the relationship between patience and intolerance, and see if you can identify where a lack of equanimity and acceptance of people and things in life is underpinned by an undercurrent of impatience.

Determination

Determination is the application of energy and the willingness to stick at things. It overcomes laziness and the feeling of not being able to gather energy to do things. It is the sustained effort and resolve that is required to see things through. Determination arises when we encounter hindrances and we do not give up in the face of them. A huge amount of suffering is caused by laziness. There is nothing more withering than knowing what you need to do and not doing it. That is called indolence.

It is one of the most insidious weaknesses of character and because of it we continue to come to suffering even when suffering is no longer necessary; we see what we need to do, and yet we continue to suffer because we cannot find the conviction to act upon it.

The Buddha had worked for six years trying to free himself from suffering, and yet he still had not succeeded. Having almost died from practising in an unbalanced way and having done so much work, he still had not achieved what he needed to achieve. He sat with strong determination (in Pali Adhitthana) that night under a tree, crossed his arms, crossed his legs, closed his eyes and he said: ‘I will not open my eyes, my legs or arms until I finally see through and get to the end of suffering or I die.’ That is the strongest determination of all.

Now, we are unlikely to be asked to call upon such determination as this in the pursuit of our aspirations, but it is useful to reflect upon the fact that if our aspirations are greater than our willingness to put forth the effort to fulfil them, then our aspirations are in fact rooted in both greed and entitlement. Once we come to understand the law of dependent origination and karma we see for ourselves that what unfolds for us in the life is entirely the result of conditions we create (seeds sown) and the effort we make to bring these seeds to fruit. To deeply long for something and to know where to find it, but then to not find the determination to actually reach our goal, probably brings more internal suffering than not have longed at all.

Once we have understood the nature of virtue and our hearts are set in the direction of harmlessness, then our aspirations will naturally incline towards wholesome things that are for our benefit and not our detriment. Greed itself is gradually overcome and selfish desire is transformed into wholesome aspiration. Yet still we may find ourselves not progressing year by year simply because we have not found the determination to stick at our goals and see things through to resolution.

Indolence, which is very much the attitude of, 'I can't be bothered', is a deeply depleting character trait. Nothing great is achieved without a combination of determination and humility. There are countless people who are forever coming up with good ideas, or are motivated to do something out of desire or greed, but fail to see through to completion the things they start because of sloth and torpor and lack of determination.

Being realistic about what we are actually willing to bring to the party is a very important part of laying out our stall in life. We are all capable of great ideas, but how many of us are willing to put in the hard graft, much of which will go unnoticed and be repetitive and uninteresting, to turn a great idea into a reality? To do so takes determination.

It is important to reflect upon the relationship between aspiration and ambition and see if you can recognise where your desire to have and do things is rooted in greed, even if the things you desire in themselves may be wholesome. Then look into your level of determination or willingness to fall into indolence and let the things you have started fade away because in reality they required more determination than you could muster.

Reflect also upon the difference between the wholesome quality of determination and the unwholesome quality of wilfulness, which is simply the need to have one’s own way without reflecting upon whether that is appropriate. Determination is the energy required to bring forth through sustained effort the things we desire. It is important that we recognise the difference between determination and wilfulness, which is simply our dogged desire and even greed for the things we want and the insistence upon having our own way.

In many ways patience and determination are the bedrock and backbone of true strength of character, and without them we are likely to be one who has many dreams, and maybe even starts many projects, but who fails to see much through to completion. Such a person makes much noise in their time but tends to produce little. It is the opposite of the person who moves quietly and unnoticed in this world but achieves great things in small understated ways.

The two qualities of Patience and Determination work together in support of each other, complimenting each other to produce a balanced ability to put forth sustained effort.

In meditation we talk of how serenity and concentration overcome restlessness, and how energy overcomes sloth and torpor, but in life it is patience that overcomes restlessness and determination that overcomes indolence and laziness. Spend some time reflecting on these qualities and perhaps review your life for where the wholesome ones have shone through or where the hindrances have undermined you. Make an exercise of this if you have time. List the things that you have done in life that have been significant, and regardless of whether you succeeded or not, reflect upon the degree to which you found the level of determination and patience that might have been required. You can also look into your daily life and see where these two qualities might be serving you better.

Renunciation and Restraint

Restraint and renunciation mean learning to give up what is now superfluous. Another way we haemorrhage a tremendous amount of energy is through things that actually are not that meaningful. We have become entangled and our life becomes inordinately complex because of marginal choices that actually are not really pertinent to our real well-being. Learning to give up the things that consume energy, that are not productive, that is what we mean by renunciation. And restraint is understanding the importance of moderation.

There are still desires to experience life in its fullness which of course we should honour, but without restraint it is easy to consume all of our wholesome energy in the pursuit and gratification of our desires so that little time or energy is left for the making of merit with our lives. Without restraint we quickly become overcome with greed or gluttony and our lives can easily become an unsustainable withdrawal from our deposit account.

We need both our energy and good fortune to carry us through to the end of our lives, and to not run out before we get there. Life is always about choices. Perhaps we could reflect upon the things in our lives that consume unnecessary energy but bring little by way of benefit or reward. Learning to give up what is superfluous leaves us with more energy for the things that are truly meaningful to us.

Many of the people who seek guidance from me on account of a pervasive feeling of despair in their lives, when we look even sometimes just briefly at their situation, we so often recognise that the feeling of despair is coming from not having the time to connect and develop the things that are meaningful to them. Almost always this is on account of haemorrhaging energy to things that are totally unnecessary.

Truthfulness and Self Honesty

Truthfulness is the next Parami, which is a willingness to look at the terrain within which we are living and look at things honestly rather than try to package it up in a way that suits us. Self-honesty is the willingness to see things as they actually are rather than pretending that they are otherwise. And of course this also involves honesty with regards to how we convey ourselves to others.

Even though we perhaps do not lie openly, there are many ways in which we might seek to elicit responses from others or seek their admiration by presenting ourselves in ways that are less than honest. At the end of the day, it is you yourself that you have to be with when you are on your own, and it is you that you want to be at peace with. When you are at peace with yourself you will much more easily be at peace with everybody else.

So this willingness to look honestly at what is going on within you is self-honesty. Not seeking to package it up in such a way that suits you, or pleases others or seeks their approval if it is not true to yourself, which is another form of dishonesty.

Denial is an aspect of lack of self-honesty. It is not being willing to accept things as they are, and is a form of ignorance. This can severely block or disrupt the flow of awareness and its energy through our bodies. It can have a significant impact upon our health and well-being, even if at a conscious level we are using denial as a coping mechanism. Overcoming denial so that our life force can be fully expressed within us is an important part of developing our Parami of energy. Denial plays a significant role in many forms of chronic fatigue and depression.

Wisdom

Wisdom is insight. Our capacity for insight is another one of our Paramis. Some people have a capacity to ‘see into’ quite quickly, others not so much so. We can see this with regard to receiving spiritual teachings. On retreat I give the teachings and explain how to practise meditation. I explain how things are, and you reflect upon these teachings. You start to see your mind changing on account of these reflections, and now you start to see life in a different way. When the wisdom faculty is strong in us, then the Dharma opens in us quite quickly and we see what needs to be done. When the wisdom faculty is poor we do not really get it. It does not cut through the position we are holding on to quite as convincingly.

Now our wisdom faculty matures with the reorganising of our mind and the disciplining and refinement of the way our mind functions, which is what our meditation practice does for us. You know, insight is always the result of our meditation. It is the fruit of our endeavour. And then, as we start to ‘see into’, our capacity to love becomes more unconditional, our attachments and our entitlement starts to fade, and the conviction behind our other Paramis grows.

Our capacity for wisdom, like our energy, is something that varies tremendously from person to person, and it is something that we can either support by taking care of the mind or undermine by allowing ourselves to become smothered in ignorance and inattentiveness. Once that happens, even if we had the capacity to understand we cannot make sense of things because our mind is so poorly organised. Wisdom, like energy, indeed like all the Paramis, is something that takes cultivation so that it can reach its potential within us.

When the Buddha realised Nibbana that night under the bodhi tree twenty-five centuries ago, when he freed himself from suffering and realised the culmination of his efforts, his own wisdom faculty reached its fullest potential. Having done so he made reflection, 'That for which I came here to do I have done.'

With this a tremendous sense of deliverance and release came upon him as he sat, and as he was enjoying that feeling of freedom he reflected to himself, 'This Dharma that I came to see this night, this is deep and hard to understand. If I was to try to teach this to others it would be vexing both to them and to me.' And he was about to head off to the hills, to the mountains, to live a life as an ascetic of few needs and just delight in his bliss, having made the reflection, 'I’m just going to upset people if I try and explain this to them'. And then one Brahma, whose mind was likewise bright and clear and who had been witness to the Buddha’s efforts that night, saw the radiance that appeared in the Buddha's heart as he reached the cessation of suffering.

The awareness that arises in your heart produces a light, and the brilliance and colour of that light depends upon the clarity and purity of the mind. This is what we mean when we talk of the light in our hearts. And how bright it is is a reflection of the quality of that consciousness that is arising in it. That night the Buddha’s heart shone, as we could imagine, very brightly. So Brahma, seeing this, appeared to the Buddha, seeing that he was about to head off to a life of seclusion. And Brahma said to him, 'Look, there are beings with little dust in their eyes. They will understand what you have come to see. Teach them. They will learn, they will practise and they will see what you have seen.'

This seeing, this seeing into is wisdom. And the Buddha reflected upon that. 'Ah, yes, this is true. There is a possibility.' So he made reflection, 'Who should I teach?' And he went in search of his teachers, the ones who had taught him the eight levels of absorption Samādhi earlier in his life. But they had died while he was doing his practices alone in the forest.

So he then thought, 'Well, who to teach?' And he went to see the five ascetics who had been with him when he was practising the austerities, prior to him going off alone. He thought, surely they have little dust in their eyes. He found them one month later and he taught them, and they did get it, but they did not all get it immediately. They got it gradually, some of them after receiving instructions in meditation from the Buddha.

Over the forty years that he taught, nobody got it easily, apart from the very, very few. Most of them had to put forth tremendous effort. That capacity to see is not borne of your intelligence. When we listen to Dharma we listen from the heart. Our capacity to see is actually what we call direct perception, and it arises within the heart, not the mind. It is in our heart, through direct perception, or direct knowledge, not through reflection, that we come to know if there is truth in the Dharma or not.

It is not whether your mind can reason it all out. Your mind can tie itself up in knots with it all if it tries to think it all through. The ability to see is a reflection of the gradual maturing of this wisdom faculty and it functions at a much deeper level that intellect. And for some of those, even with the Buddha teaching them, it was forty years of practice before they could really see through, and they worked at it. So this wisdom Parami is something we work on by guarding the quality of our mind and developing the quality of it, so our ability to see develops gradually.

Loving Kindness

And then the next Parami is loving kindness. Being kind and caring towards others. It is having regard for the welfare of others and opposes selfishness. The basic capacity for human kindness is one of the things that marks us as truly human. When we talk of that which is inhumane, we invariably are talking about attitudes that are lacking in any sense of kindness or regard for others, like cruelty.

Something very significant happens to us at a subtle energetic level when we experience the feeling of kindness or love towards another, and something equally significant happens when we experience a feeling of unkindness or incline towards another with ill-will or hatred. We talk often about the notion of being open-hearted or feeling that our heart is closed. There is more to this than just a turn of phrase. The mechanism by which we feel any kind of empathy with others and our surroundings relies upon the coherent functioning of the heart chakra and the flow of awareness through it.

When we experience such things as resentment and ill-will it literally chokes the current of life through the heart chakra, and in so doing shuts down our capacity to feel. As I have said when we looked at the energetics behind the life experience, all of the depth of feeling that adds texture to our experience relies upon the coherent current of energy through the heart. When this current stops flowing through us we are no longer able to feel such emotions as love.

Love is the longing for the happiness of another, what we wish for others when we reflect with kindness or empathy. This life current becomes stagnated gradually through repetitive self-centredness, anger, and ill-will. And in so doing we lose our ability to feel and experience love and kindness. This longing for the happiness of others is something that is strong in some and less so in others, and like our wisdom faculty, it matures or atrophies dependent upon the attitude we bring to life.

Often it requires either an act of forgiveness or generosity of spirit towards ourselves or others to allow the heart to open where it might have closed, and allow the feeling of love and kindness to be experienced more deeply within us. The more self-focused we become, the less we delight in the happiness of others. As the idea of ourselves as the centre of our world fades, we create more openness within the heart and become more able to experience love in its higher expression, or what we call unconditional love, which inclines with an attitude of kindness towards others with no expectation of anything in return.

While love is the longing for the happiness of others, compassion is the longing for the cessation of suffering of others. They are in effect two sides of the same coin, because to be happy is to be free from suffering and to suffer is to not be happy. In Pali the word for happiness is Sukha and the word for suffering is Dukkha ( literally not-happy). Love and compassion mature equally within us as our understanding of both happiness and suffering matures.

Equanimity

People often ask me on retreat, why is equanimity considered to be a wholesome quality of mind? Does it not mean that we do not care or that we lack interest in anything? It could not actually be further from the truth. What they are alluding to is indolence, which may well contain in it a feeling of numbness, denial or unwillingness to be with things.

Equanimity is the quality of mind that can be completely with things as they are without rejecting them or clinging to them. It is the attitude of total acceptance. In truth it is reaching this point of total acceptance of what is that becomes the ground for the arising of the three other truly noble qualities of mind that we call love, compassion and appreciative joy. All three of these qualities are shrunk by our either not accepting things and rejecting them with aversion or clinging to things with attachment.

I always say to people that equanimity is the highest of all states of mind, and that it may take a very long time before we truly experience it in its highest form, and come to understand why this is the case. But even at the simplest level we can see that our mental suffering is proliferated by our inability to be with things as they are, and hugely reduced by our acceptance that it is what it is.

It is the make Up of Our Character that Determines how Completely we can Engage with Life

So these are the 10 Paramis. The development of them constitutes the development of our character in a positive way. There has been much said in recent years of the benefits of mindfulness, but in truth while the Buddha most certainly praised the benefits of mindfulness, it is interesting that he did not include it in the list of Paramis. Perhaps it would be helpful if we started to pay attention to a broader range of qualities within us and see what role they may play in determining whether we progress quickly or slowly, painlessly or painfully.

It is all too easy to get into a muddle in life, through making choices without thinking about them that later on impact our lives in ways that we would never have anticipated. Our life is not made better simply by packing more into it, but by our ability to engage more completely with it, which may often mean that less is more.

Our ability to engage more completely with life is hugely diminished when these Paramis are lacking, and tremendously enriched as they develop. As I have said previously, even our ability to meditate calmly and peacefully with a clear, bright and concentrated mind will be a reflection of these Paramis as they develop within us.