Dominance in the Mind

 There is a battle for dominance in the mind between our natural clarity and thought invaders. Either clarity is dominant or thoughts are dominant…and usually it is thoughts!

 The battle is won the moment clarity recognises the ‘thought invaders’. Once knowing is present, not knowing disappears immediately, like switching on a light in a room that has been in darkness for a thousand years. This is easily seen in meditation. In fact, this is all one does…recognise!

 One moment the senses clearly see all appearances through a clear mind, and the next, the senses disappear – everything disappears – as mind’s clarity disappears. Suddenly we are in an imaginary past or future. Pure vision has gone. Panoramic view has gone. We have just been invaded by fantasies…aliens!

 We can watch the mind opening and closing in a slit second…from clarity to occupied/vacant and back to clarity again. This going on all the time, if we didn’t have milli-seconds of clarity, we’d keep walking into walls – which in itself would make us come to our senses! We don’t have to walk around with a blooded nose all the time in order to remember 🙂 We just need mindfulness.

 Just look at a physical object, and see how long it takes for a distraction to occur: this is shamata meditation with support. It’s that simple: recognition doesn’t require anything complicated. We are distracted all day (and night), and unfortunately this adds up to a life time…many life times!

 What we can now realise is that clarity (pure awareness) is present all the time, and that temporary appearances are passing images – illusions – that occupy our mind. We can either recognise these appearances coming and going, or be taken over by them.

 You can see this for yourself. There is no right or wrong: there is just recognition. It is all about that recognition. That recognition is awareness. Then, that awareness has a choice, either to look into its our nature and recognise emptiness, which is our essence at peace, or get dominated again by addictive desire and frustration.

“To be or not to be…that is the question!”