Set free in front, set free behind, and set free in the middle; gone beyond.
Mind freed everywhere, one will not approach birth and old age.
– Dhammapada, verse 348. Translated Christopher J. Ash
With the cessation of divisive perception, erroneous reflection ceases. With the cessation of tainted reflection, wilfulness ceases. With the cessation of wilfulness, unskilful preferences cease. And by the cessation of preferences, aggression and self-bias (selfishness) are overthrown, and all violence ceases. No angry ape – in the car, the office, the kitchen, the bedroom, in dreams, or in parliament.
Anger, rage, ill-will, egoistic displeasure (or, egotistical pleasure) – they all depend on selfishness (that is, on identifications involving ‘me and mine’). They also depend on rejection of reality as it is. The mind-set includes rejecting another point of view but one’s own hungry ape view. This means that being displeased with things-as-they-are is present. I’ve been wanting to write something about acceptance. The idea of not grasping means accepting the totality of one’s life, just as it is. That sounds crazy, to I-systems that have become so used to operating in the basis of deficiency.
So, I want to re-iterate an important qualification. Let’s say I have the unpleasant experience – for instance, a loved one is angry with me. What is the wise relationship to the experience? Firstly, I don’t push it away. I welcome it, thinking (to my immediate feelings): “Hello hurt.” That allows me sufficient pause, or dispassion. Dispassion, here, means unhooking to the habitual reactivity, and that I receive all my experience intimately, unmediated by how I think it should be. Reactivity means that I’m pushing it away. So, I fully experience the unpleasant experience. It is happening, after all. In respect of the other person, I may step away from them, perhaps; but I don’t deny my feel of the experience – which is knowledge.
It’s easy to misunderstand dispassion. It doesn’t mean not feeling. It means not indulging in the feeling, not adding a ‘me-story’ to it. Not adding legs to a snake. The bad experience is already happening. It’s an illusion to think that you may not experience what is already being experienced, what is already happening. ‘Ouch’ is just ‘ouch,’ and I needn’t make it into ‘this ouch is wrong, it shouldn’t be here.’ If I try to put non-pleasing feelings or sensations away, I am reinforcing the underlying division into ‘me’ and ‘my experience.’ I am strengthening the bystander experience of my life. I continue the severance from the greater life-process.
The hurt feeling, for instance, is already here as sensations arising in the middle area of my torso. We may think we are rejecting that person there (on the other side of the table, the end of the phone, in the back seat of the car, on the other end of an email, at the front of the class) when, actually, we are refusing is our present experience. That means a loss of vitality, because, pleasant or unpleasant, any experience has energy which can be transmuted. So, to be a warrior on the great way of self-knowledge, we turn toward intimacy with whatever our inner experience is, at any moment.
When we accept the limitations of our life totally, we find ourselves integrated in the present situation, beyond our ego-affirmation or negation. The limits imposed by our actual life are the real ‘now,’ not the one we think we should have. And, there our constructing activities, our fashioning tendencies, can end. We find ourselves in maximum spiritual freedom, at this limit of our becoming.