How Far Until Awakening?

Do you ever wonder how far you’ve got in terms of Awakening? Maybe, when you review it, you see it like this: ‘Well I live with a sense of conscience and concern for the welfare of others. I do meditate, and from time to time my mind gets quite peaceful. The thinking stops; there’s a sense of wonder and ease. Then I come out of that, but in the flow of events of people and things and ups and downs, I get jangled and tense. Is there an end to this?’

It’s good to remember one of Ajahn Chah’s sayings: ‘The only thing that has to end is the desire that it all end.’ Kamma, the restless search of the self: that’s what has to end for Awakening.

Awakening is not that easy to assess, because our old un-Awakened habits can keep getting triggered by events in life. This is because we’re living in the field of kamma, of mental patterns and psychological programs that have been established in us from what we’ve participated in.  This is ‘resultant kamma’ or ‘vipaka’; and it is what gets referred to as ‘myself.’

And as long as we’re centred in, feeding on, or attached to, that field of kamma, we participate in the ups and downs of ‘me’ and ‘mine’. This is how consciousness is conditioned: to experience of birth, which is the basis for the arising of the sense of ‘me and other.’ Internally that duality is experienced as ‘I and myself’ – in which ‘I’ becomes the agent, the cause and ‘me’ is the mind-state that I refer to at any given time.  These two breed the notion of ‘myself’, an ongoing accumulation of what I’ve done or what has happened to me.

And right there is conflict. Because sometimes ‘I’ don’t like ‘myself’: I don’t feel in harmony with myself, or I don’t know how to support myself, or what to do about myself.

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the article, “Is There an End?”