City life, like any kind of life,is a good way to learn the values of patience and yielding. Most of the places I frequent have line ups, and most of the city is pretty crowded with people trying to have their needs and wants met.I have heard someone explain that multitasking and taking on too many things is literally the 'violence' of the 21st century. But that kind of taking on a lot of things probably happens most often in the city life, where there are simply too many choices and not enough time to do everything. I wonder how people do manage to slow down the pace of life?
I read an essay by Venerable Guo Xing in the book Encounters with Sheng Yen that helped me to better understand this question. In it, he relates, "After I was ordained, I encouraged myself to be in a state of mind of a seven-day meditation retreat every second of the day" (p.66). If I had such a state of mind, would everything appear to be so fast paced? It reminds me that the sense of pace is based on how I see the way thoughts flow in the mind. Because thoughts race past each other in rapid succession, I think that a lot of things are happening to me. For example, if I am in a crowded store,and suddenly the thought of being comfortable at home arises, I will have these two images seemingly juxtaposed in front of me. I use this thought of being at home to reject the thought of being in the store, or vice versa. The two thoughts almost appear to interact with each other. It's interesting to wonder if they really do interact.
This past weekend, Venerable Chang Zhai used the example of a person moving to illustrate this point. If I see someone get up and move around, I assume that one thought of the person connects with the next thought, and so on...until I see this person moving across the room. The succession of thoughts generates the illusion of something that is moving. But if I can stop the camera and see that the images are just separate, I will see that consciousness joins those images together to form some illusion of movement. The thought that these images are 'joined' arises so quickly that there is no way to see that they are separate thoughts. The mind just starts to follow the idea that they are joined.I think the same goes with these two separate images: being in the store, and being at home. When the image of the store arises, it is somehow joined to my image of relaxing at home. The two images are joined together. Then I add a third thought, "I don't want to be in the lineup,I'd rather be at home!"This goes on and on...until I get home and realized that I forgot to buy something at the store. And then a feeling of regret arises. And so on.
If I were to really slow things down, I would see that the images don't really interact or connect with each other.The mind is always still, but the sense that the images are joined creates this illusion of 'moving' between the thoughts.
It's important to reflect on that principle, because doing so can allow me to see how most of what I consider 'problems'are really the result of the habitual joining of unrelated images and thoughts. I see the thought now and connect it to past experience which I labelled as 'unpleasant'. Is the present thought therefore unpleasant? Before I go to trying to fix the problem (or the person),I need to examine this root habitual tendency. Most of my unsettled emotions arise from the way I conjoin images and thoughts, rather than seeing the stillness in the current thought.
References
Encounters with Master Sheng Yen II: (2013) Sheng Yen Education Foundation
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