Choosing Positive Ways

  One thing I am reading in the Surangama Sutra is a very beautiful verse called the 10 profound analogies. Number 3 reads, "All physical bodies are like the moon on water" (p.342), while 7 reads "All deeds of the Buddhas are like dreams" (p.343). With all these dreamlike analogies, you would then start to wonder, why are people often so sad in life? I think that the Buddha is in some ways trying to compassionately demonstrate that life needn't be a chore at all, and one can simply see it as impermanent, changing.
    It is hard to do this without some practice in observing the mind. For instance, when a person is extremely angry at someone else, what are they key constituents of that 'anger'? I would have to say that within myself, I tend to think that my impression of someone else were somehow tangible and unchanging. In fact, however, most of the time one gets angry only at a few moments which are not even a fraction of another person's life and behavior. But because I cling to that one view of a person so tenaciously, it seems so hard solid. Then another thing happens: a word comes to my mind which then is supposed to sum that person up! Really! But actually, the point is that there is nothing in my experience that corresponds to an enduring self or being. If I am able to anatomize my experience into individual moments in time, there no longer seems to be an enduring substance. Perhaps this is what the sutra means by 'dreamlike'.
   There are times when this kind of thinking most likely needs to be supplemented with positive words and actions. It's not that there are any specific positive things in a dream, but sometimes we need to find ways to detach ourselves from negative thoughts and embrace more lively and certainly more balanced ones. One thing that seems helpful is to keep track of moments when one's thoughts are fixated on a self/other distinction. We hear this a lot when there is a voice like , "oh, he's just so.." or "that person is such a..." as though one could really understand a person in this way. When one has these kinds of thoughts, it might be helpful to slow down and ask the question, can anything I am experiencing now be so simplistic? Can it be reduced so easily to a formulaic argument or a label? In this way, one can detach from those negative judgments and start to see that they don't have too much value for anyone.