Immanence and Its Risks

  In the last several years, I consider myself to be exploring an "imminent" spiritual life. When I refer to "immanent", I am actually talking about seeing the world and all its activities as inseparable from the mind itself. It's not that I take the spirit on the one hand and separate it from daily life; on the contrary, daily life is identical to the spiritual principle itself, to the point where I can never take myself out of a life of mind or spirit. The danger or risk of this approach is that it can lead to a sense of permissiveness, or "letting things happen" without an accompanying awareness of what is happening and why. For this reason, certain principles still need to be observed in mindfulness.
  For example,it's not just what am seeing that's important in mindfulness practice, but being aware of how I am approaching what I see. Do I take things to be so real that I start to interact with them, or do I see these phenomena as arising because of the way the mind is functioning? If I am truly mindful, it's not just the objects I am aware of but also the relationships I am forming and how these relationships can be a form of suffering if they mistaken things as tangible and permanent.
   A very good example we can take from Surangama Sutra is the tendency to attribute discrete powers to certain things. A "lamp" is said to be a "source of light", and one tends to point to a lamp as an example of something that originates light. However,in reality, a whole lot of conditions are needed to make the light perform this function: one needs space to transmit the light, a mind that sees the light, eyes, and even an unobstructed area. Without all these conditions, could light exist? In the same way, I might attribute frustration to a specific stimulus, yet not realize that part of my aversion to it is mental associations I have accumulated over the years which have been triggered by seeing that stimulus. These associations are not automatically contained in the object, but they are imposed on it by a process of mental bestowal.
   Some people might see mindfulness as simply a kind of "seeing things as they are", but it's more complicated than this. Mindfulness itself comes from specific spiritual traditions which do have aims to liberate people from a state of suffering in the world. This doesn't come from simply accepting everything passively, but requires an ability to unearth the mental dynamics that contribute to suffering in the first place, including the tendency to cling to one's experiences. If I mistakenly believe that mindfulness is only a state of acquiescing to experience, I fail to realize how I am actively constructing experiences themselves and even setting mental traps for myself, resulting in more suffering.