When we are using conscious thinking to reflect on our lives, we are always in a conditional frame of mind. In a subtle kind of way, my orientation becomes "this is who I should be" and "this is what I need to obtain". Yet, as Andrew Bernstein notes in his book The Myth of Stress, the notion of stress arises when we inject a "should" in between our current moment and the moment we think should be happening. In a sense, we are continually interacting with the previous thought by adding a second one which evaluates the previous. This is an extremely subtle point which needs meditation to reflect.
ChangYuan Fashi is always emphasizing "ordinary mind": a mind that is simply intent on doing what is needed in the moment. When we add a thought of "the self" to that ordinary state, ignorance arises. I start envisioning a sense of self that I need to advance or protect, through the acquisition or rejection of certain kinds of experiences. If I cling too tightly to this process of liking and disliking, I literally stop seeing the mind that is still and unmoving. I am not able to tune into the mind that is a source of infinite peace and abundance. Sometimes this can take the form of subtle striving to replace one thought with another but more often it is from over-conceptualizing experience: trying to fence it in using concepts, which makes a person dead to the present moment. The present moment is the most important, but this requires a real study of what is the present? How can we even grasp something like "present moment"? We might see it as a drop of dew or a falling star: something ephemeral. So then we need to ask, what is this process of minding that is beyond time, beyond space, beyond clinging and grasping, and beyond definition?
Contemplating this would give rise to a tremendous feeling that there is something that cannot be bought or sold; it freely exists beyond the mundane world and yet enfolds the mundane world simultaneously.
