Do any of us make it through a day without having contact with one of the worldly winds?
Praise and blame, self-image success and failure, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute. These are the different polarities of this human life, with its relationships and the nature of the body.Looking at these you could probably identify a base for these images we have. Have we built a self upon praise? on blame? on pleasure? on pain? on fame? or disrepute?. I know I have, I reckon I would have a self image built upon each of these, some of them coming together to create a nice little complex. I feel like I take one as base, this is who I think I am. Depending on how self obsessed I am I may not notice its polarity as it passes by through the day. This sense of crystallising around a particular wind, creating a self position is ignorance. When we crystallise it becomes hard to sense wholesome qualities, because the crystallised self has taken the central seat, rather than sharing the seat with what ever is arising. My sense is that these eight qualities are a foundation conditioned into our nervous systems by our bodies, parents, ideologies, society, religion, education. They begin to form our super ego, that voice in our selves that judges, measures and decides the value of what we are doing/thinking/being.
How do we live with these winds, how can we take the power of these winds to fuel our wind mills of growth and maturation?
Usually we react to them, we may try to take them as positions for a self and attach to them. Once we have a position we then need to maintain it.This can be either a positive or negative self image. As conditions are impermanent this position is in constant flux, so we try to maintain the original perception developed , this can not happen, we may get close but never again the same. The original perception of self is now in conflict with the ever changing conditions of life=suffering. Watch how mindful you are off maintaining a self image? I am a calm Buddhist, I am a person of integrity or authenticity. If your being mindful of being a particular way you have taken a position against conditional arising.
Life is the worldly winds, these winds are not-self. Life is complex, when we stop resisting complexity life is simple. Simply complex.
How do we not take a position? I find in my practice that positions I take arise dependent on the conditions arising. So it is more of the case of knowing a position as it arises, when we open to the arising of a position we begin to see the conditions that are bringing around that particular position. We know it as conditions, by opening to the conditions we become aware of the conditions which have formed our attachments to taking certain positions.
Enjoy your investigations. Open to the winds, let them blow through, humbling and removing the formation of self.
