It's with the awareness that we are not aware that the spiritual life begins, when we become aware of how conditioned and reactive our minds are, like tiny puppets jerked by strings and wires.
Working with Our Mind
Most of us understand that the state of our bodies is affected by our actions. Good nutrition and regular exercise will help us to be healthy and fit.
The same is true of our minds. We typically take our states of mind for granted, imagining that our personality and character is fixed, and quickly blaming our struggles on events or other people. We can treat our minds as most people treat their cars, only considering how they operate when they stop working. And that sometimes happens when we get into very difficult states like stress and anxiety, and we can’t keep operating as normal.
So how do our minds work?
Like bodies, our minds are changing all the time, influenced by what we take in. But the key, for Buddhism, is how we respond to our experience. We can respond by pushing away a painful experience, for example, distracting ourselves from it or pretending it isn’t happening. These are what Buddhism calls the unskillful motivations of craving, aversion and ignorance. Or we can respond more skilfully with qualities like patience, generosity, kindness and awareness. What’s more, there are ways to develop skilful states of mind and let go of unskillful ones. That’s the aim of Buddhist practices.
Reactivity and Creativity
As well as these traditional terms, it can be helpful to use less technical language to describe the basic Buddhist outlook on the mind. Sangharakshita uses the terms ‘reactive’ and ‘creative’ as a way to describe two modes of experience that many people find helpful.
In a reactive state we receive a stimulus and then respond automatically. An advert can stimulate craving and a traffic jam can stimulate irritation without our consciously choosing those reactions. In that case, we are operating on ‘autopilot’, without very much awareness. More broadly, our views, attitudes and life choices may also be the result of conditioning and habit.
A creative response is based on a skilful motivation that includes much more awareness. For example, we can respond to a traffic jam with patience, taking account of the difficulty but not letting it drive us into irritation. We might even learn something about ourselves, or find a way to enjoy the period of enforced stillness. Creativity in this sense isn’t just about activities like writing or painting, it means bringing creativity into our basic responses to life.
The most creative way to live, in Buddhist terms, is by following a path in which we learn to act creatively within every area of our lives. The various versions of the Buddhist path, such as The Eightfold Path and The Threefold Way, are guide towards doing this. In the Threefold Way we start with Ethics, or our behaviour towards others, and we could say that unethical or behaviour is essentially reactive, while ethical behaviour is creative. Meditation means cultivating skilful or creative states of mind, and wisdom is the new way of seeing life, as it really is, that a creative outlook makes possible.
