Where the hell is Inner Peace when you need it the most?

Guest post by Kaushik@Beyond-Karma

Why does it seem that it’s easier to suffer than to be peaceful? Why do we take a peculiar pleasure from pain? Why do we repeat stuck patterns?

We do it because it is easier. The mind is a very fast habit computer, riddled with grooves, and the mind’s automatic and easy tendency is to slide through the habitual grooves of conditioning.

These grooves are latent impressions called Samskara in Sanskrit, and conditioning in every day language, and recently through Eckhart Tolle we have come to know them as the pain-body. The Samskara grooves determine how we feel, what we think and what we do.

Where do these grooves come from?

As we tumble through life, swayed mostly by circumstance, we react to each experience. Experience comes from six portals: the five senses and the mind itself. Through the day, we may experience some 60,000 stimuli, and we react to each. The mind may see the sensation as neutral, where it fully experiences the stimulus in the moment, and lets it go. More often, we are not present and the mind marks the experience good or bad, and stores the judgment. What we like and what do not like, and what we want and what we fear arises from this complex of stored judgments.

We take a peculiar pleasure from our destructive patterns, because it is easier for the mind to flow through its conditioned grooves. You’ve wondered why you always do this or that, even after you recognize that this or that is very destructive. You’ve wondered why you suffer, when suffering is entirely optional. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is completely optional. Pain is part of being human. It is the beautiful, wistful part of the the spectrum of feelings we experience in the manifested world. Pain, in the Now, is feelings and sensations experienced in the Now. Suffering is the experience of grooves left behind by reaction to pain (and pleasure). The mind likes to suffer because it is easier to be on auto-pilot and ride through the usual grooves.

And all we have to do rise above our conditioning is to stop and notice.

All meditation, awareness, and release techniques are about the recognition of automatic mental activity. We don’t have to figure out our patterns. We just have to notice them, in awareness, in Now. The mind cannot discern its own activities. Awareness can.

It is far less effortful to experience existence from the still, gentle, choiceless, unoccupied awareness that we already are than to allow the mind to run through its groves, but the mind is a fast habit-computer, and to halt its automatic reactions may take a little bit of practice and effort.

The mind wants to do what it’s always done. When we are able to brake the mind enough, we see that stillness is much more natural than letting the mind run through its patterns. This is when we are able to see what effort and struggle really are, and we are able to be—just be—in effortless awareness. This is the still, gentle, unoccupied awareness, where every moment is fresh, and the future is no longer a variation of past patterns. The present is infinite and full of glorious possibilities!

About the author: Kaushik writes books and free articles on www.beyond-karma.com on awakening: How do we free ourselves from the past, from depression and anxiety, from the unease of being which most of us experience? The joy of being is so utterly simple, right here and right now. Awareness and Release–the two-step dance of awakening–allow this natural ease which transforms all o fliving–health, relationships, and well-being!

Tags: inner peace, peace of mind, Eckhart Tolle, Samskara

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