Announcement
Next week, we’ll start an exploration of One-Pointed Attention, and it kicks off with the next online workshop. Join us live if you can on June 24 to set the scene for our next topic. You can register for the event for free, or optionally you can pay on the sliding scale from $0–25. (The standard fee is $10.)
If you’re unable to attend the online workshop live, don’t worry – if you register we’ll send you the recording a few days later.
This is the final week of our group Journal study. We’ll explore a theme that ties together our efforts from the past three weeks: strengthening the will. This theme is at the crux of gaining access to a more permanent “disposition for benevolence”.
Which eight-point program strategies have you tried to build up your will power?
It may come as a surprise when Easwaran says below that “intellectual knowledge has very little say in the choices that shape our lives.” He asks us to test it out for ourselves by deepening our meditation. Have you experienced the ways a more concentrated meditation has strengthened your will during the day?
The excerpt below is from the Spring/Summer 2017 Blue Mountain Journal, by Eknath Easwaran.
Gaining access to the will
For most of us, intellectual knowledge has very little say in the choices that shape our lives. You may know in painful detail about the harmful consequences of smoking, but if you have ever smoked, you know how shallow that knowledge is when measured against the power of habit and desire.
Similarly, you may know from bitter experience how destructive anger can be, but that makes it no easier to keep your temper the next time something provokes you. The reason is simple: there is very little connection between the intellect and the will.
Intellectual knowledge is on the surface of consciousness; addictions, urges, and conditioned cravings arise deep in the unconscious mind. And the vast majority of us cannot bring our will to bear in the unconscious; even in waking life, the will may have little to do.
When you reach a certain depth in meditation, however, all this changes. You gain access to the will even belowthe surface of awareness, which means you can actually get underneath a craving or negative emotion and pull it out. After decades of sustained effort, you finally get to the roots of the primordial drives that take their toll on the lives of every one of us: self-will, anger, fear, and greed.
Anger as a positive force
Let me change metaphors to make a practical illustration. All these forces – anger, for example – can be thought ofas powerful physical forces like electricity. Electricity can destroy us, but when harnessed, it can also bring us light and warmth. In the same way, we can learn to use anger as a positive force, devoid of any ill feeling, to heal divisions between persons and nations and to find creative solutions to conflicts. When we have gained mastery over our responses, when deepening meditation brings insight and creativity, when will and desire have fused into a passionate determination to act only for the good of all, we have simply to flip a switch to redirect the current into its new channel.
To do this takes a great deal of preparation, of course. The mind has to be trained to listen to you when all it wants to do is turn tail and run, or lash out in retaliation. The muscles of the will have to be made strong enough to reach for that switch when everything in you is screaming, “You’re wrong!” This takes a lot of work, but the day will come when, in the heat of a conflict, you will be able to say quietly, “Let’s look at this problem together and see what we can do to solve it.”
In presenting the connection between meditation and peace, then, I am not advancing moral or ethical arguments. I am presenting the dynamics of acquiring a new disposition of mind.
Through the practice of meditation and its allied disciplines, every one of us can become a peacemaker by making “a disposition for benevolence” our natural state: that is, by teaching the mind to be calm and kind.