True Freedom

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I had 2 months of quiet and peaceful time to myself, until the beginning of July, when a new roommate moved in and turned my peaceful world upside down……

He was quite an outgoing person.  He always sang very loudly, talked on the phone for 3-4 hours straight, burst into laughter at the most unbelievable times and startled me, and bounced the basketball in the room whenever he liked. I am obviously of the opposite personality than his and felt greatly disturbed, but I tried to be polite so he would not feel distressed or pressured to change his lifestyle because of me. So, whenever I heard those noises, I felt very annoyed, yet I had to bottle it up. After two long months of struggling and bottling up, the level of frustrations had reached the top of my head. Thus, I decided to sit and meditate to manage my anger. That morning I started to look inward and analyzed my emotions. It is not possible that my body initiated the anger, so could it be ignited by my mind? But where is this angry mind actually? While meditating, whenever I heard a noise from my roommate’s direction, I focused on searching internally for where this angry mind came from. The more I searched, the more I realized that as the sound from outside entered my auditory system, my consciousness would swiftly differentiate and categorize the data received, telling me how much I disliked the sound, which prompted me to start gasping and feeling suffocated. As I gained more and more clarity toward the internal events — the coming and going of my thoughts and the physiological changes to my body, I realized that it was impossible to find the exact location of that angry mind. Surprisingly, once I realized this, those noises did not bother me anymore, rather, I felt a sense of bliss and freedom.

I am a doctoral student. While at work, I used to have an issue with implementing my ideas into an actual project. I was always procrastinating, stagnated in the planning and procedure writing stage and could not move on into the actual experimenting stage. I kept telling myself that I was not completely ready yet. Knowing that I have a procrastination issue, I started to search for more information about this on video channels. One of the videos pointed out the root cause of my procrastination: we all look forward to having a good ending but often ignore the process of getting there. I find this so true. My upbringing was surrounded by the kind of education where academic achievement is everything. So, I was always worried about not getting the results that would make my teachers and parents proud, that I would be scolded for not working hard enough. Obscured by these worries, I rarely enjoyed each moment of the learning process. I realized that I had carried this kind of thought habit into my doctoral studies — I was constantly worrying about not getting the desired result or magnifying the difficulties of the task unfoundedly. And this has become a major obstacle to the launching of my thesis project. Also, without the proper actions I could avoid seeing the results, and thus sparing myself from getting into the imaginary ultimatum with myself. For over 20 years of dealing with this thought habit, I never knew how much it had limited my achievement. Ever since I realized this, whenever I started procrastinating again, I would introspect and find out exactly which part of the task I was avoiding and how I actually felt about it. As I kept observing and illuminating my thoughts, my procrastination and worries disappeared — I’ve learned that this very moment is the perfect time to start. In the past, whenever I encountered failure at work, I would either give up easily or take a long time to recoup and start over. But now, I am able to remind myself to stay clear and calm and keep observing how each of the worries and anxieties arise in my mind. I began to regard everything that I encountered at work as opportunities to improve my cultivation, and work has become more enjoyable than ever.

From these two life lessons, I’ve learned that the root of the problems lies within my mind— whenever I lost track of my awareness, it became easily stimulated and distracted by external phenomena and brought me troubles. No matter at work or in daily life, things simply happen— there is essentially no good or bad, all dualistic prejudices simply come from our own experiences and expectations. By keeping my awareness in check and observing my thoughts frequently, I am able to illuminate the darkness and be liberated from suffering. As long as I am able to abide in the present moment, and be free from the past and the future, then everything surrounding me — whether it is the falling leaves or the burgeoning trees, every single phenomenon is so free and wonderful.

~By Shaun Chen (Fa Guang)