Unexpected Freedom

The Power of Paradoxturn towards outer forms for support. We will remain overlydependent on conventions and techniques, clubmembership and beliefs. But with a real interest indeveloping our hearts and minds and freeing them from thetype of conditioning that I have been describing, we won’tshy away from what others might call a dilemma. We willapproach it with a view to finding the awareness that canreceive the experience – an all-embracing, non-reactiveawareness. When we come across a paradox, instead ofautomatically turning to some external structure, or clingingto some particular point of view to make us feel safe again,we actually engage with the paradox in a manner thatincreases the capacity for accommodating frustration.Frustration leads us to finding that increased capacity.Frustration is our friend in practice. If we get that messageearly on, it’s a great blessing. Because sooner or later all of us,not just once but probably a good number of times, willreach a point of utter impossibility, where it seems there’snothing we can do about our situation. We reach a pointwhere we feel all our techniques have been exhausted; wecan’t fix it and yet we can’t stop trying either.Ajahn Chah wrote a letter to Ajahn Sumedho after he’dbeen in Britain for a year or two. In this letter he wrote: “TheBuddha Dhamma is not to be found in moving forwards, norin moving backwards, nor in standing still. This, Sumedho,is your place of non-abiding.” That’s a truly helpful teaching.The numerous forms and techniques that we are taught havetheir place, but they are limited. If we don’t understand therelative function of forms, and we give them too much value,we run the risk of feeling betrayed by practice. We mightthink, ‘I’ve been keeping my precepts and meditating. I’vebeen going to the monastery and going on retreat, but I justcan’t help feeling betrayed and let down by it all. Buddhism97