Simply This Moment - Buddhist Meditation and Theravada ...

When you start to see the will ceasing and experience that state for a long period oftime, it’s seen as a condition, a process. You then see that which does: the chooser,the decider, the generator of thoughts, the will, what the Buddha once described as thebuilder. This is what Dependent Origination is all about, imasmi sati ida hoti,‘when this is, then that occurs’. Once you see that will is not coming from you, youlook back and start to see the whole process of causality. You are not choosing to dothese things. Why did I decide to talk like this, this evening? Why do I decide toscratch my ear? You start to see after a while that this is not coming from a personinside, it is not coming from a self. It is completely conditioned.Once you start to understand what we call choice, the movement of the mind, you seeit is conditioned, fully conditioned, one hundred percent conditioned, and then youcan start investigating the conditions. You question what is the condition that makesyou do this, what condition makes you do that? And then you find the bestconditioning. Because, wherever you are in the world, there will always be someconditioning or brainwashing going on. The best conditioning if you really want to behappy and become Enlightened is to hang out in monasteries. If you come here everyWednesday evening, then you get brainwashed by me, and that’s much better thanbeing brainwashed by the T.V. or being brainwashed by the shopping malls. Why isit that when you go to the shopping mall you buy all those things? You are beingbrainwashed – the conditioning is not coming from you, it’s coming from outside.Once you begin to experience this you start to understand how this mind and bodywork, and then you can start playing around as it were with the conditioning. Whenyou start playing around with conditioning you realize that if you want to be peacefulyou have to create the conditions for peacefulness. You can’t just say, ‘Now I amgoing to be peaceful’ or, ‘now I am going to be happy’. You have to know theconditions for happiness, the conditions for peace, the conditions for jhāna, and youthe conditions for liberation. This is what Dependent Origination is all about. Onceyou begin to notice what the conditions for happiness are you know that you can getthe grosser happiness’s in the world from making good kamma. By doing good things220