Awareness in Buddhist Meditation

82
If there is violence, ‘I’ am the conflict, the opposition, the struggle.
It is the ‘I’-concept which resists, and which must resist in
order to exist. It is the search for security, the search for the ideal
of continuance which has created this isolation, this opposition, this
conflict. And the understanding of this projection makes the concept
of memory cease. In the absence of an object in itself, there
can be subject in reaction.
Thus, in awareness of this process of becoming lies the cessation
of the conflict.
Escapes
From delusion there are no escapes. Is that fatalism? Fatalism
would be a submission to a higher power in acknowledgement of
one’s impotence. But there still remains the wish to escape, if that
were possible. What is involved in escaping? Escape is the mind’s
reaction to become free from conflict. This conflict has many forms
which pose as outlets for an escape from fear. Conflict is the struggle
for becoming what I am not, and is expressed in social work,
study, religion, political activity, drink, drugs, sex, all various forms
in which the ‘self’ tries to forget, and thus to escape from, its own
pettiness and emptiness. In trying to become a holy man, a social
reformer, I merely try to change the actual fact into an ideal. This
endeavour, this effort, this search, however, is an escape from what
I believe to be unholiness, sin, etc. To escape from what I am, I
condition myself to become the opposite; and that causes confusion
and conflict. I am painfully aware of this contradiction within myself;
but whatever I try to do about it, it only increases the conflict
of which I am afraid and from which I want to escape.
An escape from conflict is attempted by attaching oneself to an
ideal. Thus one escapes through work, through pleasure, through religious
observances, through renunciation, even through pain. But,
whether attachment is to gross sense-satisfaction, to subtle sense-