Reactive vs. Responsive

We know when we know; we know when we don’t know.

It’s much more simple than it sounds in one sense but it’s also quite difficult to do. Our nature is that we like to speculate, rather than to just be aware. Rather than to just simply know.

“A feeling is a feeling,” or “a thought is a thought.” It’s so simple it’s difficult to do, to not proliferate. The mind has a proliferating nature. Desire drives this proliferating nature. We tend to proliferate around everything. Particularly feeling — we can just note it, “Oh, this is pleasant feeling arising and ceasing,” but we get carried away with it. Or we don’t note what is unpleasant feeling arising and ceasing because we tend to want to get away from it.

We are reactive rather than responsive to these things. Actually it’s perfectly okay to respond; all our reactions are made redundant by our responsiveness. That’s mindfulness.

As we continue to be aware of these things, certain characteristics will come to mind; we will notice certain things about all of these phenomena, the thoughts and feelings. We will notice how they are unstable and uncertain, their changing nature. How our bodies are uncertain, of a changing nature. How we can’t hang on to these things.

Because of that, we become less enchanted by them; we just see them as transitory phenomenon, and we become more interested in the mind that is aware of them — the stability of the mind, the stability of awareness itself, of the knowingness itself.

When we become aware of this knowingness, we can steady ourselves on it.

This reflection by Ajahn Kalyāno is from the book The Thread, (pdf) p. 48.