A Good Pair of Spectacles

The practice is so beautifully simple.

All the techniques, methods and teachings are designed simply to bring us back to the present moment, here and now, to bring us back to seeing clearly. All the techniques and methods help to give us a good pair of spectacles. We wear them so we don’t have blurry eyesight.

When we look at the world through lenses of greed, hatred or delusion, we look at a very blurry world. And yet as meditators, we can become attached to clarity, to purity, to wanting a perfect view. But it may be a long time before we achieve that perfect view. Meanwhile our vision is not clear yet and that’s just the way it is.

The Buddha encourages us to develop Right Effort, Right Concentration and Right Mindfulness as balancing factors helping us bit by bit to achieve clear vision.

Balance is a skill we develop; we don’t achieve it straightaway.

We’re not working with an inanimate object. We are working with energy, our big energy body that doesn’t always tell us in advance how it is going to respond to the practice. So we have to become skilled in receiving this energy without freaking out, without misinterpreting it or being confused by the energetic movement of the mind and body.

According to the Buddha’s teaching, integration of the world begins with sila (ethics); that is the foundation. Ethics requires effort; it calls for energy. It can be more difficult than meditation and attaining Samadhi. Ethics is the first step, and the hardest one for most people.

This reflection by Ajahn Sundara is from the book Paccuppanna, (pdf) pp. 9-10.