FOCUSING ON WHAT MATTERS MOMENT BY MOMENT

The Summer 2002 issue of S&H included this still-timely article

- B. ALAN WALLACE

WE IN THE MODERN WEST assume that the normal mind is a healthy one. But a “healthy mind” is still subject to many types of distress, including depression, anxiety, frustration, restlessness, boredom, and resentment. Only when such imbalances are excessive are we advised to seek counseling and drug therapy. The implication is that unhappiness is part of life, and we’re to make the best of it and learn from it, while happiness comes from outside: from sensual enjoyments, possessions, other people, or God.

But many of the world’s contemplative traditions teach that the normal mind is afflicted in various ways; that since it so readily brings us suffering and anxiety, it can’t be deemed healthy. One symptom of a dis-eased mind is that the attention oscillates between obsessive-compulsive states (grasping onto thoughts and emotions) and slipping into stupor.

When the mind is subject to such attentional dysfunction, its emotional ground state is dissatisfaction, from which we take solace in outer and inner pleasurable stimuli. By refining the attention we can make the mind serviceable and thereby rediscover the sense of wellbeing that emerges spontaneously from a balanced mind. The contemplative traditions of the world have long known this, but our contemporary civilization seems to have forgotten it.

CREATING YOUR UNIVERSE