“When we realize the everlasting truth of ‘everything changes’ and find our composure in it, we find ourselves in Nirvana.” – Suzuki Roshi

Meditation practices are trainings that allow us to calm, focus, and examine our mind with increasing compassion and ease. Initially, attention to our own mind illuminates the ever changing mad-monkey stream of thoughts, perceptions, reactions, feelings. We can see how easily we can be caught by our desires, prejudices, conditioning, and instincts. Observing our mind with mindful loving awareness, clear and kind, we begin to step back and free ourselves from judgment and conditioned reactions to this constant flow of events and mental process.

As mindfulness becomes steady and observant, the constant change of all physical and mental phenomena is increasingly apparent. Absolutely all we know, see, hear, feel, think, smell, and taste—is changing from moment to moment. Our inner states, our relationships, our circumstances, all are an ever-changing process. As this constant flow is felt more fully, grasping and holding on becomes clearly undesirable. Views and opinions inevitably come and go. Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, all arise in their turn. Trying to hold on to what changes becomes like rope burn, clinging becomes a cause of suffering.

With loving awareness, we can see all events of the mind and body as an interconnected process that happens by itself, seeing that there is no fixed, separate self behind it. This opens up our inner space to one of ease. We do not have to reject experience. We can hold everything with a heart of compassion and care amidst this fleeting world. Mindfulness sees this life process possessing order, following the Law of Karma or cause and effect, the orderly unfolding of mind and matter, arising and perishing moment to moment. 

Witnessing life with spacious loving awareness in this way is enormously freeing. Instead of being caught up in our reactions and fears, our longings and wants, our mind becomes spacious, clear, and radiant. It is the illusion of permanence and control that binds us to the world of duality and keep us separate from one another and from the true flow of nature. A deep perception of the dreamlike ever-changing nature of all  phenomena undercuts our desire to grasp and hold on to any experience as a source of lasting happiness. Liberation comes from this loving non-attachment, resting in mindful loving awareness. This is the gateway to freedom from suffering. Peace.

*This article is a freshly revised and updated version of the previous article ‘Meditation, Freedom and the True Emptiness of Self‘, which originally appeared as a segment in Jack’s book, Living Dharma. We are leaving both the original and updated versions of this article up to show how Jack’s teachings have evolved and ripened over the years.