The mental layer carries guilt. The development of virtue and keeping the precepts help to clear this layer of all the guilt. Otherwise, all kinds of guilt will come up in meditation instead of gladness, joy, and inner happiness.
According to TRANSCENDENTAL Dependent Origination ( sequence of conditions leading to Awakening), freedom from remorse arises automatically in one who is virtuous. Gladness arises automatically in one who is free from remorse. Next in the sequence are Rapture ( piti), Tranquility (passaddhi), Inner Happiness ( sukha), Samadhi ( jhana), Wisdom, etc.
From a very young age we are taught to perform and compete with others. There is a strong pressure to run in the rat race . We are so busy running from morning to evening everyday that we hardly have the time to ask ourselves why are we always running. The fact is that we are all heading toward the grave . Does it matter how much we accumulate at the end. It is not the destination that count but every steps of the journey ( the quality of each moment ). |
|
| " Have you ever been happy in the future? Have you ever felt rich, loved, sad or angry in the future? Even if you feel happiness for something that might happen in the future, you always feel it in the now. You cannot feel in the future. You cannot experience in the future either. It is all done in the present. That is the only place where you can experience the beauty of life. Real happiness and joy can only be found in the present. Still we constantly try to create the best circumstances so that we can , one day, be happy in the future. And thus we are running after a moving train, a train we can never catch. See yourself running behind that train, then stop and turn back, back to the present. Only when you have done that will you be able to see that the present already contains everything you need." | We may ask, " But what about working on our future or creating our future?"
We should do that. But that doesn't mean that we should allow worries to govern our lives. Only look at the future as an even better present for us to create. We can project for ourselves a new future, therefore we can create. |