Floods of Sensuality and Becoming
In the gentle or pulsing waves of this flood however, the objects of the sense seem irresistible, charming and productive of real satisfaction. And yet the manifest truth of our lives is that we are not blissed-out or even satisfied for long in any sense of contact. It happens all day long and with luck it is mostly okay. Sometimes it is pleasant for a little while and sometimes it is unpleasant, but the pleasant, once established, gets to be normal and then became boring after some time.
So, desire for newer sources of pleasure kicks in. However, we cannot really have any of it because it runs through consciousness like water through our fists. Sensory input, with its pleasure and displeasure, passes. That's it. That's all there is. Why make anything more of it? We would have figure this out by the age of three were it not for the hypnotic power of the sensuality flood. But in that trance we assume we have no alternatives.
Secondly, there is the flood called "becoming" (Bhavogha). This is the flood that carries time and identity. When you look at experience directly, it is obvious that all we are or have is happening right now. Our memories happen now and the results of what we have been involved with happen now. Our projected scenarios for the future happen now and our actions, whose consequences may occur in the future, happen now.
Furthermore, our awareness of this state of affairs, feelings about and responses to all that happens now. And yet, there is a current in the mind that creates a felt identity who was is and will be. Rolling on its surface are worries and expectations about what I will be, nostalgia and regret about what I was. A conceit may form: "Having been this, certainly I deserve to become that"; or its negative form: "I have never been this, so I will never become one of those". There is a lot of drama and suffering and stress in this flood, so much, so that we fail to question "Who is this character?"
When we do question and give full attention to the present in the focus that should surely give us the clearest, most stable impression of who we are, we find that images break up like reflections in a stream poked with a finger. And as those images break up, all the weight, the desperate need or the embarrassing anxiety, suddenly sinks with no footing. There is a fumbling, a blur of attention, a shift of energy and we are left groping at ripples. The spell of the flood of becoming does not work in the present. This is why we study it because through investigation we come out of it.
But as with the flood of sensuality, it is quite difficult to stay out of it because the power of these floods are based on the fact that to the ordinary level of consciousness and the world, there are concrete sense objects, there is time and identity and they are also important. And so they are. However it is possible to separate sights, sounds and the rest from the trance of their ultimate desirability in order to clearly apprehend as they are.
For this, we need to attend to the sense world with wisdom and truthfulness. We need to note that it is in flux and that the feelings and mind states that the flux evokes also change. Then the dream of sensuality does not arise; you can be in but not of the sensory world and this helps you to handle it skilfully. So we study the sense world in order to rescue it from the flood of our trance and in the course of so doing, we develop parami such as wisdom, truthfulness, morality and renunciation.
Much the same is truth of bhavogha. Our actions have effects and if we act mean and cheat then, we become a mean cheater. Act compassionately and you become grand hearted. So we do have an inheritance and potential for the future. But when we study to becoming closer, we can notice that what has become i.e. the mind state of the present, is just that. It is a good or band mind state, but it isn't an identity. If it were an identity, you should be in the state from birth to death; there would be no possibility for change or development or decline. However, good and wise people do lose their temper at times and cruel people may very well have a tender spot for their dog or revise their ways and reform.
Now we can step back from the current of who we seem to be and the world-view that it projects and we can say, "No! Adherence to this generates suffering. It either drags me down or it makes me callous or negligent". By reflecting on where the flood is taking us and who we seem to be in that, we can step out of it long enough to choose an alternative direction. The capacity to do so depends again on an underlying current of parami.
In brief, becoming cannot be skipped over, but can be reflected on, handled and directed. Rightly directed, this stream of causality can take the mind to the fruition of parami in the meditative skill of the Enlightened mind. Here, the legend of the Buddha arising in the world out of the long cultivation of the ten perfection has a verifiable ring of truth. The very word "Buddha" means "unbounded wisdom" and that arises from the ongoing cultivation of the inclinations, attitudes and intentions that constitutes the parami.
These bear their richest fruit in meditation but are rooted in the daily life wisdom that lifts out of the floods.
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