As wise as these words are, your unconscious mind has already created a scenario designed for your suffering!  It has made the decision that unwholesome is bad – avoid it!  Simultaneously, it has decided wholesome is good – go after it! 

These decisions have nothing to do with you, the depth of your understanding, or the number of years you’ve been working to improve yourself or awaken.    You can’t stop this unconscious choice - or change it.  But you can be aware of it; and offer your unconscious mind a deeper understanding and an additional option.  Right now, the choice is either one or the other.  The additional choice is to embrace both the wholesome and unwholesome.

It is the natural conditioning of your body and mind to move toward pleasure and away from pain.  Without additional input, this is your mind’s only option in the presence of this fundamental human dilemma: ‘If I have to choose between pleasure and pain, how do I decide?’  Of course, it’s a no brainer.  Pleasure wins out every time – even if it takes you into an unwholesome emotion or state of mind.

Understanding that pleasure and pain are a set of polar opposites – interdependent and thus inseparable – makes it clear that you can’t actually abandon unwholesome emotions or states.  Where one goes, the other will follow. Why?  They use each other to define themselves.  Wholesome is defined by the absence of unwholesome. Likewise, unwholesome is defined by the absence of wholesome.  Like wholesome emotions and states, the unwholesome also arises and passes away like waves in the ocean.   One cannot exist without the other – not on this dualistic plane of reality.

So how do you make sense of this ancient and useful guidance?

You have to approach duality in a slightly different way.  Rather than trying to get rid of one thing so the other can blossom, you learn to navigate the paradoxical nature of being human. 

You can indeed cultivate or practice wholesome states and feelings – compassion, empathy, love, sympathetic joy, respect, focused attention, and so on.  But if you can’t really avoid the unwholesome – anger, hate, jealousy, envy, greed, and so on – what are you to do? 

The answer:  allow these unwholesome emotions and states to arise and pass away.  Don’t be for them and don’t be against them.  Simply let them be exactly what they are without giving them your energy.  They need your presence - but only to the degree that you are aware of their arising and their passing away.

Paradoxically, this action helps you to develop the wholesome states of presence, acceptance and letting go.  These wholesome states are essential as you cultivate the skillful means to be neither for nor against what is unfolding.  Give it a try and see for yourself how much relaxation and peace can arise in the presence of unwholesome emotions and states of mind when you just let them be.

Until next month when another Reflection will appear, may you enjoy tasting that  ‘peace that passes all understanding’ – just waiting there – in the wings – as you allow ‘what is’ – both wholesome and unwholesome – to move through you and around you – freeing your awareness to, paradoxically, become larger than both.

Ragini