7.6.1 ‘How am I to recognise and deal with my own failure to face up to reality?’

Begin with an evaluation of your life as it is now. Lay aside all thoughts of whom you do, or do not, hold to be responsible for your current situation. In your quest for enlightenment, it will not help you, now or at any other time, to apportion blame for your conditions to yourself or to others.

As you proceed with this self-evaluation, there is one preliminary activity which it is essential to undertake if you are to be successful.

Learn to lay aside the bluff you have been running, the pretence you maintain to fool yourself and others that you understand and are in control of your life. Unless you conduct this evaluation honestly, you will fail and continue to incur the miserable consequences of negative karma.

The first and easier stage of this process of self-evaluation is to identify those areas of your personality in which you are aware that you refuse to face reality. The test to establish which are these areas in your personality is simple. Your usual response when an issue arises in such an area of your life is some variation on: ‘I don’t want to deal with this’.

Perhaps you find the aspect of life you don’t want to deal with frightening or unpleasant. This may well be a genuine and valid reaction; nonetheless, unless you face up to the reality of your life, you will continue to incur the karmically imposed penalty of recurring misery. To proceed along the path to enlightenment, you must find the strength, the determination and the resolve to deal effectively with all that occurs in your life.

The way to harness your innate determination, to gather together your energies with a firm resolve, is to be found by including the insights resulting from your self-evaluation into your practice of meditation. During your daily meditation, whenever your thoughts shift from counting the breaths, focus your thoughts on the aspect of your life that you would prefer not to have to deal with. With practice of this simple discipline, in time you will find that a new perspective on the problem emerges: you will see your difficulties in a wider context, where they will become understood as less important to you.