2.8 Freedom from attachment to stimuli

The enlightened person has learnt through experience to become detached from all things, from all of this, yet to look on this and its suffering people with infinite compassion. Even after enlightenment, you will still experience happiness and sorrow, success and failure, life and death – all the everyday experiences of ordinary life. To the enlightened mind, these are understood in their true nature – as stimuli which are experienced as part of this, and simultaneously known to be the manifest form of that.

Mind in its ever present nature is still, like an ocean without a wave, observing all things, including the thought process of each apparently individual mind. That manifests itself, experiences itself and witnesses itself as this. The enlightened person learns to experience this, all the variety of conditioned existence, with detached uninvolvement through freedom from attachment to stimuli.

As an unenlightened person struggling to attain enlightenment, you will have to learn to become detached from the constant stimuli bombarding your mind through your senses. Chapter 3 of this book teaches practical exercises which lead to enduring freedom from the urge to respond to stimuli. Committed daily practice of these meditative techniques will assist and guide you in your progress along the path.

Meditate long and hard on what it might mean to understand your individual experience as only being relatively real. Try to understand, through meditation, how you would behave if you no longer responded to the effects on your mind of the ten conditions. Try to understand that the bird flying free in the sky, the person in life who causes you the most aggravation and yourself, are equally important parts of a harmonious and integrated unity.

These Implicate Technology practical techniques for learning detachment from the influence of stimuli, offer the possibility for our Western cultures to make a significant advance. In the late-twentieth century, we in the West are poised to make the cultural leap from an ethically-based to a spiritually-based civilization. To grasp the implications of this you will need to meditate on the evolutionary purpose of karma.