When our happiness is entirely dependent on conditions, we experience the suffering that Mother Teresa described as a poverty of spirituality. In our Buddhist spiritual tradition, we examine how our lives are shaped by causes and conditions. Causes and conditions determine whether we feel happiness or suffering, impatience, or fear. Our reaction, in turn, is a seed which becomes the cause for further conditions. And on and on it goes. Causes and conditions, these are ordinary words. A cause is that which produces an effect. The difficulties we encounter in our life and our habitual way of viewing these difficulties tend to seed emotional pain and suffering. And without a more nuanced view of the conditions of life, we are left with no choice but to suffer. We become fixated by our aversions and desires, as though they are imperatives, caught up in grasping after them. With practice, stopping and looking deeply into what is, we open this view and notice the wider situation within which it’s arising. We notice the many more conditions that are also shaping this moment. We can recognize what is as an ever-unfolding display of causes and conditions, or what the poet Robert Kelly describes as the flowers of unceasing co-incidence.
Conditions – physical, social, relational, economic, health, environmental are always in flux and continue to affect our direct experience of what is. State of mind is directly affected by conditions. Practice can help us develop an open and inclusive attitude that takes us beyond liking and disliking, beyond grasping after desired outcomes. More open, we can respond to the actual needs of the moment, according to what may bring benefit, what may prevent harm. It’s possible to distinguish the source of our life as emanating from an unending font. We can tap our capacity for awakening into a full spiritual life, beyond. Always flowing beyond.