Common Sense by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
"When the Buddha described the essence of his awakening, he boiled it down to a very simple principle, a principle of causality.
That’s not usually what we want to hear. We want to hear about all the great cosmic visions he had. And he did have some cosmic visions leading up to his awakening. In the second watch of the night, he saw beings dying and being reborn all over the cosmos in line with their karma, in line with their actions.
But that wasn’t his awakening. His awakening was when he extracted a causal principle out of that: that what you do bears results.
And so that became his laboratory: his actions. He watched what he was doing in his mind, and he saw which mind-states gave rise to sufering and which ones put an end to sufering. That’s how he arrived at the four noble truths. That’s how he arrived at true awakening: simply noticing that thoughts and feelings have an effect on the mind, and that some thoughts and some feelings have a better efect than others.
That’s the whole principle of the path. You try to develop thoughts and feelings that lead to an end of suffering. And as for the ones that lead to more suffering, you learn to let them go. It’s all very basic and commonsensical, but most of us don’t like to think in terms of common sense when it comes to the mind.
We want something more magical. But magic doesn’t work. What works is the common-sense approach that looks at things as they happen in the mind and notices the difference between skillful actions and unskillful ones — and teaching yourself to choose the skillful ones.
Now, some of the principles as to what’s skillful and not can be taught. For instance, you’ve got the precepts. If you kill, it’s going to be unskillful. If you steal, if you have illicit sex, if you lie, if you take intoxicants, it’s going to be unskillful, it’s going to have a bad effect on the mind. These principles are true across the board. But there’s a lot more going on in the mind than just those actions. And to see the principle of cause and effect in the mind as it applies to those more subtle things, you have to be very observant, develop the qualities that allow you to be observant."
Common Sense
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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