Motivation by ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu

 Motivation by
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu

"Awakening doesn’t just happen. You have to have the desire for it. We hear stories of spontaneous awakening, but the question is, is it really awakening? Psychologists talk about what are called “neurotic breakthroughs,” where people have been struggling through a really dark period in their lives and then, for one reason or another, it snaps. That really oppressive mind state, that really oppressive state of becoming that they’d been maintaining, had gotten so heavy and so unbearable and so unmaintainable that they just finally dropped it and experienced a great release.

But the question is, what did they awaken to? When the Buddha awakened, he awakened to understandings about intention, action, cause and effect, skillfulness, lack of skill.

In the process of reaching the deathless, he really did have to take apart bit by bit by bit very subtle and very pleasant states of mind, very subtle mental activities so that he really understood what it was to act, what it was to condition something. That way, when the genuine unconditioned came, he really knew that it was unconditioned.

With neurotic breakthroughs, though, you usually come to just another form of conditioning that, in contrast to where you were before, seems very bright and very light. It’s like going from a very dark room into one that’s extremely bright. Because you’re so blinded by the light, you don’t see any objects in the room. You think there’s nothing there, just this incredible light. 

But you’d have to stay with it for a long time to begin to realize, as your eyes begin to adjust, “Oh, there are objects in the room.”

So this is one of the big paradoxes of the practice: We want to get to a state that’s unfabricated, but we really do have to fabricated strong intentions and strong desires to get there."

Motivation
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/CrossIndexed/Published/Meditations11/101101_Motivation.pdf