“DD” BECOME AN ISLAND
(The Dhammapada) With earnest meditation, purity of mind, and compassionate acts of kindness, you will become an island of serenity which even the greatest floods cannot sweep away.
The folly of the mind is apparent when you choose to look at it. The endless blabber of thoughts can be like flood waves approaching dry land, whose mission is not to maliciously destroy, but whose effects are destructive and continual for those who choose not to evacuate.
When anger comes into awareness, or vanity, or resentments, judgements, positionality, opinions, hatred, anxiety, worry, grief, or any other negative aspect of the mind’s proclivity to fixate, the island of the self feels as if it will be swept away at any moment. However, likened to sandbags spread by a village to keep the flood waters at bay, the gifts of surrender and forgiveness act as shields and eventually levies to protect any island from any storm.
Anger and pride are two aspects of the lower mind which the ego loves to use for destruction. Both anger and pride are like heroin or crack cocaine for the host, highly addictive, which can lead to prolonged use and eventually death for the host if gone untreated.
Meditation is a sandbag when practiced. Purity of mind is a byproduct of surrender and forgiveness, compassionate acts of kindness flow from the person who chooses to look past their thoughts for definition of being human. To become an island of serenity which even the greatest floods cannot sweep away, one must practice these things regularly, not just in times of great hardship.
In the world of sports, the best teams practice as they intend to play. Conversely, it’s easy to see which teams chose to practice as if they don’t intend to play. Surrender, forgiveness, earnest meditation, purity of mind, and compassionate acts of kindness, don’t just happen because you pray for them to be part of what you experience, they protect you from storms when practiced regularly, because they prepare the island before the winds start raging.
The secret to spirituality, religion to some extent, and most definitely self-improvement, is you must put into practice the things being prescribed as beneficial. You must regularly meditate in times of peace as well, regularly surrender over impure thoughts, regularly forgive yourself and the world around you despite your opinions about either, regularly go out of your way to provide kindness for the sake of compassion, and only then, after making these elements part of your regular life, might you have the opportunity to know what it means to be an island of serenity.
If you wait to pray when times are tough, times will never not be tough. If you wait to practice meditation after your mind has run wild with negativity, you’ll stop meditating soon after starting. If you wait to feel like being compassionate, you’ll hate yourself regularly. If you hope to find purity of mind arbitrarily, you’ll remain forever looking for happiness in the illusion of ego.
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