"May all beings abide in peace and equanimity, their minds free from attachment and aversion, and free from indifference." - David Michie
There's the challenge of Buddhism for me, right there. It has been hard for me to comprehend how releasing attachment and aversion can lead to anything but indifference. I have always fallen more firmly on the side of Paganism, simply because of my lack of desire to give up desire itself. For all my love of stillness, silence and solitude, equanimity has felt like a giving up of delight, pleasure and pride in sensual experience. "Simplicity" has felt like denial or even sensory deprivation - a sacrifice of essential imagination and a de-valuing of colour and art. These things I have not been prepared to abandon.
But the apparent paradox of Michie's prayer or mantra shows the cloud in my thinking. I cannot think it but folly to disdain the physical world; how then shall I see past my perception of indifference and into that fierce joy of non-attached physical being?
There's the challenge of Buddhism for me, right there. It has been hard for me to comprehend how releasing attachment and aversion can lead to anything but indifference. I have always fallen more firmly on the side of Paganism, simply because of my lack of desire to give up desire itself. For all my love of stillness, silence and solitude, equanimity has felt like a giving up of delight, pleasure and pride in sensual experience. "Simplicity" has felt like denial or even sensory deprivation - a sacrifice of essential imagination and a de-valuing of colour and art. These things I have not been prepared to abandon.
But the apparent paradox of Michie's prayer or mantra shows the cloud in my thinking. I cannot think it but folly to disdain the physical world; how then shall I see past my perception of indifference and into that fierce joy of non-attached physical being?