Best Way to Deal with Whatever

The most skilful way of dealing with this or that is dealing with it is in the present moment with present moment mindfulness. There is no point thinking about the aspects of past that we cant work with in the present moment. Similarly, there is no point in worrying about the future or the results. 

In order to be effective, our whole focus must be in the present moment. Right here and right now is where the action is done, which is going to shape the future. Future comes from what mind is doing at present, right here and right now.

This does not mean that contemplating about past or future is never helpful. For example, its often helpful to contemplate the cause and effect relationship of our past experiences, which enables us to learn from our mistakes and develop beneficial actions further. Similarly, we often need to make decisions and plan for the future in order to do something skilfully. 

However, whether its contemplating the past or the act of deciding or planning for future, it is all happening right in the present moment, and that is where the focus should be while contemplating, deciding or planning. We can work the best when we have present moment awareness.

Mindfulness of our intensions, motivations, thoughts, feeling, reactions to those feelings as the result of habitual patterns – working with all this in the present moment is the best way to deal with whatever.

Only when we can catch our biases, habitual unskilful thoughts and habitual reactions to the feelings in the present moment, can we spot our judgements based on emotional preferences and not react by making wrong decisions with wrong motivations.

Next is to develop wisdom in order to distinguish skilful from unskilful. Skilful is what is truely beneficial and leads to long-term happiness for ourselves.

Tagging with 'Likes' & 'Dislikes'

When either of our 5 senses/mind, their respective sense objects/mind objects and consciousness come in contact, feeling is produced. Either this feeling is that of pleasure, displeasure or neutral.

Based on the pleasurable / unpleasurable feeling produced, our tendency is to immediately get either attached / repulsed by it respectively.

Based on this attachment / revulsion towards the feeling we often form a view about the sense experience - 'I like it' or 'I dislike it'. The extent to which we do this, is mostly not noticeable unless we develop our mindfulness to a certain extent and notice our subtle swings in mood with each sensory input. We do this very subtly and almost habitually.

Why so?

We have probably developed this mechanism in order to gain pleasure and avoid displeasure - after all only by tagging it all and remembering it, can we know what to peruse and what to avoid in future.

And often it does seem to lead to pleasure when we get what we want or are able to avoid what we wish to avoid.

Downside

If we look closely, we find that the more tags we have, the more it creates long-term unsatisfactoriness, anxiety, fear, grief, greed, hate, etc. All these harmful states of mind arise so as to:

     -       get what we 'LIKE' and avoid what we 'DISLIKE';

     -       maintain what we 'LIKE' and continue avoiding what we 'DISLIKE';

     -       not lose what we 'LIKE' and not gain what we 'DISLIKE';

Sometimes, we notice that the amount of anxiety, fear, grief or unsatisfactoriness is not worth the momentarily pleasure we get once in a while.

Furthermore, we create wrong views. The information stored in our memory about ‘LIKE’ or ‘DISLIKE’ is obsolete. We often can’t recall clearly why we took some decision, or arrived at some conclusion, or the reason of our liking/disliking something, yet we feel safer to rely on our past memories and tags that we had set for our future reference. But we must investigate how unreliable this potentially could be. For certain things it might not matter that much, however, some other things that we are habitually doing and is causing misery for us or others, needs such investigation.

Life didn't come with a instruction-manual

Training our minds in right direction, we are sometimes confused about what to do in what scenario. We want to know all the steps to follow for all the possibilities that can exist.

But mind is very dynamic (dependent on varied causes/condition which are ever changing), so there are countess possibilities. Therefore, its good to have a attitude of EXPERIMENTATION. We might not know which button to press exactly in all situations, but we learn in the process. We learn what CAUSES lead to which EFFECTS and how changing the causes change the effects. Important is to always keep the observer (mindfulness) intact while doing the experiment.

Like someone asked: "what do I do when I get angry - Observe/Substitute thoughts or Observe Feelings?"

Well, it doesn't matter so much what you apply, as much as if mindfulness is fully intact, you will learn something or the other.

eg: from Thought Substitution: You see cause-effect (how changed thoughts lead to changed result) and thus are not-self.

eg: from Observing Feeling: You notice feelings are impermanence and not-self.

eg: from Observing Body: You learn about how mind and body are interconnected and interdependent.

eg: from analysing the cause of anger: You might see where your attachment lies.

eg: from Observing thoughts and poking your self a question- 'from where did I get this way of thinking?': You might see how your thoughts are conditioned by people, society, culture, media, your habitual patters of thinking you have developed, your assumptions of reality, etc.

...When you get good at this, you can even start playing with your thoughts, by replacing them with thoughts that are more aligned with the reality or are more beneficial and see the effects it has on feelings, body, etc.

So, its not about "knowing beforehand" what to apply to our minds, but working with our mind real-time, tending to what our mind needs at that time. It is similar to how we read the child and see the situation before deciding how to deal with him/her: you are liberal at times while strict when needed; one way of dealing/strategy doesn't suit at all times.

Personally, when my mind goes out of control, I have tried this 5-fold strategy to control my mind. Then when I am in a controllable situation, I gather my mindfulness to observe/investigate anything that I think would be relevant at that situation. If I see thoughts are overpowering, I don't investigate them. The very fact the thoughts are overpowering means that my mind is full of delusion. So if I investigate from that state of mind, I will only condition my thinking further in a wrong direction. So, I observe other objects of mindfulness. In case of anger, changes in body are very apparent and therefore very interesting to observe. So, we can choose the most apparent/interesting thing to observe at that moment which captures our attention. Its easy to maintain our attention on something that is apparent/interesting to us. On the other hand, always deciding beforehand what to observe when this or that emotion arises, would be very constraining/limiting if not forcing/suppressing.