An Inside Job (extract)

"One of [the Buddha's] big discoveries is the extent to which we fabricate our experience from within, through our intentions. In other words, we’re not just on the receiving end of the material world. We actually shape the world we live in. The whole point of the path is to learn how to take advantage of that fact — so that, on the one hand, we can shape it well — and then shape it really well so that we can get beyond these worlds that we ordinarily shape and arrive at something that’s really reliable, something really solid.

Yet it is an inside job. You can get advice from outside, but the actual work is something you have to do. This is very different from the materialist’s idea, which is that the material world is real and what you experience, your consciousness of things, is what they call an epiphenomenon. In other words, it’s just a side effect of the real things, which are atoms doing their thing. And the Buddha’s perspective is also very different from the post-modern view that you’re just a product of social forces. Everything you do is already determined by some force outside you, they say. The Buddha resisted those teachings in the forms that they took in his time. Well, we have to resist them again now. We’re not here just on the receiving end. This is why the teaching that mindfulness is just pure receptivity is so detrimental, because it teaches you not to look for what the real problem is, which is that you really are shaping your experience.

Sights come in and there are certain sights that you pay attention to and others that you don’t. You interpret them in different ways. The same thing with all the other input that comes through the senses — and it’s your shaping of that input that makes a difference between whether it’s going to cause suffering in the mind or not. And so there are certain dualities built into this. There’s the duality of skillful and unskillful, and desirable result and undesirable result, because after all, suffering keeps pushing you. Stress, pain, all these things keep pushing the mind, squeezing the mind. And how long do you want to put up with that squeeze? Wouldn’t you rather learn how to shape things in such a way that you don’t have to suffer? The choice is yours. So you have to try to figure out ways of motivating yourself, gaining some discipline over your actions."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "An Inside Job"