When we decide to respond to or initiate an interaction with our environment, we have already stored away a large number of fixed action patterns, some learned, some innate and refined down by experience, which save us a lot of energy because we don't always have to figure out afresh how to do things. We accumulate habitual and automatic ways of doing things, from brushing our teeth to even having an argument. They are not wrong. Without them it would be difficult to function at all. But if we don't have any awareness around these conditioned responses, we become very rigid and limited.
So the first element of the training the Buddha advocated is to become more aware of how all of this functions. The second element is to become more skilful about how we work with it, to try to use our awareness to find ways to weaken and perhaps finally abandon those habits that we recognize as being harmful or not helpful, and to reinforce the skilful ones. As we become more adept at this the burden of our conditioning becomes lighter, and our ways of getting involved in creating our reality become more skilled and more flexible.
Then we can increasingly use the inner space we have gained to question the whole process. How much of my experience is constructed? How am I involved in constructing it? Do I have any authority over it? If so, which kinds of construction are useful, and when? Are there times when I can let go of constructing, and to what extent? What is a less constructed reality like? Is it possible? Is it possible to let go of constructing altogether? What would be left then? By letting go of the mental activities involved in construction, is it possible to get a glimpse of what the Buddha referred to as the unconstructed?
Ajahn Abhinando
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