The Urgency of Spiritual Life

Merely postponing practice quickly becomes a habit. The longer one waits for the “right moment”, the more firmly the pattern of waiting becomes entrenched.

Meanwhile, spiritual practice operates in the present moment. When one acts today, one already begins to change habitual mental patterns. Therefore, even a small step now is more beneficial than a grand plan for an indefinite future.

Time cannot be saved. Therefore, act now — so that later “there will be no painfully regret for years lived aimlessly”.

Urgency is not haste. It is the readiness to begin practising right now and to maintain discipline thereafter.

Dependent origination reveals a simple truth: nothing arises by itself. Everything emerges from conditions. When causes are present, a result appears. When conditions change, the related circumstances change too — and at that very moment, a new set of causes and effects arises.

Therefore, one cannot wait for a perfect moment. The perfect moment does not arrive separately from causes. It is formed by the actions we take now. If we cultivate clarity today, it becomes the condition for clarity tomorrow.

Such a perspective makes practice very concrete. We are not fighting an abstract laziness. We are simply changing the conditions that support laziness, distraction, and postponement.

Virtue does not exist separately from a person’s actions. It shapes one’s subsequent life, serving as the cause of inevitable consequences. When the mind becomes mindful and filled with loving-kindness, both actions and life itself transform. Five fundamental precepts:

• To abstain from taking the life of living beings.
• To abstain from taking what is not given.
• To abstain from false speech, gossip, harsh words, divisive talk, and idle chatter.
• To abstain from sexual misconduct, including intimate relations with minors or those incapable of consent.
• To abstain from intoxicants that cloud the mind.

Endowed with this righteous restraint in life’s faculties, one experiences invulnerable inner happiness.

The Five Aggregates — form (body), feeling, perception (recognition), mental formations (thoughts), and consciousness — when properly understood, help one realise what constitutes what we call “self”. These five aggregates change constantly and non-linearly. Therefore, no fixed “self” as an unchanging essence is to be found here. It simply does not exist.

In order to form right views of the world here and now, meditative practice can be of great help. If we proceed from the premise that all our experiences are impermanent processes, then our personality is likewise a process of change. Moreover, correct observation of all five aggregates requires mindfulness of that observation at the very moment of their manifestation.

Clearly, such impartial observation weakens the mind’s clinging to things as “I”, “mine”, or “my self”. Through the practice of mindful breathing, one clearly sees that feeling passes, thought changes, and the self-image does not remain fixed. This makes inner work more honest, gives rise to right views, and subsequently, right mindfulness.

Urgency does not require perfect conditions. It requires only one thing — to begin with an accessible step. This might be five minutes of silence, a few mindful breaths, or a brief observation of the body.

Having abandoned doubt, one dwells beyond doubt; freed from uncertainty regarding wholesome qualities, one purifies the mind of doubt.

Mindful practice develops gradually. First, one notices the body in the body. Then one sees feeling in feelings. Next, one observes mind in mind. Finally, one contemplates phenomena in phenomena and begins to see the entire process as a whole.

Thus, practice becomes the Path leading first to right mindfulness and right concentration, and then to true liberation of mind. It does not require perfect conditions. It requires only attentiveness to the breath (body in body, feeling in feelings…) and the readiness to begin.

The six spheres of perception, through the six sense faculties, create the experience of living through six types of consciousness: visual consciousness, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, and mental. Each sphere opens its own channel of sensory connection (mind-contact) with the world.

It is precisely here that the obviousness of urgency can manifest most clearly. One need only be truly attentive to one’s sensations and mindfully note these states of “mind-body”. Contact of each sense faculty arises, as a rule, separately at each moment in time (here and now). Reaction also arises in a single moment. Therefore, attentiveness (mindfulness) is needed not “sometime later”, but at this very moment of contact between “mind-body” and the things of the world in existence.

For example, you hear a sharp sound. Immediately afterwards, tension appears. At once, the mind begins to construct a certain “story”. If, through right mindfulness, you notice this process earlier — at the moment of contact — a certain pause arises.

Such non-emotional moments provide the opportunity to arrive at right thoughts, letting go of wrong ones in that very moment. Thus, mental formations of effort function.

He guards the faculty of mind; in the faculty of mind he attains restraint.

Beginning today is beneficial for one simple reason: each step changes the next. That is, right action here and now leads to wholesome consequences. First, one’s attentiveness (mindfulness) improves. Then, intentions (motivation) change in the right direction. If these impelling causes lead to right actions and speech, then, correspondingly, the quality of life of the practitioner changes as well.