The day begins, and thousands of impressions pour in through our senses. Some of them we notice, most of them we don’t, and a few get our attention for a while.

 

We sometimes don’t notice that we are choosing our experience. Not by conscious intention, but most of the time, by habit. We see what we usually see. Our experience is filtered by our expectations, and we do not notice our participation in creating the content of our reality. 

 

If we cultivate a frame of mind that says “same shit different day,” that will begin to define our experience, no matter the content of the new day. If you are angry and habituate to being angry, you will find things to be angry about. This may be obvious if you watch the news. The targets of the anger change, but the flow of anger does not.

 

It may be less obvious that if we are tuned in to the blessings and miracles that rise around us continually, we will see more of them. We will not be like the lost Gurdjieff traveling far in search of the miraculous, looking in strange places where it can never be found. We will not be like the poor boy wandering the roads of India in ancient times, begging for food, seeking his lost, half-recalled inheritance — only to discover that his dad had sewn it into the lining of the coat he had been wearing from the start of his journey.

 

As we look around, it is sometimes difficult to fathom how people can see what we see and see something totally different. It is perplexing and sometimes terrifying to note that people soak themselves in cruelty and poison and delight in it, or fail to see magnificence and bomb it.

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, though lacking as a role model, could be pretty sharp when he had his thinking cap on. And I think he had it on when he wrote his famous note in the margin of his copy of Shakepeare’s “Othello.” Coleridge wrote the note to explain why Othello’s buddy Iago tricked Othello into murdering the person he loved the most, a person who loved him completely, too. Iago’s act seems inexplicable, one of completely senseless evil. Coleridge scribbled in the margin of the play:

 

“The motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.”

 

He was describing the imbecilic Nietzschean delight in the exercise of power over another, which depends not for grievance or even gain on its selection of a target, but only on a convenient opportunity to act. Justification follows conception, if the act is pre-meditated. Justification for the act comes after the fact, if the act is impulsive. But in neither case is the justification for the act the cause of the act.

 

The cause of the act is mental habit. What we can call a karmic propensity. A tendency to act based on long habit of acting that way.

 

There are people prowling the night looking for the bodies of strangers to have sex with. Does it seem the best type of life to everyone? Does it to them, after a while? But still, some do it, and some do it when it brings misery instead of pleasure, and some do it till they die of it.

 

The call to hate appeals to many people who already have hate in their heart, and now have a convenient object toward to direct their pre-existing mental state. This feels elevating to them. They are filled with purpose. Their once formless and disturbing hate now gives them a place in the world.

 

Glimpse the grannies stuffing their social security checks into slot machines on the back wall of a convenience store on Route 66 in the desert at midnight, and you will see the force of habit in action.

 

Watch a nurse move through a children’s burn unit and see the care and kindness she pours into each baby, and you will also see the force of habit.

 

It is a two-sided force: what you see is the result of an accumulation of habit, and it is establishing a habit, forming the cause for future acts of the same kind.

 

The good news is, we can choose our mental habits, so we can determine the course of our life.

 

With an agitated mind, these mental habits are difficult to change. Just like when you are speeding in a car, it is much harder to change direction than when you are going slow.

 

Sometimes we change course by “hitting bottom” with a sudden shock that allows our mental filters to dissolve, and the scales to fall from our eyes, as we have insight into the habits that are guiding us, insight into the self-imposed cause of our suffering.

 

Sometimes we can change our mental habits without that terrible medicine. Sometimes the insight can come in quiet and stillness, in the presence of a teacher or a teaching which directs our mind to the path that puts an end to ignorance. A path which, if we follow it scrupulously, leads to the end of suffering for ourselves and others forever.

 

The path is: treating ourselves and others decently, settling down and seeing clearly.

 

Those three parts of the path are described in thousands of volumes of the traditional Buddhist canon. This path has been travelled infinite times by living beings. And we do not have to study the whole library to find the trailhead. We can take the first step now.