Confidence and ease do not come from control.
It is impossible to cover all potentialities and control every external conditions. In addition, having preconceived ideas about situations limits our natural, intuitive responsiveness to uncertainty.
Confidence comes from the ability to meet, accept, embrace, and respond to the unexpected in a harmless way.
The development of wise awareness brings you there.
First, confidence arises from wise reflection. Then, from acting from knowledgelessness. The development of wise discernment through the contemplation of impermanence will bring the following direct insight: whatever arises, passes away. In other words, any situation, however disagreeable it is, will eventually end up. In sitting insight meditation, you allow phenomena to arise and cease over and over again, and you wait to the point of their cessation. As a consequence, you intimately know that by inviting goodwill, patience, and acceptance, you will be able to endure wisely till the end. Anchored in morality through the cultivation of virtues and knowing the law of cause and effect, you know how to react in such a way that you won’t harm yourself and/or others.
You become centered and grounded.
At another level of spiritual development, fearlessness is established firmly through direct insight into the nature of what builds up our seeming individuality. The knowledge of impersonality, self-concoctions, and the I-making process has been clearly established to the point that there is no fear of losing anything.
Nothing belongs to anyone. There is no one. There is no self in that living body of yours.
When there is no fear of dying to the world, confidence is present at every step. It is sometimes seen by others as arrogance, irrespect, or a lack of good manners, since there is no hesitation in speech or action. It’s just being done.
When the knowledge of the manifested world and the unmanifested has been established, the world is perceived as a dream where things are known to not have inherent existence. Nothing is worth holding onto. Yet, they can be very solid. Both are true.
Purification of the mind is the way. Purification of the heart is the way. Purification of the body is the way.
What’s the price of it? I was asked.
EVERYTHING. The desire to be loved back, to possess, to succeed, to get, to know, to produce, to create, to feel, to probe, to make beautiful, to feed on, to prevent aging, to keep, to make sense of, to convince, to improve. Even ultimately, at the very end, the wish to do good has to be dropped. Yes, even the production of good karma has to cease.
EVERYTHING which is nothing. I cannot elaborate further without any other seeming contradiction. English is not even my mother tongue.
Silence is.
-: 𝙱𝚎 𝙱𝚛𝚊𝚟𝚎 – 𝙸𝚗𝚚𝚞𝚒𝚛𝚎 – 𝙰𝚠𝚊𝚔𝚎𝚗 :-
Nibbana Unplugged 
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