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Attention in Reaction
That evening Siddhartha entered progressively deeper states of attention. The traditional accounts describe how Mara, the demon of obsession, tried to distract Siddhartha and bring him back into the realm of reaction and confusion, where Mara held sway. He first tried to distract Siddhartha with desire by sending his daughters, in the form of beautiful women, to seduce him with affection, relationships, and sexual pleasure. Understanding that all experience, no matter how pleasurable, comes and goes, Siddhartha remained in attention. Mara tried anger next, sending armies of demons to the attack. Siddhartha saw the demonic armies as the play of mind, so the rain of weapons arose in his experience as a rain of beautiful flowers. Siddhartha then saw that the source of suffering was emotional reaction to what arises in experience. He saw that reactivity is based on the misperception that the "I" exists apart from experience. When he saw through the misperception, it dissolved completely. In that moment, Siddhartha became a Buddha, a person who has awakened from the sleep of unawareness and reactive patterning.
To wake up is hard. We must first realize that we are asleep. Next, we need to identify what keeps us asleep, start to take it apart, and keep working at dismantling it until it no longer functions. As soon as we make an effort to wake up, we start opening up to how things are. We experience what we have suppressed or avoided and what we have ignored or overlooked. When that happens, the reactive patterns that have run our lives, kept us in confusion, distorted our feelings, and caused us to ignore what is right in front of us are triggered. They rise up strongly to undermine the attention that is bringing us into a deeper relationship with what we are and what we experience. When we can see those patterns and everything that is constructed out of them as the movement of mind and nothing else, we begin to wake up.
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The information on these pages is excerpted from Ken McLeod's book, Wake Up To Your Life.