November 21^st, 2025

Crossing the Floods

A way of talking about transcendence, liberation or however you conceive of a spiritual path, is to use the metaphor of 'crossing the floods.' Interest in deep change gets triggered by the feeling of being swept along by events; by the sense of being overwhelmed by, and even going under, a tide of worries, duties and pressures.

That's the 'floods.' And crossing them is about coming through all that to find some firm ground. It takes some work, some skill, but we can do it...

Our experience is a meeting and merging of external and internal currents of events...At times the internal activity... can amount to a volume of overwhelming proportions. Then the experience of overload develops into one of exhaustion, or of a pressure in our lives that diminishes peace and joy and can incline mind to either the temporary oblivion offered by drink, drugs and entertainment, or a need for therapy to find some ways to manage the daily round./

This is the loss of balance that we can rightly experience as being flooded. it isn't the world per se, nor is it that we are chronically unbalanced; it's just that the right relationship hasn't been struck.

On the other hand, we may have had an experience of aware stillness in which the concerns of the day and all those habitual inner activities stopped or abated. Perhaps it was in the presence of a natural wonder, or maybe it was in a temple, or under a night sky, where we felt for a moment lifted by awe... In such an experience, the world around us changes to a place of beauty or spiritual presence...For a moment, without creating or rejecting anything, we experienced a shift both in terms of our self and the world around us.

Now if we were to find a method of experiencing such shifts and stopping on a regular basis, we could examine that sense of stopping and know that...it's not oblivion, but a vibrant stillness. It's as if the mind had been crinkled and folded in on itself, and now it has unfolded. An underlying restlessness and tension that we hardly noticed because it was so normal, has ceased - and with it, our normal sense of what we and the world are has changed for the better.

This 'unfolding' to a wider and deeper sense is what we call 'transcendence.' We change, and our apparent world changes. In terms of the previous metaphor, it is an emergenc from the floods.

Ajahn Sucitto, Parami, pp.11-12