In What You Need, I explained that to structure peace, you need to change your conditioning. That to do so, you need to become aware of the conditions giving rise to your behavior.
The natural inclination when faced with this advice is to think about your behavior — to reflect on it. Change does require thought, but to craft an effective strategy you must first directly experience the behavior, not just think about it. Examine the behavior in the wild. Otherwise you risk reflecting upon an image, not the real thing.
So — choose a behavior to observe. For example: “I’m going to pay attention the next time I lose my temper.” When it happens, approach the behavior with curiosity. What’s going on here? Observe your experience in that moment as you would in meditation. What thoughts arise? What physical sensations are there? And so on.
When you repeatedly pay that kind of attention to a single behavior, patterns appear. You begin seeing the early signs of those patterns before you are taken over. Now, use your brain. How can you redirect your experience right when the earliest signs arise, and avoid the worst of the behavior? This is where the effort to change your conditioning comes in.
You are conditioned to act one way, but if you come up with an alternative plan and execute that plan when those conditions arise, your default behavior can rapidly change. The key is to find an action that will occupy as much of your attention as the default behavior would have. Choose something constructive.
Plan for the next time. Set an intention. It’s only with an intention for how you will act under certain conditions that you can tell whether you’re doing the right thing.
What did I fail to do?
When?
Why?
What am I going to do about it?
It can seem too difficult. Like the chaotic conditioning we’re wrestling with is too powerful. But presume that progress can be made, kindness can be shown, and good pursued under any extrinsic condition. No matter how tough the torture, how few the resources, or how dire the circumstances, the whole universe surrenders to a mind that sets a strong intention. To a mind that is still.
Nonetheless, chaos dismantles structure. And the forces of chaos are powerful. We need base conditions under which progress can be made. We need awareness of what conditions are present, when they are absent, and what we do to create or undermine them.
Trained and aware, planning carefully, we can combat chaos and structure our lives towards peace.