Equanimity

Having equanimity doesn't mean that you don't have emotions or that you don't feel emotions.

Having equanimity means that when you experience unpleasant emotions and cravings, you let yourself feel them without trying to stop them and without judging them: without thinking they are bad, and not thinking you shouldn't feel them. You don't create secondary emotions such as: "I don't like this feeling." "I shouldn't feel like this." "It's bad to feel like this." "This feeling means I failed." etc. Judging and secondary emotions can be very subtle so you may have to make an effort to notice if they are present.

And having equanimity also means just observing emotions and not getting drawn in by emotions: not getting lost in thought or carried away by emotions (trying to solve the problem or planning a reaction or thinking about how it is unfair etc. etc.).

When you just observe without rejecting, judging, or getting drawn in, the emotions seem like they are not yours, your ego is disengaged, you suffer much less.

Having equanimity doesn't mean you don't react to situations; it means you respond with compassion and reason rather than selfish emotions.

In summary, having equanimity means you feel the emotion, you don't try to stop it, you don't judge it, you don't get caught up in it, you just observe it.

• Judging and secondary emotions can be subtle so you might need to make an effort to notice if they are present.
• If you feel tense you can try to relax.
• If your mind wanders you can bring it back to feeling the emotion.
• Remember, the situation is not causing you to suffer, your reaction to the situation is causing you to suffer.

It is easier to have equanimity if you are relaxed and your mind is calm.

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Copyright © 2024 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Disengaging the Ego

Unpleasant emotions can be hard to let go of. If you examine unpleasant emotions, you may notice that there is usually some involvement of the ego. You might feel that if you could somehow disengage your ego then you could let go of the emotion and you would suffer a lot less.

There is a way to disengage the ego. It is easier to learn to do it while meditating, but the disengagement persists for a time after a meditation session, so it can be helpful in daily life. And with practice, disengaging the ego becomes easier to do.

This is one way to disengage the ego:

1. Relax and meditate to quiet the mind.

2. Then notice an unpleasant emotion, let yourself feel it.

3. Try to see clearly how the ego is involved - so that you understand disengaging the ego, letting go, would eliminate the emotion. But at this point you probably feel stuck, you can't let go.

4. Then try to relax. That probably that won't change much, you still feel stuck, until the next step:

5. Add an extra ingredient.

   I don't know exactly what to call this extra ingredient, probably the best way to describe it that will get someone close enough to figure it out for themselves is to call it metta. But it is not exactly metta, it is metta/humility/forgiveness/tranquil-happiness/freedom/compassion. It is the feeling of letting go, the feeling of letting go of your ego, the feeling of having your ego disengaged.

   When you do this correctly, the ego disengages, you let go of the emotion.

   I think many people who meditate will recognize this feeling, but you might not think of it as ego disengagement. I know this feeling very well, it's what I mean when I say, "When I am fully relaxed, nothing bothers me". But I had to experience it in the right context to see that is ego disengagement. If you follow the link and master that practice, you will understand what this "extra ingredient" is. When you do that practice, first your body starts to feel numb or tingling, then that feeling becomes more intense, then you feel like you are floating, and that becomes more intense, then you experience a transition (your ego becomes disengaged) and nothing is bothering you. If you experience that transition while focusing your attention on an unpleasant emotion, you will see that your ego has been disengaged.

I don't know how easy or hard this will be for any particular person to figure this out, but once you see how to do it, you can practice it and get better at it. The disengagement persists so you have to wait until it fades before you can try to produce it again.

In Buddhism, the first stage of awakening is called stream-entry. The main ingredient in stream-entry is the loss of identity view. Identity view is the belief that the self is a thing. When you are able to disengage the ego, you implicitly recognize that the ego is something that can be turned on and off or engaged and disengaged. The ego is not a thing, it is not a permanent entity, it is some type of process - it is one of the various unconscious processes that produce mental activity ie. thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experiences, and also the sense of self (the ego). When you can disengage the ego, it is loss of identity view.

Loss of identity view doesn't mean you don't have emotions, it means you don't identify with them. When the ego is disengaged, you can let go of emotions more easily, and you can stay mindful more easily. When you are mindful of emotions, you don't react to emotions by pushing them away or judging them or suppressing them and you also don't get lost in thought or carried away by emotions in response to them.

The other factors in stream entry are loss of doubt about the teachings and loss of attachment to rites and rituals. Loss of attachment to rites and rituals is interperted to mean that you stop looking at meditation as some type of magic process because you see how it really works. So, learning to disengage the ego also involves loss of these other two factors, you understand how meditation helps you end suffering, and you have no doubt that it really works. Therefore, learning to disengage the ego is one way to attain stream-entry.

The process of learning to disengage the ego more easily over time so that you can keep the ego disengaged for longer and longer periods of time in daily life is part of attaining higher stages of awakening. In order to keep the ego disengaged in daily life, it is necessary to be mindful in daily life so that you can stay relaxed and notice when the ego becomes engaged and then disengage it.

Another part of attaining higher stages of awakening is letting go of attachments and aversions. Disengaging the ego allows you to let go but it doesn't automatically rid you of attachments and aversions. It doesn't eliminate your habitual reactions that have been reinforced over a lifetime. You still have to observe the activity of your mind to recognize attachments and aversions, and you have to decide to let go. Letting go means learning to relax and accept your emotions rather than reacting to them with in unmindful ways - you don't push emotions away or get carried away by them. Letting go may feel like letting down your barriers and expanding your borders. It may feel like your self is dissolving.

It can be hard to figure out how to accept emotions. It becomes easier if you understand that an unpleasant emotion is resistance to a fact of reality that we don't like. It's a lot easier to accept a fact we don't like than an emotion because if we understand a fact is the truth, then there is really no alternative but to believe it, ie. to accept it as truth. If we understand an unpleasant emotion is simply our resistance to an unpleasant fact, then if we can accept the fact as a truth, then when we accept the fact, there is no more resistance to it. It can be helpful, when you experience an unpleasant emotion, to identify the fact of reality that you are resisting, and remind yourself that what is really the problem is your resistance to the fact that, "reality is not the way I want it to be".

In Buddhism, those at the highest stage of awakening are said to experience nirvana with remainder. Nirvana is the absence of suffering. That there is remainder means it is not complete absence of suffering. This is because a complete elimination of suffering is not possible due to the limitations imposed by being a biological organism.

Related Reading

Despite the common perception that awakening is a sudden and mystical experience, for many people, maybe the majority of people, awakening is not sudden and not mystical.

Man on Cloud Mountain - Shodo Harada Roshi-Segment

Often enlightenment or kensho or satori is considered to be some kind of unusual experience or something external or some kind of special phenomenon. But it’s not like that. There may be some kind of sudden revelation or some kind of sudden perception, but its not something that is that unusual or that strange or foreign that we come upon or that comes upon us. What it is, is the ability to see without any interruption of the ego, without any filtering of the ego. And since we are all walking around seeing things through our ego filter almost all the time, to suddenly be able to see without that filter is a surprise. But it is nothing that we have ever not had.

On Enlightenment – An Interview with Shinzen Young

When it happens suddenly and dramatically you’re in seventh heaven. It’s like after the first experience of love, you’ll never be the same. However, for most people who’ve studied with me it doesn’t happen that way. What does happen is that the person gradually works through the things that get in the way of enlightenment, but so gradually that they might not notice. What typically happens is that over a period of years, and indeed decades, within that person the craving, aversion, and unconsciousness—the mula kleshas (the fundamental “impurities”), get worked through. But because all this is happening gradually they’re acclimatizing as it’s occurring and they may not realize how far they’ve come. That’s why I like telling the story about the samurai...

Enlightenments By Jack Kornfield

There is also what is called the “gateless gate.” One teacher describes it this way: “I would go for months of retreat training, and nothing spectacular would happen, no great experiences. Yet somehow everything changed. What most transformed me were the endless hours of mindfulness and compassion, giving a caring attention to what I was doing. I discovered how I automatically tighten and grasp, and with that realization I started to let go, to open to an appreciation of whatever was present. I found an ease. I gave up striving. I became less serious, less concerned with myself. My kindness deepened. I experienced a profound freedom, simply the fruit of being present over and over.” This was her gateless gate.

Uposatha Sutta - The Dharmafarers, themindingcenter.org

Even so, bhikshus, just as the great ocean slopes gradually, slides gradually, inclines gradually, not abruptly like a precipice — so, too, in this Dharma-Vinaya, penetration into final knowledge occurs by gradual training, not abruptly.1

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Give Yourself Permission to Have Emotions

When something happens and you feel an unpleasant emotion or craving, you may react to that emotion with more unpleasant emotions. This creates a type of feedback loop. (For those who are interested in dependent origination, step 12 feeds back into step 6.)

For every time a situation triggers us, we trigger ourselves again and again, because we don't like having unpleasant emotions, (especially if we practice meditation because we want to become serene and we feel anything that is not serenity is a kind of failure). This is one reason it is so hard to let go. And it focuses our mind on the situation so we get more triggers from the situation. 

But you can interrupt the feedback loop when you give yourself permission to feel bad (allow yourself to accept/welcome your feelings without rejecting them or pushing them away) and while also maintaining mindfulness (not judging, not getting drawn in: your thinking mind doesn't start wandering, and you are not carried away by emotions).

The suffering caused by negative reactions to emotions is usually what is causing the vast majority of our suffering. The resistance is really the problem not the actual emotion. When you accept your emotions with equanimity, you experience a great sense of relief. Unpleasant situations are much easier to endure when you stop making things worse by beating yourself up over how you react to them.

And it isn't just unpleasant emotions and cravings. There are often emotions that in themselves aren't unpleasant, but we might not like to have them for various reasons so we react to them in an unpleasant way. This often happens if we feel an emotion that doesn't reflect our values, for example if you think of yourself as a spiritual person but you feel excessive pride, or someone else's misfortune makes you happy, etc. These types of emotions can set up the same type of feedback loop, where one emotions results in other unpleasant emotions.

By giving yourself permission to feel all your emotions, by making it okay to let yourself feel what you feel, you can experience your emotions to their full depth, explore layers of emotions and associated reactions. You can get things out of your system (let go of them) by letting them express themselves.

Doing this, in a sense, is losing identity-view because we stop protecting the "self" from insult and injury. We stop reacting like the self-image is a physical thing when it is only an image projected by the unconscious processes that produce all of our thoughts, emotions, and impulses. When you give yourself permission to feel all your emotions, it is like removing the ego filter.

Developing the habit of observing the mind and learning to notice the sensations in your body that accompany emotions can help you learn to notice emotions more easily.

When you notice an emotion you don't like, it can help to say to yourself in a relaxed way:
"It's okay to feel _____".
Try not to push away or judge the emotion, also try to observe how it feels in your mind and body while staying mindful, ie. without getting lost in thought or carried away by emotions.

Saying "it's okay" is a way of saying, "I experience relief from struggling against a fact, by accepting a fact as a fact. Resisting the facts of reality just makes things worse than they have to be. It is much nicer to have equanimity than to be upset - being upset doesn't help."

Saying "it's okay" is not to be understood as giving yourself permission to do anything in response to a situation or emotion, and it is not to be understood as encouraging yourself to repeat anything in the future, it is to be understood only as a reminder to experience your emotions with equanimity and mindfulness. (Equanimity is not pushing away, not rejecting, not judging and mindfulness is not getting lost in thought, not getting carried away by emotions). When you react to situations with equanimity and mindfulness, you are just taking your ego out of the equation. This will allow you to formulate a response to a situation with compassion and reason rather than selfish emotions.

In addition to emotions, you can fill in the blank with physical sensations and situations as well as emotions. You can also include things that are pleasant but that you might react negatively to. Accept with equanimity anything that produces a negative reaction (disliking or craving). Accept the situation and your reactions with equanimity. Try to notice different aspects of the situation that might be upsetting you and accept all of them.

When you notice unpleasant emotions arising, if you look closely you can usually see that the ego is involved. There is almost always something that offends the ego or threatens the self-image that is responsible for the unpleasant emotions. By accepting situations and emotions, giving yourself permission to have unpleasant emotions, you are disengaging the ego. You are teaching yourself to turn off the ego filter, to look at things free from identity-view.

When you accept everything with equanimity, you experience a great sense of relief. Unpleasant situations are much easier to endure when you stop making things ten times worse by beating yourself up over how you react to them.

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Copyright © 2024 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Observing the Three Characteristics

On an internet discussion forum, someone asked if it was okay to notice just the impermanence aspect of the the three characteristics. This is roughly how I replied:

If you just study for example your car rusting, you might not get much out of it. If you look deeper you might get some insight into how your egoistic attachment to your impermanent car leads to suffering. The three characteristics are interrelated and studying one usually involves all three. By just focusing on impermanence and not looking deeper, I think you would be missing something important.

If you are observing the three characteristics because 1) you want to gain insight into the cause of suffering and the end of suffering as explained in the four noble truths and the eightfold path, and 2) if you want to gain insight into anatta because the main ingredient in stream-entry is loss of identity-view, I recommend first calming the mind with some type of samatha practice so you can focus your mind, and then, in meditation and daily life, observe the activity of the mind (thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experiences, and senses of self and no-self).  If you do that you will see a lot of dukkha, impermanence, and anatta.

Knowing what to look for in particular can help so I will also suggest:

Notice dukkha arising and fading and notice how the ego or attachment to the self-image is involved in the arising of dukkha.

Notice how things pop into awareness by themselves, uninvited: thoughts distract you, you have unwanted emotions, and impulses are often unhelpful. Notice how the activity of the mind operates on cause and effect one bit of mental activity leading to another and another through associations, memories, and reasoning, until something sets it off on a new tangent - without any entity in control. Notice that different bits of mental activity sometimes work at cross purposes or undermine conscious goals, (for example people crave rich foods while hating to gain weight). 

Notice how the sense of self, the feeling of being an observer, an experiencer, a doer, a sufferer is no different than any other thought or feeling. And notice how the sense of self changes in different situations and as your emotions change.

(Most people already know a lot of this and therefore most people already have a lot of insight into anatta. They just don't connect the dots. To connect the dots you have to see it operating in your own mind over and over along with the connection to dukkha arising. Then you get disenchantment and attachments begin to fade. Some people have a sudden insight, but for many people it happens gradually.)

If you do this you will be studying dukkha, impermanence, anatta, and dependent origination.

More here:
https://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/meditation.html

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Copyright © 2024 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Stop Making the Story About Yourself

As you experience various situations in daily life, you will tend to think about how the situation affects you, and about how you relate to the situation. This creates a story about you, a story where you are the main character, the victim or the hero. Most people are constantly making stories about themselves. This perspective on reality is what causes suffering.

If you observe the activity of your mind, the stream of consciousness, during meditation and daily life, you will see this happening, you will see how you make yourself suffer by making everything about you. When you understand how you make yourself suffer, you will also understand how to stop it.

You will see that when you stop making the stories about you, when you stop taking everything personally, when you stop focusing on yourself, when you stop thinking "I don't like this", "I don't want that", "I want this", I like that", when you stop making yourself the central character in everything that happens, you stop making yourself suffer. But you need to experience it from inside your mind, you need to feel how one way of thinking is suffering and how a different way of thinking doesn't make you suffer.

Mindfulness can help people give up the habit of making themselves the main character in every story. When you are mindful, your mind is in the present moment, you are just aware of what you are doing as you are doing it. You are not imagining, your mind is not wandering, you are not carried away by thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experiences, etc, you are not making stories about you that cause you to suffer. Then, when dukkha arises, you can see how you have caused it by making the story about yourself. But if you change the story, let go of that plot, think about the situation without yourself as the main character in the story, you don't suffer. This requires just a tiny change in perspective, a relaxation, a letting go, (not a lot of analytical thinking, not anything mystical, not anything non-dual), and you don't have to suppress anything - just notice the difference in how you feel. The point of mindfulness is not to concentrate the mind as a means of suppressing thoughts and emotions etc, the point is to provide a contrast where dukkha is absent so that when dukkha arises, the contrast is clear and when you return to mindfulness that contrast is also clear. Meditation that is relaxing can also help provide a quiet mind that helps you to maintain mindfulness and experience the contrast.

And then, when you are not making the story about you, you can respond to situations with compassion and reason instead of selfish emotions.

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Copyright © 2024 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Observing the Mind

In an internet discussion on stream-entry, I posted an explanation of a way to cultivate vipassana (insight) and how vipassana fits into a Buddhist practice of meditation and mindfulness. I have included an edited version of the post below. The Buddha taught his students to cultivate two qualities of mind samatha (traquility) and vipassana (insight). Cultivating tranquility involves relaxing the body and calming the mind, vipassana involves observing the activity of the mind. By calming the mind first, one is able to see more clearly what is going on in it without getting distracted or carried away by thoughts, emotions, impulses, and sensations.

In this post I am going to discuss what is contained in the early Buddhist texts of the Pali Canon, the earliest recorded teachings of the Buddha. Other writers have different views and different definition of stream-entry. I don't have an opinion on which is better or if others are better at something different. Also when I refer to "suffering" or "unpleasant emotions" I mean reactive emotions which are emotions that occur as a response to thoughts or situations.

One of the marks of stream-entry according to the Pali Canon is freedom from doubt about Buddhist practice. When you have stream-entry you understand how the practice leads to the end of suffering. There are many things people confuse with stream-entry but there are some things that clearly indicate you don't have it, and if you have doubts, you don't have it.

Another mark of stream-entry is freedom from identity view. Freedom from identity view means you don't think the self is a thing. There are a lot of different types of experiences that people have where they feel like they don't have a self. Not all of them are useful. Some are interesting or fun to experience but not really useful or worth maintaining. The ones that are useful involve ending suffering. So if it helps you ease your own suffering then you should have no doubt about what what to do with it, how to use it.

In Buddhism, in the Pali Canon, it is taught that letting go is the seventh and last factor that is required for awakening. Letting go of attachments and aversions is a cause of awakening.

Freedom from identity view also means you are not attached to anything that could be interpreted as "me" or "mine" for example: your life, you body, your mind, your thoughts, your opinions, your family, your possessions, your house, your car, your social status, your ethnicity, your nationality, being smart, getting what you want, winning, being better than someone else, etc etc.

So when you are able to let go of all attachments and aversions that might be considered "me" or "mine" including all those I listed above, you will be free from identity view.

The way to let go of attachments and aversions is also explained in the Pali canon (in the anapanasati sutta). You meditate to calm the body (steps 3 and 4), emotions, and mind (step 10), then and only then, when your body, feelings and mind are calm - this includes producing joy (piti step 5), tranquil happiness (sukha step 6) and gladdening the mind (step 10), you observe the mind. I recommend this type of meditation as preparation for observing the mind:
https://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2020/08/preparing-for-meditation-with.html

One method of observing the mind is to observe the activity of the mind in meditation and with mindfulness in daily life.

• Observe thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experiences and the sense of self. Sensory experiences include, for example: seeing, hearing, touch, smell, hot/cold, pain/pleasure anything you experience with your senses outside or inside your body. The sense of self is explained below where its constantly changing nature is explained.

• Notice the physical sensations in your body that accompany emotions.

• Notice how suffering arises in the mind when emotions occur in reaction to situations, thoughts, or memories.

• It is easy to see that disliking and not wanting are unpleasant, but also notice that liking and wanting are unpleasant. Wanting something you don't have is unpleasant. Worrying about losing something you like is unpleasant. The feeling of impatience is unpleasant. And the feelings of regret and loss after a pleasant situation has ended are unpleasant.

• Also notice how your ego is involved in so many unpleasant emotions.

• Notice that your sense of being successful depends on getting what you want/like and avoiding what you don't want/don't like, and so your ego, your sense of self, is involved in liking, wanting, disliking and not wanting.

• Also notice how your sense of self (identity) is constantly changing. From one moment to the next you might think of yourself as a student, or a friend, or a parent, or a worker, or a manager, or a music lover, or a musician, or a person of your nationality or ethnicity or a sport fan, or an athlete, or someone who engages in a specific hobby, a winner, a loser, smart, stupid, better, worse, etc. etc. Your identity, your "self", is not a constant unchanging thing.

• Notice there are different ways of experiencing self. Notice how they change from time to time. Some of them include:
  • How you feel about yourself, the kind of person you think of yourself as, pride, shame, winner, looser, smart, stupid, knowledgeable, ignorant, angry, tolerant, happy, sad.

  • The kind of person we think others see us as.

  • Our place in society: child, parent, student, employee, supervisor, member of a team, friend in a group of friends. Our nationality or ethnicity.

  • Notice how your self as an entity that exists is defined by everything we experience, our thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experience, bodily sensations, and sense of self all define how we view our self. These are all changing constantly from moment to moment. Moment to moment awareness blurs into an impression that there is a continuous self even though that awareness keeps changing from moment to moment so the feeling of self is constantly changing.

• Notice even the feeling of being an observer as well as any other feeling of self is just like any other thought or feeling. It is not separate from the activity of the mind, it is not separate from experience, it arises into awareness from the same unconscious processes that produce other thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experience, bodily experiences.

• Notice that every time your mind wanders in meditation it shows you that you don't control your own mind. If you can't control it, if it is independent, how can it be you or yours? And if you can observe it, it must be outside yourself, it isn't you. Your thoughts emotions, impulses, and sensory experiences arise from unconscious processes unasked for, uninvited, they are not you or yours. Even if you feel like you are using your mind to solve a problem, where did the impulse to solve the problem come from? You might think you are just an observer but that sense of being an observer, the sense of self, is just like any other thought or feeling, it arises from unconscious process, it isn't you or yours. Buddha called consciousness a magicians trick.

• Notice your stream of consciousness, notice how thoughts emotions and impulses form a sequence of cause and effect, each one triggering the next. Experience each to its full depth, then let go. Try to see how decisions to move your body are made. Asking where did this [thought/emotion/impulse] come from? Somehow it all seems to function autonomously.

  This is how we get fooled into thinking there is a continuous unchanging self. When we don't look closely it feels like there is a self, when we look closely at the activity of the mind we see there isn't any "self" we can find. We make an assumption that we are in control, we assume it is our will that is the cause, that the self is the will, but when we look closely we see it is just cause and effect operating autonomously.

  And if all is cause and effect, if we can't find a self, then the idea of separation is meaningless, if there is no self, there is no other.

  But the illusion is so strong, attachment to self is so strong, so ingrained in our thinking and behavior, that even though you can see how the illusion forms, you can still suffer from attachments and aversions because of its influence.

  Recognizing the link between the illusion and suffering helps to weaken the attachment, disenchantment with identity view weakens its hold on us. When you observe dukkha arising in the mind, and see how identity view: the ego, the sense of self, the sense of self importance, egocentricity is involved, and how getting what we want and avoiding what we don't want is central to our belief that the self is a success or failure, that helps to weaken the attachment.

• Notice that when you relax, emotions fade, suffering fades, without anything being suppressed. Suffering, mental anguish, is a state of mind, when the mind/body is relaxed it is not in a state of anguish. If you're not sure how to relax, try taking a deep breath, or try breathing in a way you find relaxing. Also try to notice if there is muscle tension in your body and move those muscles a few times to release the tension. You can also do relaxing meditation to help relax and let go of emotions. If you can't relax, try metta or piti or sukkha.

When you observe these things, you are observing the three characteristics (suffering [dukkha], impermanence, and not-self) which helps you to develop detachment that leads to letting go. And when you do let go, when you relax instead of letting thoughts, emotions, and impulses take over your mind and body, you are interrupting the chain of dependent origination.

By practicing this way, you can learn to gradually let go of attachments and aversions and this leads to the end of suffering. In the Pali Canon (in the Satipatthana Sutta) it is also clear that after awakening you still have to practice meditation and mindfulness in daily life - calming and observing the activity of the mind and letting go of reactive emotions. When the Buddha taught mindfulness he says (paraphrasing) "a monk dwells practicing like this..." and goes on to describe meditation and mindfulness techniques. The Buddha and the monks lived practicing meditation and mindfulness. It becomes part of life, it is not something you can stop after some attainment. Buddha never stopped practicing meditation and mindfulness in daily life or ever indicated a stage during life when you could stop it.

By "the end of suffering" I mean you do not suffer from reactive emotions. You are experiencing nibbana with residue. The "residue" is due to the fact that you are still in a body. You will feel pain and unpleasant sensations. Some emotions like some kinds of anxiety and depression are caused by biological factors that mental techniques cannot eliminate. However, when you are non-attached, you will find you have a quiet contented feeling that you dwell in during which there is no mental anguish. In this situation, in the absence of mental anguish, pain is much easier to bear and those emotions that remain seem more like physical sensations than a cloud over reality, so they are much easier to bear also. Whether it is possible to master this to 100% perfection is a matter of controversy. My view is that it might be possible for some people so I don't rule it out. Most people today do not practice the full teaching of the Buddha and it is not realistic to expect to attain 100% perfection in that situation. But even short of 100% perfection, this practice is immensely beneficial to well-being.

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Copyright © 2023 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

The Present Moment

If you want increased freedom from dukkha, increased freedom from the fetters, you have to stop wanting things to be different from the way they are now.

That means you have to accept the present moment as it is, embrace it, abide in it, relax into it. Including the dukkha and the fetters. "Everything's perfect just as it is".

When you meditate on see, hear, feel, you learn to observe dukkha thinking, fetter thinking, to accept it, and to gently extract your mind from it, to gently let go, and you train your mind to abide in the present moment instead.

In time you become intimately familiar with the difference in the two modes of consciousness and you can feel how dwelling in the present moment is liberating.

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