Our whole complex world is only this: changing sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touch and thoughts and feelings. In practice we make the effort to be aware of our direct, immediate experience of life...And as we do this , we come to understand more and more clearly ...the three basic characteristics of all created phenomena: suffering, impermanence and selflessness.... The realization of these characteristics can cut through all grasping and goals and can guide us to wisdom in all spiritual experiences....
Jack Kornfield ( page 171)
Huh?
What we define as the world is simply our perception, is it not? How we pick up the stimuli around us with our senses and how the mind makes sense of it is what the world becomes to us, right? It is an indirect, filtered and selective experience. We try to take the ever changing stimuli and mental activity that occurs moment to moment and make something solid and tangible out of it. We pull in that which is pleasant, push away or stuff down that which is unpleasant and ignore the neutral. The world becomes then, not a direct experience, but a story we tell our selves.
As we practice experiencing life directly...not with just our senses, not with our thought or feeling but with awareness, we notice, allow and even appreciate the suffering, the impermanence and we see the impersonal nature of all of it. The seperate self , we realize, is just a part of the story.
When we realize that what we really want and need is a direct experience of all that is beyond the selective and discrimatory mechanism of sense perception, thought and feeling, we begin to awaken.
Suffering
By seeing for ourselves how much suffering there is in our own experience and the experience of others we are opening up to a fundamental truth. Suffering is a part of our experience. We can come to this truth by directly observing our own experience and noting how much dissatisfaction, pain, discomfort, frustration, sadness, lonliness, judgement, aversion, fear etc we "suffer". We can then see how that is the experience for all of us. Most importantly, we can directly witness how we close off to that suffering, how we do whatever we can to avoid it, resist it, push it away, numb from it. When we see how we run from suffering, we see how much that further impacts our living experience in a negative way. We learn then to stop pretending that suffering does not exist. We stop resisting it and instead learn to turn toward it, to look deeply at it...to accept it, allow it and even embrace it. We, from there, begin to see clearly the second characteristic of all phenomena...impermanence.
Impermanence
Everything around us is constantly changing and eventually dying. Nothing but awareness lasts. We, in these bodies, are constantly changing...our cells are aging and dying off, our thoughts and feelings are in constant flux. The pleasant things we grasp and cling to in order to attempt to create solidity and security, a pleasant life experience...will not last. Our cars will rust, our jobs will go, money will disappear from our accounts, the special beings in our lives will get sick, age or die. Our own bodies will die too. Nothing pleasant lasts. Either does the unpleasant or neutral. Pain and suffering is not permanent either. Nothing in this world of form is permanent. This makes us uncomfortable. We want to believe in the solidity of things so we have something to hold on to. We tend then not to look at impermanence . We close our eyes and minds and hearts to the reality of it and feel great shock and loss when that which we were clinging to, telling ourselves it was "solid", changes or is gone. What we need to do...is look deeply and directly into the nature of impermanence in our own lives. We can learn to let go of that which we could never hold and embrace the ever changing fluidity of life.
Selflessness
There is no entity seperate from the flow of experience, no "self" to whom it is happening. pg 179
Things are not happening to "me". They are not happening to "you". They are just flowing past and through. This "me", "you", "us" is no-thing but awareness, empty and spacious awareness. This "I" we identify as solid and real, is just a concept, a story we tell ourselves and others because we are so attached to the illusion of the "solidity" of things. This clinging, defending and attacking for the sake of this illusion causes so much suffering. When we explore deeply the questions, "Who amI?" in meditation, we can sense the deeper awareness beyond that thought form...and this awareness is not a single entity. There is no "self". It is simply awareness, aware of its own nature.
The answers for our suffering are not out there. We just need to look deeply and directly at our life experience to learn what is true.
All is well!
Joseph Goldstein & Jack Kornfield (2001) Seeking the Heart of Wisdom. Shambala Classics: Colorado.
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