B MIND

"The breath is also a meditation theme that goes along with you wherever you go. As long as you’re alive, you’ve got the breath right here to focus on. This means that you can meditate on the breath and develop alertness at any time and in any situation."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation"

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/////////////// "A person with mindfulness and discernment looking after his behavior is gracious within and without, and maintains that graciousness in a way that never loses its appeal at any time. When we use mindfulness and discernment to straighten out things within us — namely, the mind and its mess of preoccupations — the mind immediately becomes clean, clear, and a thing of value."

~ Ajaan Mahā Boowa "The Four Frames of Reference", transl. Thanissaro

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//////////////////Fear is very useful. It points both to: (i) where our mind is fixated, and (ii) the fact that everything changes and the things we are fixated on have no intrinsic “self”.

Buddhism teaches that we live in a state of delusion. The way things actually are, there is no basis for fear.

The traditional analogy used to explain fear is the analogy of the rope and the snake. In our lives, we are like a person who is in a dark room and we see a snake in the corner of the room. In reality, we are deluded. There is no snake. What we think is a snake is really a piece of colored rope. Nevertheless, we are terrified.

The conventional way to relate with fear is to apply the three poisons. The three poisons are passion, aggression, and ignorance. Passion is the habit of grasping at pleasant things. We might try to collect antidotes to poison or put on heavy clothes that might protect us from snake bites. Aggression is trying to destroy what is fearful and unpleasant. We might try to kill the snake. Ignorance is distracting ourselves and ignoring our fear.

The three poisons don’t work. They don’t get to the root of the problem. We are afraid of death. We try to eat healthy food and hope that if we eat a lot of fruit smoothies, we will live a long time. We adopt belief in philosophies that say that Jesus or the Buddha will save us and that there is a heaven and that death isn’t real. Or we distract ourselves with video games or we get drunk or become workaholics and spend our lives preoccupied.

The only solution that works is to confront fear. We do this through meditation practice. We look into the nature of who we are and discover that there is no intrinsic self that needs protection from death. We are more like a process or a continuous unfolding of experience than we are like a person. It is not that we are impermanent and dying. It is that, in a single moment, we can’t put our finger on exactly who we are. We can’t identify who we are. What we are afraid of losing is an illusion. There is no snake.

Of course, writing this (or reading it) is an intellectual exercise. It is necessary to actually practice meditation and to sit and to look into the nature of fear — to look into what we are attached to and what fear really is. It takes bravery.

///////////////////////Impermanence is part of your perception of existence.

//////////////////////////B When he boiled his teaching down to its shortest formulation, he said that he taught just dukkha—suffering and stress—and the cessation of dukkha (MN 22; SN 22:86)

////////////////////////WAVE METAPHOR X B MIND

A recent bestseller that devoted a few pages to the place of Buddhism in world history illustrated these three understandings of the Buddhist approach to suffering with another image: You’re sitting on the ocean shore, watching the waves come in. If you’re stupid enough to want to cling to “good” waves to make them permanent and to push “bad” waves away, you’ll suffer. But if you accept the fact that waves are just waves, fleeting and incessant, and that there’s no way you can either stop or keep them, you can be at peace as you simply watch, with full acceptance, as they do their thing.

///////////////////////////CLING X UPADANA

To begin with, a lot can be learned from looking at the Pali word for clinging, upādāna. In addition to clinging, it also means sustenance and the act of taking sustenance: in other words, food and the act of feeding. The connection between feeding and suffering was one of the Buddha’s most radical and valuable insights, because it’s so counter-intuitive and at the same time so useful. Ordinarily, we find so much pleasure in the act of feeding, emotionally as well as physically, that we define ourselves by the way we feed off the world and the people around us. It took someone of the Buddha’s genius to see the suffering inherent in feeding, and that all suffering is a type of feeding. The fact that we feed off things that change simply adds an extra layer of stress on top of the stress intrinsic in the felt need always to feed.

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