20241021 - 15:35
I’m sitting here, reading teachings of the Dhamma. Question your intentions, they say. Work on establishing a continual and general mindfullness of your presently enduring situation. What are your feelings, right now? What are the intentions behind your actions? What is here, in a general sense, right now? So I ask myself, and I answer. I am sitting on a chair. I feel my body relaxed, although there is a slight discomfort in regards to my food processing. I feel anxious in a very broad sense about my life situation, and there is both fear and doubt in abundance if I look underneath that anxiousness. From this anxiousness, I am reading the Dhamma. From the desire to find answers, to lessen my anxiousness and presently enduring discomfort, I am involved with reading. It is a reaction. It is not working with Dukkha, with the liability-to-suffer. It is an attempt to rid myself of discomfort, to ease my current situation. It is rejecting pain, and walking towards pleasure.
So I look beneath, and I dwell alongside it. Alongside the discomfort, anxiousness, fear, and doubt. There is no resolution to it in terms of doing something that will rid myself of these feelings. Such a thing would be highly temporary. Until they arise again, born from a new object. This is not the direction of the path. They are here. I am here. Together, we are. Acting from a desire to be rid of them, from the rejection of pain and craving of pleasure, we reinforce the structure that holds us liable to suffer. Dukkha. Instead we work on the basis upon which suffering arises. Why are we liable? Why is it that even though ‘suffering’ might not be presently enduring as such, it could arise? And is this could not exactly Dukkha itself? The constant situation of managing; of fearing that it might arise, of trying to push it off as long as possible, and trying to extend its absence? Is not this itself the burden?