A short post today. I walked into a half open door in the night, and got a nasty whack on my eye socket. I’ve been a bit dazed since, but I feel a bit better after a visit to my acupuncturist, today. Should be okay in a couple of days. You just don’t know what’s next. – Christopher.
A river of longing flows, and beings are pleased.
Seeking happiness they attach to pleasure, but get birth and decline.
– Dhammapada, verse 341. Translated Christopher J. Ash
Our wishes, wants, hopes, longings, hungers, and so on, themselves bring pleasure. We are pleased to long. However, the kind of pleasure we are talking about, in answer to Sakka, is the self-defeating kind of pleasure. At root it involves rejection of things as they are, and selfishness – which not only bring conflict, they are conflict.
The teacher says to Sakka that this wilfulness goes with erroneous reflections (vitakka) on self and on life processes. We can see, then that it is here – with concepts – that one’s ego-stances and defences are established. And, it’s here that the holes in consciousness arise. They exist because one depends on erroneous views about consciousness. So, when someone says they feel like there’s an empty, black hole in the middle of their body, I don’t merely take that as poetic talk. It’s very real to the person, and it comes with unconscious feelings and concepts. The experience of a hole; the person’s unexamined thinking; the hidden pleasure, and the longings – these all inter-are. The hole arises as a dynamic complex. If they truly want to end the suffering, they need to become familiar with the dependently-arisen nature of the black hole.
And, next, the Buddha says to Sakka that the underlying support for such erroneous concepts, he says, is the mis-perception of life’s multiplicity (papañca-saññā-saṅkha) – that is, dualistic perception. How to transform dualistic perception, which is the root of distorting desire, is, then, the whole point of the Buddhist work. Until this level is reached, we are without a revolution in consciousness, and our contentment will depend on tinkering with the patterns. One teacher told me once that this was like a person in a movie theatre, up there at the screen with cans of paint and brushes, trying to capture the images onto the screen. The person is not only engaged in a fruitless, messy, conceptual exercise, but they miss the movie.
People encircled by thirst run about like captured hares.
Confined by the bonds of their clinging, they suffer, again and again, for a long time.
– Dhammapada, verse 342. Translated Christopher J. Ash
This dualistic perception makes manifold what is not manifold; that is, via concepts it takes the differentiations (the sentient processes of perceiving differences) as establishing things which are really absolutely, separate. Boundaries are established as really existing, rather than as conceptual. As a result, we lose and misuse the very real power of concepts. This means experiencing without the big-life context – without the wholeness. We miss, for example, the simple fact that what is ‘over there’ depends for its presentation on a consciousness. When we begin our projects of understanding from a reality devoid of the big wholeness dimension, we can only repeat old patterns. We run around in circles. That’s called samsāra.
There is a way out of the violence. Sakka is delighted to hear that there is a dynamic which can be understood, and mastered. This kind of delight is a redirection of the flow of freedom. Thank you, Sakka.