..續本文上一頁r offended you in some way, you can work with that. There are many times in daily life when we can be offended or upset. We can feel annoyed or irritated just by the way somebody walks or looks, at least I can. Sometimes you can notice yourself feeling aversion just because of the way somebody walks or because they don”t do something that they should — one can get very upset and angry about things like that. The person has not really harmed you or done anything to you, like pulling out your fingernails, but you still suffer. If you cannot look at suffering in these simple cases, you will never be able to be so heroic as to do it, if ever somebody is actually pulling out your fingernails!
We work with the little dissatisfactions in the ordinariness of life. We look at the way we can be hurt and offended or annoyed and irritated by the neighbours, by the people we live with, by Mrs.Thatcher, by the way things are or by ourselves. We know that this suffering should be understood. We practise by really looking at suffering as an object and understanding: ”This is suffering.” So we have the insightful understanding of suffering.
PLEASURE AND DISPLEASURE
We can investigate: Where has this hedonistic seeking of pleasure as an end in itself brought us
It has continued now for several decades but is humanity any happier as a result
It seems that nowadays we have been given the right and freedom to do anything we like with drugs, sex, travel and so on — anything goes; anything is allowed; nothing is forbidden. You have to do something really obscene, really violent, before you”ll be ostracised. But has being able to follow our impulses made us any happier or more relaxed and contented
In fact, it has tended to make us very selfish; we don”t think about how our actions might affect others. We tend to think only about ourselves: me and my happiness, my freedom and my rights. So I become a terrible nuisance, a source of great frustration, annoyance and misery for the people around me. If I think I can do anything I want or say anything I feel like saying, even at the expense of others, then I”m a person who is nothing but a nuisance to society.
When the sense of ”what I want” and ”what I think should and should not be” arises, and we wish to delight in all the pleasures of life, we inevitably get upset because life seems so hopeless and everything seems to go wrong. We just get whirled about by life — just running around in states of fear and desire. And even when we get everything we want, we will think there is something missing, something incomplete yet. So even when life is at its best, there is still this sense of suffering — something yet to be done, some kind of doubt or fear haunting us.
For example, I”ve always liked beautiful scenery. Once during a retreat that I led in Switzerland, I was taken to some beautiful mountains and noticed that there was always a sense of anguish in my mind because there was so much beauty, a continual flow of beautiful sights. I had the feeling of wanting to hold on to everything, that I had to keep alert all the time in order to consume everything with my eyes. It was really wearing me out! Now that was dukkha, wasn”t it
I find that if I do things heedlessly — even something quite harmless like looking at beautiful mountains — if I”m just reaching out and trying to hold on to something, it always brings an unpleasant feeling. How can you hold on to the Jungfrau and the Eiger
The best you can do is to take a picture of it, trying to capture everything on a piece of paper. That”s dukkha; if you want to hold on to something which is beautiful because you don”t want to be separated from it — that is suffering.
Having to be in situations you don”t like is also suffering. For example, I neve…
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