..续本文上一页ound the sensations, the fears of what will happen if you don”t do something about the pain. If you sit here for the next hour, is your leg going to fall off

　　 Will you harm the tissues of the body by cutting off the blood

　　 The mind can build up all sorts of stories about the sensations, but instead of looking at the stories and getting caught up in the story line, just look at them as words coming through the mind without your having to believe them. Simply watch the stories as inpidual words. Then you begin to see that if you cling to the story line, you make the pain worse. So why cling to it

　　 You don”t have to follow the story line. It”s not a movie you”ve paid to see. You”re not missing anything important if you don”t follow it through to the end. So what you want to do is take the suffering apart into its component parts and locate the clinging that turns those component parts into the suffering. If you take each component part on it”s own, it”s not all that bad. The aggregate itself is not suffering. There can be a pain in the leg but we suffer simply because we identify with it, we lay claim to it as ours. That”s why we suffer. Without the act of identification, without the clinging, there would be no suffering. The mental label that says “mine” or “my pain,” “my leg,” or whatever: What happens if you drop it

　　 You don”t have to think it. There”s nobody forcing you to think it. There”s simply the force of habit. And habits can be changed.

　　As you take the suffering apart into little bits and pieces like this, it”s a lot more manageable. Many times the pain may still be there, but there”s no suffering. Or sometimes when you”re not worked up about it, the pain actually goes away. Some physical pains are physical in their causes; others are more mental in theirs. Even physical pain has its mental component, as the mind chooses which sensations to focus on and which ones to ignore, which ones to downplay and which ones to magnify with its stories and running commentary. You can see this mental component clearly when you stop the commentary, or when you just step back and watch the commentary as you would something curious, and say “Well, why would I believe that

　　”, and suddenly the suffering goes away. Whether or not the pain is still there, the suffering is gone. That”s when you see that the issue was not the pain but the unnecessary suffering you created by clinging to these feelings and perceptions. When you see clearly the things you”ve been clinging to, and that they”re not really worth clinging to, the suffering breaks down. The mountain is leveled and pulverized into dust. When you”ve mastered this skill, that”s the end of suffering.

《The Components of Suffering》全文阅读结束。