..续本文上一页aving for being. Notice how much on retreat we are being something or someone

　　 Sometimes there is a feeling of being kidnapped by the memory; we find ourselves back in time. Or maybe it is a future possibility; in thought, there is the sense of being a person - of becoming - through anticipation and expectation. If we are not aware of that, then our attention will be pre-occupied, kidnapped by a constant level of stress in the mind. Then there is vibhava tanha, which is a repression. We have a lot of ideals about what we should not be and what we should not have. Vibhava tanha is the desire to get rid of those things.

　　Kama tanha is the craving for sense pleasure. Around the body there is a lot of kama tanha. We like comfort in this body, we don”t like arthritis or pain; yet one of the lessons in this life, for some seemingly cruel reason, is that we need to witness to bodily pain. That is part of life. So, on the social level, we deal with the pain. We find some Chinese herbs or get the acupuncturist to poke us, whatever we have faith in; we work on that level. But, on the Dhamma level, we reflect: there is sickness. Why is there sickness

　　 Because there is birth. That is just the way it is - like it or not. So sickness is something which needs to be learned about, as is pain.

　　On a retreat you get pain; I hope you don”t get too sick or painful, but you will probably feel some pain in the knees or the back, or somewhere. So there is pain, and there is craving for comfort; that is a basic, fundamental instinct which needs to be understood. Now if one can understand the craving for non-pain and be at peace with pain, then one obviously has done oneself a great service. So try to use the feeling of pain to examine craving, to understand the wanting and see the end of wanting. The same holds true for the emotions and the way sense-consciousness works.

　　The Buddha encouraged us to consider how human consciousness and the human body are involved with pleasant, unpleasant and neutral feelings and sensations; to use feeling (vedana) as a framework for contemplation. When you are thirsty, you drink a glass of orange juice; it is pleasant. When you are sitting here and your knees hurt, that is unpleasant. That is very obvious. So no matter what you are finding pleasant or unpleasant - the body, the weather, a person, or your own mind - notice the feeling of pleasant-unpleasant-neutral; consider attraction-repulsion-neutrality.

　　When we are not in touch with Dhamma we often don”t consider these fundamental states of mind. We just enjoy the pleasant and try to minimise the unpleasant - which seems like a logical thing to do. But then that keeps us very restless, because no matter how hard we try to do this, there will always be pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. Sense-consciousness is this way.

　　Seeking the pleasant, trying to be rid of the unpleasant is samsara. The more we do this, the more we want to do it, and the more we have to do it. We become addicted to this way of operating. We get into this very restless phenomenon called rebirth – becoming, doing, all the time. And this takes us away from our real home. This takes us away from the unconditioned, because pleasure and pain are always conditioned. As they change, we feel the need to change. As we grasp pleasure and pain, we find ourselves being spun around the samsaric wheel.

　　The wheel is one of our traditional images. The rim of the wheel represents sense experience - the contacts we experience, pleasant and unpleasant - all of it spinning around. Grasping the rim of a wheel simply wrings us around with the general momentum. So grasping the pleasant, then trying to hold onto it and afraid of losing it, we make tremendous effort to keep it going; or getting angry at the unpleas…

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