..续本文上一页 to get rid of my discomfort" is all coming from our ego. And maybe we have to accept that sometimes it works. But with a broader, longer-term perspective we see it is not really successful. We get temporary relief, temporary gratification, but no real resolution of it. At the very least a more friendly attitude allows us to come a bit closer to some of this stuff with a more open, receptive, peaceful attitude.

　　Take something practical, like physical pain for example. Who likes pain

　　 If you like pain you”ve got to be a masochist. Every sentient being with feeling, every conscious being, whether it is a human being or a mosquito, does not like pain. It is like an instinct: get away from the pain! Well, if you do hurt yourself, do put your finger in the flame, you don”t even stop to think about it: "This is painful, I should move my finger". It is an automatic reflex. Sometimes you do not even actually register the pain immediately, but then there is a reflex and then "ouch, my finger is burning". First there is some kind of a reflex action.

　　Body more Intelligent than Mind

　　I have this theory – which is more than a theory I guess – a belief maybe, that our body is much more intelligent than our mind. Not that it could pass an IQ-Test, but I mean the body is first of all very simple. Our mind is just complicated so it has to go through all these various channels of nerves to figure out: "hey hey, your finger is burning!". But your body just responds.

　　Once I had a little accident up the mountain here. I was walking on a steep slope and I slipped. Suddenly I was sliding out of control faster and faster down the slope heading for the precipice. As I was sliding down my brain was thinking how to get out of it. But separate from my thinking process, for some reason my body just rolled over to the side of the rock and as I slid over this ledge I landed on the only piece of flat ground in the whole area -- just big enough for two feet! I immediately came to a stop and stood there in disbelief. What

　　! I was not even thinking to tell my body to roll over right there. But somehow it just did it automatically and I stood there with a kind of wondrous disbelief, shaking a bit.

　　It has been several times like that: when one is really pushed to the extremes, when the mind cannot think anymore, but the body somehow knows what to do. And many times these situations show that there is another way of relating to reality. If we are left with the usual way that our mind thinks, we are hopelessly over the precipice, goodbye! But there is a different way of relating.

　　The same with the so-called "negative" and the so-called "unpleasant". If, for example, we notice some particular pain in the body, if we try to see it in a new way, if we are able to look at with more collectedness -- which means that the mind does not spin out to all the old memories about it, all the fantasies that might happen -- we can perhaps begin to experience it in a different way. And if we add to that more of an open, peaceful and friendly attitude, we can change the whole perspective of how we relate to these things.

　　Reality Subjective

　　What happens is that we usually pide up reality quite subjectively. In reality there are no pleasant or unpleasant; I mean in the real reality. Each one of us makes up our own personality: "I am the one who says that is unpleasant, I am the person that says that is pleasant". That is what accumulates this part of the personality. And so we get a whole backlog, a whole set of things that are unpleasant and pleasant, then we keep reinforcing that, feeding that. And when there is any kind of threat that some of that stuff will be contacted, resistance comes up. That way is simply making it an enemy, our enemy, and all this stuff is our enemy.…

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