Amaravati Origins

We use the signs of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and not-self -- anicca, dukkha, anatta -- as reminders of the way it is, not as ideas we put onto life. I think one of the problems with insight meditation (vipassana), as Westerners practise it is that they tend to project the idea of impermanence. People can project impermanence, or unsatisfactoriness, so that they're really conditioning their mind to see everything through their projection rather than trusting in their ability to observe. But these three characteristics of existence aren't positions we take in order to interpret experience, they're reminders, to help us to observe these characteristics as they're happening now. So we're not trying to convince ourself that beauty is unsatisfactory but observing that beauty is attractive, it's "the way it is." We’re not making any value judgement about it; beauty is impermanent, but that's fine. The only suffering you have is when you want beauty to be permanent, then you create suffering around beauty.

Misery and pain are impermanent, but they tend to seem permanent. When you're in pain you’re always afraid that it's going to last forever. That’s a mental state, a hell realm, that you have -- that I have anyway -- when there's physical pain or discomfort or even mental pain. But with intuitive awareness then the mind is in this receptive, non-critical state of embracing the present, the pain or the ugliness or the pleasure or the beauty.

Then our response to it is through accepting it for what it is. It's "like this"; we say that the way it is is "like this." There's no judgement in that, it's a way of reflecting on it. So you start accepting the pleasure you're feeling but not indulging in it, you're really aware of it : "pleasure is like this," "pain is like this," "neutral sensation is like this."

In the silence of the mind then is where the world and eternity meet. That's an interesting reflection for me, I've contemplated that a lot because in the present moment one can be very much aware of the world in terms of the physical sensations of the body, the emotions or the state of mind that one is experiencing. And when that dominates our attention it just goes on and on-- the world has this feeling of endlessly going around and around and around -- and so as long as one's attention is caught up in the body, feelings and mind state then one is just continually processing conditioned experience. And one thing just goes on to the next.