Aparuta tesam amatassa dvara Ye sotavantu pamuñcantu saddham |
Entering the Deathless
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| These days there are many people in
the West wanting to know how to get enlightened or how to be liberated from suffering. Nibbæna,
liberation, freedom: all these words imply an ultimate realisation in which we break
through the delusions that we have about ourselves and the world that we live in. This realm that we're in is actually a very painful one to be born into. Being human beings on planet Earth entails the experience of sensation: it's sensitive, and so it's painful. We have to live with pain, anguish and despair, grief, loss, and separation from the loved; we have to bear with irritations, aggravations, frustrations and miserable situations. There's the ageing the body goes through and the variety of pain and sickness, disease, death. All this is a part of this realm. This is normal, I'm not complaining about it. I’m not saying that it should be any other way; but as long as we seek to attach to and identify with this realm of the body, the feelings, the perceptions, mental formations, and the sense-consciousness, then we create more suffering around its natural unsatisfactoriness. When we investigate this realm that we're living in, it means we refrain from making value judgements about it. We are not complaining about it or imagining we can somehow transform the conditioned realm into something that would be permanently better, permanently more beautiful, or permanently more pleasurable. In Western Europe over the past fifty years there's been an enormous effort put forth in trying to create that kind of materialist world of luxury and stability. Yet although the materialist and hedonistic approach goes into all kinds of extremes, still, even at it's very best, it can't really fulfil us. |
