Suffering - Part 2 (or The Lightness of Being)
Continuing from last week's 'becoming happier by learning to suffer better', the book 'The Science of Meditation', opens a chapter with the sentence:
"A 5th Century Indian sage Vasubhandu observed, "So long as you grasp at the Self, you stay bound to the world of suffering."
While most ways to relieve us from the burden of Self (because it is a burden) are temporary, meditation aims to make this relief from Self a more permanent state of being.
Our everyday way of living can be in stark contrast to our meditation practice. Our nature is to rush around, make to-do lists, have many and constant thoughts streaming through our minds, some of them negative, fearful, angry. Then we build on that, creating something which seems ever more solid. These are "my" thoughts / feelings, "my" perceptions, from which "my" opinions are formed, which makes "me" a (-fill in blank-) kind of person.
We feel it is very important indeed to maintain Self, remain strong in our opinions, explain our points of view, have people agree with our way of life, lest we 'compromise' ourselves, our integrity. Perhaps become a doormat.
After some time of meditation we automatically come to the realisation that our Self, which is doing the perceiving, thinking, feeling, and which to us seems very real, is really an optical illusion of the mind. This shift of perspective, this loosening of our concrete perception of Self, is one of the main aims of meditation.
The ancient scriptures use the analogy of a chariot to describe the illusion of Self. The concept of a chariot (or car) arises when we put together - in a certain format - the wheels, the axles, the chassis, the body, the wiring, etc. The chariot or car does not exist except when this combination of parts is put together in that certain way. You might take some parts of a car and make a wheelbarrow. But put these parts together in a certain way, and what we think of as a car manifests.
Similarly, our Self is made up of parts. The ancient scriptures describes the Self as an "aggregate, a collection or grouping of parts" (called Skandas) We have 5 skandas which, together, make up a person's physical existence: Form (body), Sensations (or feelings, received from form), Perceptions , Mental activity or formations, and Consciousness.
Our Self is merely made up of a temporary grouping of these 5 aggregates, each of which are "not I, and not myself", and each of these parts, alone, is empty, without substance.
In meditation, we say that suffering arises when we identify with or cling to one or more of the 5 aggregates. Our suffering stops when we stop clinging to our Self. It stops when we stop clinging to our body, our sensations, our feelings, our perceptions, our mental activity and our consciousness.
M
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