We live and breathe each moment in not-knowing and mis-knowing. Not knowing how things really are, how experience really is. Misknowing things and experience as other than what they really are. Suffering is the norm. Dissatisfaction is the underlying basis of suffering. How so?
Time and Suffering
We suffer our thoughts. Thoughts of the past. Thoughts of the future. Thoughts of the present are nothing other than thoughts from the past projected into and misconceived as such. Thoughts of the future are nothing other than projections of the past misconceived as original thoughts of the future. All are products of the past, that is memory. Both thoughts of past and future occur in none other than the present that remains unseen, unrecognized, and denied. Thoughts of the past induce grief, sadness, sorrow, discouragement, and despair. Thoughts of the future invite anxiety, worry, fear, terror, and paranoia. Suffering is this present and real to us. Our thought life is saturated with suffering. We suffer our thoughts.
Beliefs and Suffering
Suffering our thoughts also stems from being deceived into erroneous ideas and beliefs. Charismatic speakers easily hypnotise our untrained minds into the hallucination and delusion of their deceptive thoughts. These thoughts constitute wrong or false assumptions in their reading of scriptural texts. When we imbibe these ideas and beliefs, we condition our thought life into stories that take us further away from reality and deeper into the abyss of false ideology or dogma. Ideology or dogma is but a product of thought reiterated and reified, condensed into what appears to be real and concrete when it is actually nebulous and without core, like a painting in the sky. This hypnotic fixation of thought usually does not end well. Suffering, often dense and thick, becomes our lot. As a case in point, the prosperity pseudograce false gospel is one of these insidious deceptions that harm humanity. It must be avoided like a plague and demolished by truth in love.
Hidden Dynamics
Looking deeper into this suffering, what can we see and know? Why do we think incessantly and uncontrollably? If we stay with this question long enough as we acutely observe our present immediate experience, what can we realise? Can we see how we have come to find this very present experience unbearable? Even when there is nothing overtly pleasant or unpleasant, we find this moment unbearable. It feels unbearably boring and useless, as if we must be doing something exciting or useful all the time. This has a lot to do with our social programming. But that aside, how does this moment present itself to us?
This moment presents itself to us, to our obscured and unclear minds, as sheer dissatisfaction. Our habitually obscured mind seeks desperately to escape this very moment into something more interesting. Hence, thinking — projections into the past and future. This very moment hides an even deeper secret: the inescapable dissatisfaction of change and dissolution, that brute fact of this moment’s inability to fully and permanently satisfy or fulfil us. For each moment disintegrates before our very eyes. Whatever arises is already disintegrating in that moment of arising. No permanent grounding or fulfilment is possible in the midst of this untamable flux. There can be no grasping at the quicksand of content-based experience.
The content of experience is the totality of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, thought, feeling, emotion, and intention. None of these is reliable or controllable as a source of lasting satisfaction. Objects of experience disintegrate momentarily. So does the assumed subject that experiences each object. The imagined self that subjectively knows it’s object of experience is but a thought that breaks the seamless flow of knowing into parts that do not truly exist. Both the knower and the known are in the knowing that is itself devoid of being anything whatsoever. The presumed subject-object duality of experience is none other than a superimposition of thought on a stream of ephemeral and ungraspable experiencing. Everything everywhere all at once is simply flux. The only constant is not any “thing” but the sheer unborn aware-ing that is the nature of each and every moment of pure experiencing. Be just that.
Way Out
Hence, beneath our suffering thoughts is an inescapable reality — the moment-by-moment disintegration of all things and all experience. This constant flux of ephemerality is seen only by a highly sensitive, deeply intelligent, and singularly attentive mind trained in mindfulness and clear seeing. When seen, one realises the futility of clinging to anything or any moment at all. That very clinging results in suffering. For every moment of experienced reality is dissolving uncontrollably and is thus utterly unreliable as a source of lasting satisfaction. Dissatisfaction is the very nature of experience. Denying this nature will only end in suffering. Rationalizing this away with self-concocted or internalised stories will only add to and not reduce our suffering in the long run.
The only way out is in. We learn to let go by seeing how we hold onto thoughts. This is more a process of unlearning than it is learning, unlearning how we cling and hold onto thoughts, how we identify with and fixate on them for our blanket of security. This means to revert our attention inwards in order to see and to know dissatisfaction for what it is, embrace the momentary processual nature of what is, and rest content in the sheer uncontrollable and egoless nature of experienced reality. Only then can freedom dawn. For this to happen, we need to train our minds. But this training is not a matter of ordinary conditioning or programming but an uncommon process of deconditioning and disassembling. We allow our minds to return from their hypnotic fascination with thoughts to come back into the very source of all thoughts. Coming home from our adventure in experience, we can finally return and rest in the empty ground of being that is also the timeless dance of becoming. Naked and free. Sheer joy.
Let us not suffer our thoughts any longer. It is time to come home to the heart of prayer, the essence of meditation, the first and last word beyond words. Freedom as such has no name. Like the Dao, it is an in carved block and an empty valley.
