Duḥkha

The Brahma Baharas helped me with this kind of concept that the four of us are goodwill, which is...

the presence of mind that all beings are not stressed with Dukkha.

That's kind of, I don't want to say, I don't like to say wish, but it's cause that's confusing, but it's the intention that, that kind of harmlessness is what you would like to see or that, You have the intention to cultivate the world.

And that kind of goes back to the Karinia Metta Sutta or the Metta that we practice.

So that's goodwill.

Compassion is what we experience when goodwill comes up against Dukkha.

And that compassion, that's what we feel when you know, we come up against a day like 9-11.

It's this intensity of the sense of goodwill coming up against the sense of compassion, which is, oh, I see suffering, but I have the presence of mind to know that it's not mine.

But they can also be met moment by moment.

It's like, well, what would it be like to meet this sensation in the body with Metta? What would it be like to meet these sounds arising in the sound sphere with Metta? What would it be like if we met every single element of anything that appeared in our senses with Metta? What would that be like? How would that experience be? What we're primarily trying to see is that Dukkha, the experience of stress, reactivity, confusion, it's conditioned and it's not pre-defined for us to experience.

And that's our conviction there, yeah.

So just as we've been exploring the energetic imbalances of high and low energy, which can be quite unpleasant and feel, you know, like they're already kind of expressions of reactivity to some degree, and then actually create more Dukkha when we react to them, push them away or grab onto them and sink into them, you know, rather than meet them skillfully.

Then we can take that practicing of kindness and, and non-contraction or opening contraction and take it even further.

So how would it be to meet the painful with compassion? Welcomed, allowed, cared for, given space.

I'm just kind of hypothesizing about that here.

But going back to what we were saying before in terms of seeing the dependent arising of experience and having more freedom of choice, we begin to see how certain experiences are changing are built and constructed and how dukkha specifically, because that's what interests us the most, right? Dukkha, how dukkha is built, how difficulty is built, is constructed.

And as we see that, and as we see the dependency of that experience of dukkha on craving, on the building and the construction of identity, of self, the more we see that, And through the seeing of it, because to see it, we also need to see when it's unbuilt, right? When we relax the craving and there is an easing, falling away of the experience of dukkha and a kind of dissolving and a reduction of the sense of the me doing the thing or me creating and...

and the kind of reduction of that contracted, solidified sense of self.

Quote, unquote.

So the, the kind of bad news is, uh, what-- the word that is used in Eng-- in Pali, sorry, uh, that many of you will know is dukkha.

Dukkha.

Because things are transient, ephemeral, passing, it means that none of the things of the world can satisfy us completely.

Because there, you know, there can be gratification, there can be meaning, richness, beauty, value, you know, there can be all kinds of things, but there's not one thing that will satisfy us completely.