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Liberation from…what exactly? - Bhante Pasanna

The following talk was given by Bhante Pasanna at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on September 29, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Liberation from…what exactly?

I hope you have a nice and peaceful mind now that is not distracted by worldly concerns so we can together explore this wonderful Dhamma of our Lord Buddha. We have this essential topic before us: the topic of dukkha¹. It's really essential to the whole Dhamma project we are following as Dhamma practitioners. In the suttas², of course, this is a frequently used term, central to all our endeavors and understanding of reality.

Sometimes, when several suttas were read, at the end, maybe the discussion got a bit too complicated or too far-leading, and the Buddha would like to summarize it in this simple sentence: "All I formerly as well as now teach is dukkha and the end of dukkha." So we see this is really the main concern the Buddha has in teaching people like us and sharing his vision of peace. There's nothing more in his interest than wanting to show us how to understand dukkha and how to make it stop. If there's any essence of the Dhamma, then we can say that's the essence.

Right now, you might wonder why I leave it untranslated at first and still use the Pali³ term. Intentionally, I want to leave it untranslated at first and want to work together with you to find the actual meaning of this word because it's not all that simple. In my experience, both as a practitioner and as someone who is fortunate and honored to help and guide other people in their meditation, this is actually a serious source of misunderstandings in the Dhamma practice. We don't have a clear picture of what dukkha can mean in which circumstances. The original meaning of the Dhamma can be quite misunderstood if we build up our practice on maybe an inadequate translation of the word.

For example, most of you might be familiar with the term "suffering." If you take that as a given translation that fits all the contexts and situations the Buddha is using this term, the strategy to free ourselves from this might become unclear. As human beings, we already might have a particular own take on this word from a life of experience and usage of language. You already might have charged this particular word "suffering" with a meaning. Now, obviously, I'm not a native English speaker, but when I hear the word suffering, I think of someone maybe crying or in pain and kind of visibly being shaken. Suffering means someone is suffering, and that's not really the full picture of what the Buddha means with this so important term. So it's crucial to concern ourselves with the correct definition of dukkha. For that, we have to look into the context the Buddha is using the term. We have to adapt to the context.

It's maybe a bit of an unfortunate heritage we have from the early Buddhist translators who had this vision to find one universal translation for each Pali term. That was an honorable ambition, but maybe not a useful one. The idea was that if there's one word in the Pali language, wherever it appears in the text, we have to find one translation that is always in use for whatever context it is. That can create some misunderstanding, as we will see. It can be a little bit sad at times to see that people really put in a lot of effort and good intentions in their practice but maybe get this basic, fundamental meaning of this central term in their practice a little bit wrong. We can see how the whole angle of what their practice is aiming towards can be quite distorted, and then maybe the practice goes astray in the worst-case scenario, or at least doesn't go the direction the Buddha intended for us.

I hope we can agree that there is a certain specific outcome of our Dhamma practice as the Buddha intended it. In our modern times, we might think, "Well, everyone is finding their own path," and this is a liberal path of liberation which obviously everyone can choose and find their own way of practice. But if we are interested in the original meaning of the Buddha's teachings, it's sometimes worth taking a while to reflect and analyze. And there's hardly any place where it would be more rewarding than here with our topic about dukkha.

So what is dukkha? We will probe into it now in theory, but after my little talk here, I will try to put it into practice because that's obviously the most important part of it. But theory and practice should work together to get the optimum result. By carefully reading and studying the suttas, we will arrive at the conclusion that the Buddha uses this term dukkha in different contexts, mainly in three different contexts. It's always the same word, the word dukkha is used, but not for the same purpose. So we can almost say this word is something like a homonym, a word that can have different meanings in different situations. Another word that always comes up in translations, in German as well as in English, is the word "right." That would be a good example for such a homonym. "Right" can mean just the direction, or it can mean distinguishing between right and wrong, or in modern days, it can even describe the political views of a person. All is achieved with this one same word.

Like that, the word dukkha for the Buddha is not necessarily always the same; it can mean slightly different things in different contexts. And this context usually, for a keen reader of the suttas, can be deduced from the context of the discussion. Just by studying the suttas, we can arrive at this insight. What these three types of usage of the word are will now be the topic of my presentation. Interestingly enough, there's even a Sutta that talks about three types of suffering. That's actually our main sutta that we chose as the topic for this evening.

A volunteer read the following Sutta excerpt:

Reverend Sariputta, they speak of this thing called dukkha. What is this dukkha?

Reverend, there are these three forms of dukkha: the dukkha of the unpleasant, the dukkha of constructs, and the dukkha of change. These are the three forms of dukkha.

But Reverend, is there a path and a practice for completely understanding these forms of dukkha?

There is. It is simply this Noble Eightfold Path: that is Right View, Right Attitude, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Collectedness. This is the path and the practice for completely understanding these forms of dukkha.

I have to apologize to my English audience whether this funny word "construedness" makes any sense to you. I think it's a word I just invented, but it's just supposed to mean that there's something construed about it, right? Something artificially constructed, just to make clear the meaning of this unusual word.

Now we heard about these basically three types of dukkha. In this case, not the Buddha but the Venerable Sariputta, which is of course a very reliable source of information, shared with us. We find the three types of dukkha I want to go through with you now.

The first was dukkha-dukkha, which is quite commonly agreed upon to mean unpleasant feeling, dukkha vedanā⁴. We can equate it to this unpleasant feeling, or call it the dukkha of unpleasantness. Dukkha is just one part of every human experience, this vedanā, this feeling or sensation. Last time we talked about the five khandhas⁵, I prefer to translate it as sensation. It's basically this emotional evaluation of the contacts we have through the six sense doors. There's a sound, and attention drawn to the sound, and there's ear consciousness arising, and that's what we call ear contact. Then the mind starts to evaluate what is it. Maybe we recognize it as a bird chirping, and then we find that to be pleasant. Or maybe it's the neighbor's TV being noisy again, and then we interpret this as unpleasant. So this way of how we feel about a certain sense contact is what is meant by vedanā. And this vedanā has three possible grades: the pleasant, the unpleasant, and the neutral, somewhat in the middle where we can't really decide which of it it might be. It's not clear how we position ourselves. That's an essential part of any experience, regardless of how deluded or enlightened a person is. This is just how the human mind works, and this is also a basic function of the mind without which we could not make any decisions or have any feeling of what to do next and what we prefer or like and dislike. So it's a necessary part of a human experience.

What we're also very familiar with is the usual reaction we have to an unpleasant feeling. This is kind of, "I don't like it." When it's unpleasant, it means I'd rather prefer not to have it. So there's a natural urge in us to avoid it, and the urge to avoid it expresses itself in a search for the opposite, for a pleasant sensation, for a pleasant feeling that we so much prefer to the unpleasant one.

Now, the thing is, when we hear the Buddha talk about the liberation from dukkha, and all the knowledge we have about dukkha is that it can mean unpleasant sensations, we might slide into a big misunderstanding. "Ah, then the Buddha is talking about getting rid of unpleasant feelings," and that sounds actually quite appealing to the mind because who wouldn't like to have a life without unpleasantness, right? So we might misconstrue liberation from dukkha to be freedom from unpleasantness. We might imagine a purely pleasant state, at least a never-again-unpleasant state, and then obviously try to achieve it and get closer to this wonderful, blissful state. We might say that this is the Dhamma our limited human mind comes up with by itself, without the help of an awakened Buddha. That's how we invent a solution to the problem of dukkha, thinking, "Oh, dukkha is not nice, pleasant things are nice, so let me get the good stuff." When we look around, when we look at our own lives, and even here when you look at these windows, this whole civilization is basically built on making our lives more comfortable, getting more of the pleasant feelings and less of the unpleasant feelings.

So now we've learned what dukkha can mean. We learned here also, for example, that each dukkha concept has something like an opposite, a sukha concept. When dukkha is the unpleasant or the suffering or the unsatisfactoriness, then sukha is the opposite: the bliss and the pleasant and the satisfaction, according to context. Each of those dukkhas has its correspondent sukha concept coming along with it. The sukha concept for unpleasant feeling is obviously pleasant feeling. And if we misinterpret dukkha vedanā—unpleasant feeling—as being our arch-enemy and the thing we should try to liberate ourselves from, then the obvious conclusion, however wrong it may be, at least it's logical, would be to try to attain a permanent pleasant abiding, a constant pleasant feeling, a highly illusional hope to ever attain. This might lead to a lot of disappointment and exhaustion when we actually try to get there. Not to underestimate the danger of this small misunderstanding, also for any meditation and spiritual practice. Because quite often, I honestly have to admit this is part of my own experience, but I also saw it many times with practitioners, that when we have an unpleasant phase in our lives, we tend to be highly interested in the Buddha's teaching. We run to one retreat and the next, and meditation classes can't be enough. But then when there's a nice and pleasant streak in our life, then all of a sudden we think, "Oh, it's all right, maybe the Dhamma is not so necessary because I feel all right anyways." So it's also an indication that we might misunderstand what this whole Dhamma project is actually meant for. There is much more at stake than just feeling a bit more pleasant and a little less unpleasant.

How futile any attempts at gaining permanent happiness by stabilizing our pleasant feelings might be is highlighted by the impermanence of it all. That's the second dukkha that is described here in our sutta: the dukkha of change and impermanence, the vipariṇāma-dukkha⁶. As someone has mentioned in the chat, this is actually quite well translated as "unsatisfactory." It is this dukkha of the unstable. We could call it the inability to gain real satisfaction. The word vipariṇāma might be less familiar than the word anicca⁷, which means basically the same. Vipariṇāma means it doesn't stay in the same shape; it bends and changes. And that's a very good description of how we start to see our own experience once we start to look at it with wisdom.

To make it a bit more understandable, when we talk about an unpleasant feeling, it's the feel of it, right? It feels not nice, and this one feels nice, and this one not. Now here, with the dukkha of the unstable, we talk about not how it feels—we covered that already with the first dukkha—we talk about how it behaves. And that's a big point of confusion. Because when the Buddha says, "Whatever is anicca, whatever is impermanent, is necessarily dukkha," it does not mean that whatever is impermanent is feeling unpleasant. So if we think that's what the Buddha means, we start to get into trouble. We might rightly criticize the Buddha for it and say, "Well, that's a bit pessimistic. Sometimes although it changes, sometimes maybe it's also pleasant. So why is the Buddha stating that it's always unpleasant? That's not according to my experience." Without misunderstanding the Buddha here, it's not about how pleasant or unpleasant it feels. It's about what ability it has or has not. And whatever is impermanent lacks the ability to satisfy us.

So whatever is anicca, impermanent, is dukkha. In the suttas, we find it so often, this logical connection, and it's hardly ever questioned or challenged. So we see that for the logic of Indian thinking two and a half thousand years ago, that was not under dispute. Nowadays, in a modern context, I've had different experiences with myself, but also with people like you who really, in all seriousness and honesty, try to understand it deeply. And we really have to understand it in a deep and personal way so that it can affect us. So we also really have to deeply investigate this connection between anicca and dukkha in order to clear away these really dangerous misunderstandings.

Experience can be pleasant, of course, as we all know, but still, at the same time, it won't be truly satisfying because it continuously keeps moving and changing on a big scale, on a small scale, and in every possible way we might think about it or observe it. We might observe that the body changes. That's more of the big scale. "When I was 20 years old, my skin was so flawlessly beautiful, and now it gets wrinkles and specks and gray hairs here and there." It's changing, and it's not the same as it was. One might regret it; one might understand that having a youthful body is not satisfying because it doesn't last. You can't rely on it. Sometimes I've had the feeling, personally, that especially people who might strongly identify with their beauty, maybe some Hollywood actors or actresses, whose identity might to a certain degree be built up on their external appearance, once that starts to change and to crumble, that can be a really big disappointment or a big crisis in such people's lives because what they experienced to be unquestionably pleasant at the time when they were young and beautiful and everyone loved them for their beauty, that was a very pleasant experience. No need to deny that, but it didn't last. So it is not really satisfying, even when we look at it on this very basic, big-scale way.

It becomes all the more true when we narrow down our focus, get into a more microscopic view of impermanence as being part of our experience every moment we are alive and conscious. Because every moment while we think and breathe and feel and whatever is part of our experience, even right now in this moment, it cannot last. It has to change and turn into a next present moment, and the next present moment. And however much we try to get something out of it, it will always change and become otherwise. So there's no staying the same, no true rest in this forced movement that our experience simply is. You have to move on from moment to moment. No one's asking us whether we want it that way or not; it's just happening. So there's this unsatisfactoriness of impermanence in each and every moment of our living experience, which takes a bit more patience and more clarity of view to start to see and realize and understand. But that's part of our work here in the Buddhist practice. No one said that understanding what dukkha is is obvious and given. So we have to earn this clarity by investigating.

This connection between anicca and dukkha is actually quite important. Sometimes, especially in our modern Buddhist practices, it's sometimes a bit confused or neglected because we might think there has to be a positive outcome of witnessing change in my vipassanā⁸ meditation. So easily it gets a spinoff of "this flow of impermanence, and we just flow along with it, and then it's all right." But maybe it's not all that simple. If we are daring enough, we can challenge this easy access to peacefulness and take the Buddha a bit more seriously when he talks about the unsatisfactoriness of suffering and also the importance of understanding that.

Some of my German and Austrian friends who also joined in might already know the quote that's coming now. It's one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite Buddhist writers from the last century, Paul Dahlke. He was, at least in the German-speaking world, a famous, well-known pioneer of German Buddhism. He put out this very interesting statement. I tried my best to put it in English. Let's see how it works. His statement, exactly to this connection of anicca and dukkha as unsatisfactory is: "The completeness of our liberation will depend on the completeness of our understanding of the fact that what is impermanent is dukkha (unsatisfactory)." If our understanding of this unsatisfactoriness of the impermanent is not complete, our liberation will also not be complete. For the simple reason that this understanding of the dukkha of the impermanent is one of the big arguments for our letting go of grasping and identifying with these impermanent experiences. Seeing the disadvantage of the impermanent, our mind readies itself to let go of it.

So we have to, at least even if we are not all at once of the same opinion as the Buddha, give him a chance. The Buddha is positing that not-lasting satisfaction is no real satisfaction at all. And if we think about it, it really does make sense, although it's not a pleasant truth at first. But it reflects very well this unbelievably refined spiritual palate or taste of an awakened being. Our Bodhisatta, Prince Siddhartha, was presented with all the pleasantness of three palaces and all this worldly amusement, but there was a refinement in his taste that could taste this bitterness of disappointment and unsatisfactoriness in all of that. That's what sent him on his noble search, which is a search that's more refined than the search for fun in the world.

There's also a very important trap of misunderstanding concerning this topic. Now, once we've accepted the unsatisfactoriness of the impermanent, we obviously will want to find the solution for this unsatisfactoriness. And then there's this big, seemingly logical but fatal attempt to transform that which is impermanent and unsatisfactory into something that is permanent and satisfactory. That seems the obvious exit: "Well, then let me find something that's not impermanent and therefore not unsatisfactory." We can't count how many religious and spiritual ideas in this world work with this basic logic. I think it's quite understandable that all around the world, people with a certain gift for spirituality, with a certain refinement of their spiritual taste, come to understand that the normal sensual world is impermanent and not satisfying, and that they also start their own searches for answers. But then it seems quite often the road to take is the road to a presumed permanent safety that is not yet discovered but for sure must lurk somewhere in the background of my mind, or is a mythical place somewhere I only have to reach and then I'll be safe. So ensues a fervent search for the permanent under many different names. Our human mind is extremely creative to create all kinds of images or names or philosophical explanations for that. It really seems to be something like a basic instinct of the unawakened mind to react to a view of the unsatisfactoriness of the impermanent with a strong desire, a strong longing for anything permanent.

If I may, as a side note, say this basic instinct of the human mind seems to be so powerful that even within the realm of Buddhist practice, it again and again tries to take a foothold. Wherever human thinking, although inspired by the Buddha, starts to move away from a very basic orientation on the early, authentic word of the Buddha, we can observe that slowly, slowly, these elements of mythical permanence are reintroduced. So it really needed the rigorous, the uncompromising attitude of the Buddha to shush away this lust for permanence as long as he lived. But then quite soon, when early Buddhism met other cultures and other traditions, whatever wonderful and beautiful products that might have brought to this world, it also seemed to have again and again brought to the surface this basic urge of the human mind to find something stable beyond the unstable. And that's really a big misunderstanding of the Buddha's teaching and a big misunderstanding of these different types of dukkha. That's one of the main reasons why this is such a rewarding topic of contemplation: to clarify some of those traps we might otherwise unknowingly walk into. And of course, I'm not here to blame anyone's practice, far from my intentions, but I thought this might be a helpful clarification for some of you.

There's one more dukkha on our list to understand. That is the saṅkhāra-dukkha⁹, which I, in my perhaps construed translation, tried to translate as the "dukkha of construedness," making a noun out of "construed." This is again something different than the unpleasant feeling and something different than this unsatisfactoriness of impermanence. This is the stress of construing, and this saṅkhāra is very similar to grasping, to upādāna¹⁰, which we find as a definition for dukkha in the Four Noble Truths. As all of you might be familiar with, in the first Noble Truth, the Buddha defines dukkha. First, he lists the examples of being subject to birth, old age, death, and unfulfilled desires and so on. And then, in summary, as the essence of all that, it's the five khandhas together with grasping. The five khandhas in the mode of grasping is the basic definition of dukkha in this Four Noble Truth context. And we see that's something again completely different to just feeling unpleasant or to having to bear with impermanence. This is made by grasping.

Grasping, we could define this grasping as something like an automatic urge, not by some external entity, but by exactly these five parts of experience—consciousness and the objects it experiences. The automatic urge of the parts of our experience to cling to each other and to create a sense of identity by this clinging. They try to create something more compact, more real than it actually is by itself. Now, interestingly enough, this mental behavior is not something that's under our direct control. We can't just right now decide whether we want to grasp or not, because the cause for this grasping to occur is not whether we want it to occur or not. If that were the reason, we could just wish it away and be happy ever after. But it has deeper causes than that. These deep causes are our mental conditionings and our ignorance, basically this avijjā, as the driving force behind the behavior of an unawakened mind. So we are, as long as we are not liberated, we have not liberated ourselves from the influence of ignorance, we are forced to live with this frustration of wanting to grasp something where there actually is nothing to hold on to, where there's no one to be able to hold on to. Why? Because anything we possibly ever experience is impermanent and not satisfactory. So ignorance is just another way of saying we do not understand dukkha, which can also mean we mix up these different types of dukkha and take one for the real thing and try and see it as our main problem and focus on fixing that problem, and thereby just creating the actual, real problem, which is this grasping-induced dukkha, this state of stress, this state of forced mental behavior of trying to accumulate and possess and identify, which often we might be completely ignorant of, again, thanks to ignorance working so well in the background. Because this might appear to us as suffering only when we start to gain some foothold in mental states with less suffering and less ignorance, and thereby create the ability to compare and to contrast. And then by contrast, we can easily decide, "Oh, this grasping, I never noticed it, but now that I can compare states of more grasping and less grasping, oh, it's obviously much more stressful to grasp and much more peaceful not to grasp." So it's something like a frustration of having this compulsion to identify with things that are no identity. The wishing to be and possess things that have nothing to do with self, that are impermanent and, as mentioned, unsatisfactory.

The suttas show this similarity of saṅkhāra (construing) and upādāna (grasping). A volunteer read the following Sutta excerpt:

They regard corporality (and the other four khandas) as a self, or corporality as the possession of a self, or corporality as part of a self, or a self as a part of corporality. But that regarding is just a construing. And what's the source, origin, birthplace, and inception of that construing? When an unlearned ordinary person is contacted by feelings born of ignorance-tainted contact, craving arises. That construing is born from that.

This is basically, if we analyze that through the lens of dependent arising, just another way of saying identity view. This view that the parts of our experience have anything to do with the self is the same as grasping. Because what we hear is that ignorance-tainted contact leads to a feeling, this feeling leads to a craving, and this craving, usually in the context of dependent arising, would lead to grasping. But here we hear that it leads to "construedness," which is then the driving force behind the mind construing an identity out of these five khandas. So, to bring it closer together, this suffering is the compulsion to construe an identity out of fleeting, passing parts of experience.

Now the big understanding can dawn that to understand this dukkha, this dukkha of construing, and to remove its cause—this ignorance-induced craving—that's actually our direct goal in the Dhamma practice. And how do we accomplish that? By seeing the undesirable nature of grasping, since on the one hand, it itself creates this stress, and on the other hand, it is never successful because whatever it attempts to grasp at and cling to is unsatisfactory material that's impermanent and therefore not ready to make us happy.

So basically, we had our walk through these three types of dukkha and hopefully understood that the real problem at hand for us as meditators and practitioners is this dukkha that is caused by ignorance. Because ignorance is the one point where we can insert some influence in the whole system. We can try to only experience pleasant things; however much we want it, it will never be 100% successful. We can try to find anything stable and permanent, and again, it will be never really successful. But we can try to transform ignorance into knowledge, into wisdom. And that, although not possible from one moment to the next, is possible in the long run by just training the mind to see according to reality, to see moment by moment with all the patience and equanimity we can muster that any attempt to grasp and identify is not really worthwhile because it leads to suffering. On the other hand, by understanding the peacefulness of non-grasping, of non-construing, we can start to develop a liking for this informed state of non-grasping. This state, which obviously is not free from the unsatisfactoriness of the unpleasant, is something like making peace with that unsatisfactoriness. It's not a state that is free from the unpleasant forever and always, but we've made peace with the fact that unpleasant experience is part of existence, part of experience, however long it continues. On the other hand, of course, if we take it to the context of rebirth, then we find that by eliminating the stress, the dukkha of grasping, it will lead to a complete cessation of the other two dukkhas as well by finally appeasing and letting extinguish this samsaric¹¹ existence altogether.

Let me close with one of my favorite quotes of the Buddha: Sabba sankhara samatho, which means, "This is peaceful, this is exquisite, namely the calming of all compulsions to construe."

Thank you for listening.

Q&A

Question: Thank you Bhante for your teachings. It's always a good reminder to come back to the Four Noble Truths of suffering. I'd just like to share my own experience. When I came to Buddhism five years ago, with a lot of personal suffering, I saw Buddha as a doctor giving me some medicine for the suffering. So I turned toward meditation, and the meditation was so helpful for me. Slowly, blissful experiences started to happen, my mind started becoming very calm, and now I can see the insight started coming of why the suffering is arising. The causes of suffering are coming because of my clinging and craving and controlling nature. For me personally, then I started listening to Achaan Chah and Ajahn Brahm about jhāna¹². Oh, I'm having those experiences now, maybe a little bit. So for me personally, it worked really well for samatha¹³ and vipassanā going side-by-side. Because I'm not very smart into investigation right away, my mind needed to be very calm, and now I can feel it, I can see it. Thank you.

Answer: That's the most important part of our practice, when we start to feel its effect and its relief. It can come in so many forms, because this Dhamma is good at the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end. So this one taste of liberation is there wherever we are situated in the Dhamma.

Follow-up: But it's also absolutely true that these experiences are not permanent. It makes me feel very happy and blissful at times, and whenever I got into any kind of suffering, I jump back to, "Oh, I'm going to sit and have that experience again." But it's going back and forth, it's becoming a chore now.

Answer: Yes, it's not really the solution, not to sugarcoat it. We have to swallow it, even if the sugar coating helps us with swallowing. The real medicine has to go down in order to free us from this strange growth inside of our mind, this "I" and "my" feeling, like a cancer growing in our mind. But there's a therapy, which not necessarily always has to be pleasant. There are some pleasant phases of it, but sometimes it might also give us a hangover when we realize how much we allowed ourselves to be illusioned about reality.

Question: How much have you used this understanding of dukkha to inform your understanding of the ānāpānasati¹⁴ instructions? It sounds like from your guided meditation we did at least two out of the four, well three out of the four tetrads. Do you have a kind of teaching around that or a structured way that you go about it?

Answer: The two are, of course, directly related. I view the whole exercise of mindfulness of breathing as a very refined way to prepare the mind to really fully absorb the meaning of impermanence, as we find in the last chapter of the ānāpānasati exercise. The other tetrads have their insights as well but also have a big contribution in preparing the mind to be technically focused enough on one hand, but also psychologically fit or psychologically unburdened enough to absorb the impact of anicca in the right way. So that seeing impermanence can turn into dispassion and fading away, and that can turn into a direct look at the continuous disappearance of our experience, and then facilitating this release, of allowing this illusionary identity to fall apart.

All the three types of dukkha play their role in releasing our mind from this tendency to grasp and identify. I would not belittle the suffering of the unpleasant either, because for most people, this is the first encounter with dukkha and the first driving factor to search for answers and solutions. And it's often felt as such a relief to at last hear someone talk about it so candidly as the Buddha does, that one reason why existence can suck, really, is because sometimes it's so painful and so unpleasant. But the main arguments we try to accumulate in our growth of wisdom is seeing the impermanence of our experience and the unsatisfactoriness of that. That's the basic data we have to collect and have to allow to be absorbed in order to let go, but also to understand the suffering and the stress of identification. Bringing those two together—seeing that there's a painful love for self but there's no way it actually exists—and those two together, the absurdity of the one and the painfulness of the other, can bring about this release of this compulsion to grasp.

Question: I missed a word there. You said there are two sides. What was the word?

Answer: The love for an imaginary self, which drives our desire, but then the painfulness of impermanence on the other side. And those two collide all the time. The wish to be permanent and the inability to be permanent, that's our existential dilemma. And since we can't change the one, we can't change impermanence, but we can change our love for self by showing ourselves the disadvantages of what we love so much and finally understanding that we love an illusion, just as this unfortunate young man is madly in love with a concept of a beautiful girl and not any real girl.

Question: Is "love" the right word there? It's a challenging word to put in that spot because, of course, we want to care for the being that is here. Mettā¹⁵ is important, but what do you mean by love in that sense?

Answer: Well, it always depends on the context, right? I can, in a worldly, psychological context, love myself, but at the same time, maybe let's rather use the term mettā, which is not the same as love. Out of genuine kindness, I do whatever I can to rid myself of this illusion of a self. As my teacher in Sri Lanka would like to quip: "Accept your self and reject your self." It's just one blank space that makes the whole difference. We follow the training because we love ourselves. There's a sutta that says, "the training within which gentlemen who love themselves train." That struck me when I first heard it. Why would we do this? Because we care. But at the same time, you don't want that unwise attachment to some constructed being. You don't want to allow that affection to meddle in the insight process. For motivation and psychological healing, we can have all the mettā we can muster. But then when it comes to the insight process, it's also in the interest of mettā not to interfere there and say, "Oh, but what about the beautiful self that could be?" Then our rather serious honesty of looking at our naked experience might get watered down or be decorated with rose petals, and that's not what we need.

(The talk concluded with a final sutta reading.)