WHY BOTHER WITH MEDITATION By Bhante H. Gunaratana

WHY BOTHER WITH MEDITATION BY Bhante H. Gunaratana

No matter how hard you pursue pleasure and success, there are times when you fail. No matter how fast you flee, there are times when pain catches up with you. and in between those times, life is so boring you could scream. Our minds are full of opinions and criticisms. We have build walls all around ourselves and are trapped in the prison of our own likes and dislikes. We suffer.

You can't ever get everything you want. It is impossible. Luckily, there is another option. You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of the endless cycle of desire and aversion. You can learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them. This does not mean that you lie down on the road and invite everybody to walk all over you. It means that you continue to live a very normal-looking life, but live from a whole new viewpoint. You do the things that a person must do but you are free from that obsessive and compulsive drivenness of your own desire. You want something, but you don't need to chase after it. You fear something, but you don't need to stand there quaking in your boots. This sort of mental cultivation is very difficult. It takes years. But trying to control everything is impossible; the difficult is preferable to the impossible.