For The love of The World ~ Ajahn Amaro

For The love of The World ~ Ajahn Amaro

Q: What’s wrong with feeling good when we’re praised or gain something or are thought well of? Or feeling bad when we’re criticized or lose something or are thought poorly of? Isn’t that natural and even an important part of living a happy life and improving ourselves?

A: The Buddha’s teaching on the ‘worldly winds’ is primarily about helping us notice those ways that our sense of self gets knocked around most easily. He’s pointing to those things in our life that we identify with and then create the thrill of ‘Great!’ or the despair of ‘Aaaargh!’

In our very life-affirming culture, we might think, ‘Well, what’s wrong with the thrill of having and being? 

Aren’t we supposed to embrace life?’ We love to talk in those terms. What these teachings are pointing to is not negating that way of speaking in and of itself. The Buddha’s suggesting we look at what happens when there’s a relishing – ‘I’ve got, I have, I am!’ Even though there might be something deeply satisfying in that feeling, it’s that relishing that causes suffering.

So, you might be thinking, ‘Well, I’m not very worldly. I’ve got few possessions.’ But even if there’s a relishing of the ‘Look at me, I’m not attached’ view of oneself, then there’s still an ego-attachment issue; the mind is attached to the idea of not being attached. Whether it’s to a possession or an opinion or even a problem – ‘I am the sick one, I am the flawed one’ – we suffer when that gets negated or taken away or threatened.

It’s not that holding on to things is intrinsically bad. But look what happens when those things get denied or threatened. Then we see, ‘Ah, right, I got myself addicted to this.’ When the drug of choice – the feeling of ‘I’ and ‘me’ and ‘mine’ – is no longer available and the supply gets cut off, then our reaction is ‘Aaaargh!’

How beautiful it is to be free of that addiction. How free we are when the heart is really independent and can know the quality of stillness, utterly attuned to the moving and vibrating world but never thrown off balance by that.

~ Ajahn Amaro, 

For The love of The World pp.33-34

https://forestsangha.org/teachings/books/for-the-love-of-the-world?language=English

Photo: 

http://thaiforestwisdom.org/ajahn-amaros-spiritual-journey/