hello, everyone,
"If you pay attention for just five minutes, you know some very fundamental dharma: things change, nothing stays comfortable, sensations come and go quite impersonally, according to conditions, but not because of anything that you do or think you do. Changes come and go quite by themselves. In the first five minutes of paying attention, you learn that pleasant sensations lead to the desire that these sensations will stay and that unpleasant sensations lead to the hope that they will go away. And both the attraction and the aversion amount to tension in the mind. Both are uncomfortable. So in the first minutes, you get a big lesson about suffering: wanting things to be other than what they are. Such a tremendous amount of truth to be learned just closing your eyes and paying attention to bodily sensations."
--Sylvia Boorstein, in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Fall 1992
I have found that the thoughts that go on in my head are also just as transient. If I simply observe them without getting caught up in a storyline that leads to a full blown fantasy that then triggers feelings, emotions, etc. they just go away and onto the next thought.
Sometimes I'd like to take my brain out and shoot it (to quote fellow, whose name I forget, on a tape that I heard years ago) but that would'nt be very "buddhist" of me, it being violent and all!
So, I've concluded that something sees using my eyes, something hears using my ears etc. and something thinks and its all good.
Many blessings,
lora
