Anguish Emerges

Quote for the day:

“Anguish emerges from craving for life to be other than it is. It is the symptom of flight from birth and death, from the pulse of the present. It is the gnawing mood of unease that haunts the clinging to ‘me’ and ‘mine.’ … Craving can vanish in awakening to the absurdity of the assumptions that underlie it. Without stamping it out or denying it, craving may be renounced the way a child renounces sand castles: not be repressing the desire to make them but by turning aside from an endeavor that no longer holds any interest.”
From: Buddhism Without Beliefs, by Stephen Batchelor

What are the “assumptions that underlie” my (our) anguish? Over and over again, it is the belief (or insistence!) that life SHOULD not be this way… it should be some other, better way! And that resistance to experiencing what IS, is in fact the real source of anguish. This is the fundamental realization of the Buddha. Letting go of that resistance is not easy, but there are practices that help us to get free. These practices all include some kind of attentional training, or, to put it another way, the deliberate choice to “pay attention to,” or “notice,” what is going on right now, and to do so as compassionately as possible. Where I find myself engaging in negative judgments (and this is not a rare occurrence), I work on compassionately noticing that very thing, i.e., the act of judging. And then I do it again… and again. Out of this practice comes some clarity about what is real, as opposed to what is only a story I am making up based on my reactions (“I like it! I want to keep it!” OR “I don’t like it! I want it to go away!”) to what I encounter in reality. And sticking with what-is-real is a lot easier, and a lot saner, than dwelling within those stories…