September 26^th, 2025

Keep it Simple

The Buddha particularly emphasized the quality of suffering, of unsatisfactoriness. The Four Noble Truths are based on observing this quality of unsatisfactoriness. It is something to be known.

Understanding unsatisfactoriness is a duty to oneself. The problem is how we relate to the world around us. The way we relate to each other means that we tend either to create or experience unsatisfactoriness. Then we hold on to it, cling to it, judge it, try to avoid it; we create incredible scenarios around it, we look for someone to blame because of it, or we feel sorry for ourselves. So we create a whole range of reaction around dukkha.

But the Buddha says that all we have to do is just know it. This quality of knowing is to be turned to, to be focused on our experience, and then we learn to recognize that this knowing is a point of balance: not affirmation or rejection, not wanting or not wanting. It is the balancing of the faculties of the mind. The body and the mind are the tools we have for experiencing the world. We revolve around the sense faculties of the body and the faculties of the mind: the ability to create and experience emotional tones of happiness, suffering or neutrality, the ability to remember, to conceptualize, to put labels on things through perception, the ability to act in a volitional way, to initiate thought processes and be conscious of the world around us. These are the tools we have.

The practice of the Dhamma is learning the quality of knowing: knowing the world around us, both the material world of the physical body and the sense spheres of the mind, the faculties of the mind; just knowing, not reacting to the proliferation around them, but just being with the knowing.

Ajahn Pasanno, The Forest Path p.36