This week we’re continuing our work getting into the nuts and bolts of insight practice. Recall that last week I mentioned how we change our relationship with ourselves and the world by provoking insights about the nature of experience, and that we do that by collecting evidence about three aspects of experience: impermanence, suffering/unsatisfactoriness and no-self.
The second aspect of experience we need to collective evidence on is suffering or unsatisfactoriness. There isn’t really a great translation into English and ‘suffering’ can sometimes sound too extreme for what we’re referring to here.
I’ll take Daniel Ingram’s definition here because it’s a good one:
The second aspect of dukkha [unsatisfactoriness/suffering in Pali] is the key for insight practices, and that is the inherent painful tension that comes because we take the sensate data coming in and misinterpret those sensations in a way that causes us to habitually create the illusion of a permanent, separate, independently functioning (acausal), localized self.
Just by reading this it’s probably not going to be clear how such a thing works or how we work with it. Conceptually it’s not as clear as with impermanence, but we’ll get into this with more depth in the session. However, we can notice how sensations are ultimately unsatisfying, either because they aren’t enjoyable in the moment, or because even if they are, they are going to end due to impermanence. We can also attend to this aspect of experience through working to change our relationship with sensations by letting them be and working to accept them as they arise.
In today’s session we’ll practice some techniques for accomplishing this.