Live Without Being Oblivious

To lead your daily life by keeping constant supervision over the mind is a way of learning what life is for. It’s a way of learning how we can act so as to rid ourselves more and more of suffering and stress – because the suffering and stress caused by defilement, attachment, and craving are sure to take all sorts of forms.

Only by being aware with true mindfulness and discernment can we comprehend them for what they are. Otherwise, we’ll simply live obliviously, going wherever events will lead us. This is why mindfulness and discernment are tools for reading yourself, for testing yourself within so that you won’t be careless or complacent, oblivious to the fact that suffering is basically what life is all about.

This point is something we really have to comprehend so that we can live without being oblivious. The pains and discontent that fill our bodies and minds all show us the truths of inconstancy, stress, and not-selfness within us. If you contemplate what’s going on inside until you can get down to the details, you’ll see the truths that appear within and without, all of which come down to inconstancy, stress, and not-selfness.

But the delusion basic to our nature will see everything wrongly–as constant, easeful, and self–and so make us live obliviously, even though there is nothing to guarantee how long our lives will last.

Our dreams and delusions make us forget that we live in the midst of a mass of pain and stress – the stress of defilements, the pain of birth. Birth, aging, illness, and death: All of these are painful and stressful, in the midst of instability and change. They’re things we have no control over, for they must circle around in line with the laws of kamma and the defilements we’ve been amassing all along. Life that floats along in the round of rebirth is thus nothing but stress and pain.

If we can find a way to develop our mindfulness and discernment, they’ll be able to cut the round of rebirth so that we won’t have to keep wandering on. They’ll help us know that birth is painful, aging is painful, illness is painful, death is painful, and that these are all things that defilement, attachment, and craving keep driving through the cycles of change.

So as long as we have the opportunity, we should study the truths appearing throughout our body and mind, and we’ll come to know that the elimination of stress and pain, the elimination of defilement, is a function of our practice of the Dhamma.

If we don’t practice the Dhamma, we’ll keep floating along in the round of rebirth that is so drearily repetitious – repetitious in its birth, aging, illness, and death, driven on by defilement, attachment, and craving, causing us repeated stress, repeated pain.

Living beings for the most part don’t know where these stresses and pains come from or what they come from because they’ve never studied them, never contemplated them, so they stay stupid and deluded, wandering on and on without end….

This reflection by Upāsikā Kee Nanayon is from the Thai Forest Ajaans book An Unentangled Knowing: The Teachings of a Thai Buddhist Lay Woman, pp. 26-27, “The Details of Pain, December 28, 1972,” translated from the Thai by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu.