LET IT COME, LET IT GO - Ajahn Jayanto
"LET IT COME, LET IT GO" ~ Ajahn Jayanto
Ajahn Chah used to often say that happiness has the same value as suffering (the unpleasant).
Unpleasant sensations are just as valuable as pleasant sensations; pleasant experiences, same value as unpleasant experiences.
That's so against the grain of our habits, as we've been conditioned for certainly all of this life, and in the Buddhist view of things, traditionally many, many, many lifetimes: very strong conditioning to want to identify the pleasant as good and right, and the pleasurable as what we want, and where happiness resides.
And to try to move away from the unpleasant and that which is not pleasurable.
So that's something all of us know, we come to the teaching, we know it intellectually...we know this also through our practice, we've seen it for ourselves because otherwise why would we do all this?
...We've seen that the mind is caught in one way or another, and that the practices the Buddha gave and that we've inherited can help us individually, each one of us, to see that for ourselves and find our own way through it...
Each one of us has different conditionings, different life situations, we have very different views of the world, even though we might spend a lot of time together, even if we have similar ideas about many things, our fundamental experience is usually very different: our view of the world, what we carry around with us - because, of course, we carry the world around with us wherever we go - the world is what we make it.
It's how we perceive and experience.
In a very real way we are responsible for a lot of it. It's not that it's our fault, not to apportion blame to ourselves, but just to notice that we have power in terms of what we experience.
The teachings that encourage us to live in a way where we are not causing harm to ourselves and others are so crucial to have as a foundation for this path.
Because if we are hurting others, hurting ourselves, we are creating mental conditions, emotional conditions such that the remorse and the painful perceptions that go along with them, they'll form the way that we experience the world.
That's why when somebody hurts somebody else, from the point of view of kamma, the Buddhist point of view, it's sort of more unfortunate for the person doing the hurting than it is for the person who is being hurt.
In one sense of course, the usual sense, it is much more unfortunate for the person being hurt, and it's a horrible thing, but the person doing the hurting is creating the conditions for a world of suffering from that point on, even if they are not aware of it, and even if the effects are not apparent to themselves or even to others for a while.
So the unpleasant sensations, the unpleasant experiences that we have, they are unpleasant and they are hard to deal with, and yet they are also just what they are and if we have not intentionally acted to cause them, they can only have as much power as they have for the impact, as an experience, physically or emotionally, perceptually.
It will have an impact, and yet if we are in a place of wholesomeness in ourselves, goodness in ourselves, we will be in a much better position to be able to receive that, and not be overwhelmed by it, not become the victim of it, in a sense, in the way of not identifying with thoughts of being someone who is hurt; but just simply to be able to receive the experience for what it is.
Let it come, let it go.
~ excerpt from a talk "Observe and then let go" by Ajahn Jayanto, 2014
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