(I stashed an additional post, written today, into the former blank spot at July 19th below.)

2: Not Liking, byapada: Aversion, hate, irritation,

Rejecting the moment and pushing it away. Two cool teaching stories in the first seven minutes. Am I the aversion type? Oh yeah I think so.

Eat slower, walk slower. Study the force of hate/fear. What is it? How does it feel? (It is … a strategy for safety and it’s intractable because it works for that, short-term, maybe.

The more separateness, the more fear. Fear and anger toward one’s own weakness is central to it. Feeling that is really hard, and necessary to the project of freedom.

Digression: The first of the four noble truths.

1. All existence is dukkha. The word dukkha has been variously translated as ‘suffering’, ‘anguish’, ‘pain’, or ‘unsatisfactoriness’. The Buddha’s insight was that our lives are a struggle, and we do not find ultimate happiness or satisfaction in anything we experience. This is the problem of existence.

You can try to reject this and be eternally at war with the fact of suffering. Or you can accept the shitty way the world really is and try to find the path to freedom from suffering, which won’t involve avoiding it.

Fear is imagination running away with itself down a bad road. If what we fear happened in the past, then it’s a re-imagining or a re-living of the suffering or trauma. So maybe living in the moment, even letting the moment be full to the brim with this imaginary fear and the pain it causes, can be useful like setting a backfire is useful.

The fear is always ultimately about what happens after you die.

“Is there skillful worry–maybe you could call it planning?” A good wry question.

***

The talk about Greed/Wanting was posted a month ago. This one about aversion, two weeks ago. There aren’t ones yet for the last three hindrances. So I’ll be looking deeper for ways to address them. Or maybe loop to the four noble truths or the eightfold path … something. It’s all good.