Three Worlds

We live in three worlds simultaneously, the world of matter, the world of emotional and social connection, and the world of mind and spirit. Each of these worlds has its own rules, its own way of functioning. What works in one world usually does not work in the others. These three worlds interact with each other in subtle and complex ways, making life difficult, if not impossible, to predict or control. 

Three Ways We Struggle

• In the world of matter, we struggle with birth, old age, illness and death, the four great sources of struggle in the human condition.
• In the world of emotional connection, we struggle with chance and the four lesser struggles, not having what we want or need, keeping what we do have, being with people with whom we don’t want to be with, and not being with people we do want to be with.
• In the world of the mind or spirit, we struggle in subtler ways. We struggle with identity, not knowing what or who we are, what the world is, and the mysteries of life and being itself.

No political or social system is going to eliminate these three ways we struggle with life. Just as Buddha did 2500 years ago, we have to look inside, not outside, to find a way to live without struggling.

How each struggle comes to an end

• In the world of matter, our struggles are with pain, in one form or another. Pain is a sensation. We can learn to experience pain as a sensation, as an arising in mind. When we are able to experience pain as a sensation, we stop struggling with it. 
• Then we become aware of the emotional reactions that pain triggers, attraction, aversion, and indifference. We can, similarly, develop the ability to experience emotional reactions as movements in mind. We then stop struggling with them, and can let them come and go without having to express or suppress them. 
• When we can do that, our conditioned sense of self, our identity, and our relationship with life are called into question. Who am I? What are these feelings that dictate so much of my life? What is real? We can, again, develop the ability to experience self and everything associated with a sense of self as deep structures in mind, structures that are, by their very nature, neither absolute nor fixed.

When we are able to experience the contingency of self and everything associated with it, we find a peace, a clarity, and a freedom that we cannot put into words. Among other things, we stop struggling to define or maintain that sense of self or any fixed posture with respect to what we experience. 

How to do this

As long as you are alive, you breathe. The breath is already there. Rest in the experience of breathing, an experience that includes your whole body, and everything else you sense, feel, or think. When you lose touch with the experience of breathing, you never lose touch forever.

As Saraha said over a thousand years ago, mind is like a bird on a ship in the middle of the ocean. It may fly high in the sky for miles and miles, but in the end, it always returns to the ship. It has to. It has nowhere else to go. In the same way, mind always returns to itself.

A moment always comes when you go, “Oh, where was I?” Or “Oh, where did I go.” At that moment, you have returned to what is already there. Rest right there. There is nothing more to do. 

This is one of those instructions that unfolds as your ability to do it develops. It will take you a long way, a very long way, out of the world of struggle and deep into the mystery of being.