Comfortable With Uncertainty Read Online Free PDF Page B

and the unconditional goodness of humanity, rather than meeting an obstacle or a punishment.
    The safest and most nurturing place to begin working this way is during sitting meditation. On the cushion, we begin to get the hang of not indulging or repressing and of what it feels like to let the energy just be there. That is why it’s so good to meditate every single day and continue to make friends with our hopes and fears again and again. This sows the seeds that enable us to be more awake in the midst of everyday chaos. It’s a gradual awakening, and it’s cumulative, but that’s actually what happens. We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.

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    The Facts of Life: Suffering
    T HE THIRD MARK of existence is suffering, dissatisfaction. To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death. We suffer not because we are basically bad or deserve to be punished but because of three tragic misunderstandings.
    First, we expect that what is always in the process of change should be graspable and predictable. Because we mistake what is impermanent to be permanent, we suffer.
    Second, we proceed as if we are separate from everything else, as if we are a fixed identity, when our true situation is egoless. Because we mistake the openness of our being for a solid, irrefutable self, we suffer.
    Third, we look for happiness in all the wrong places. The Buddha called this habit “mistaking suffering for happiness.” We become habituated to reaching for something to ease the edginess of the moment. Thus we become less and less able to reside with even the most fleeting uneasiness or discomfort. What begins as a slight shift of energy—a minor tightening of our stomach, a vague indefinable feeling that something bad is about to happen—escalates into addiction. This is our way of trying to make life predictable. Because we mistake what always results in suffering to be what will bring us happiness, we remain stuck in the repetitious habit of escalating our dissatisfaction.

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    Hope and Fear
    O NE OF THE CLASSIC Buddhist teachings on hope and fear concerns what are known as the eight worldly dharmas. These are four pairs of opposites—four things that we like and become attached to and four things that we don’t like and try to avoid. The basic message is that when we are caught up in the eight worldly dharmas, we suffer.
    First, we like pleasure; we are attached to it. Conversely, we don’t like pain. Second, we like and are attached to praise. We try to avoid criticism and blame. Third, we like and are attached to fame. We dislike and try to avoid disgrace. Finally, we are attached to gain, to getting what we want. We don’t like losing what we have.
    According to this very simple teaching, becoming immersed in these four pairs of opposites—pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace, and gain and loss—is what keeps us stuck in the pain of samsara.
    We might feel that somehow we should try to eradicate these feelings of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disgrace. A more practical approach is to get to know them intimately, see how they hook us, see how they color our perception of reality, see how they aren’t all that solid. Then the eight worldly dharmas become the means for growing wiser as well as kinder and more content.

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    Lighten Up (and Do Something Different)
    B EING ABLE to lighten up is the key to feeling at home with your body, mind, and emotions, to feeling worthy to live on this planet. For example, you can hear the slogan “Always maintain only a joyful mind” and start beating yourself over the head for never being joyful. That kind of witness is a bit heavy.
    This earnestness, this seriousness about everything in our lives—including practice—this goal-oriented, we’re-going-to-do-it-or-else attitude, is the world’s greatest