Page 43 - Because I know, I can let go

One person has this magnitude of desire, and, in this world, the benefit arising from one’s
defiled desires is small and difficult to achieve, hence people compete, are envious, jealous,

violent, they oppress each other in order to win the chance to make big gains, thus there’s
fighting and killing all over the world, and little hope that such will come to an end. Unless,
that is, people can come to true knowledge and realize that this sort of defiled desire is
insane and impossible to satisfy, then they might begin to entertain thoughts of turning

things around, of going in another direction, and might come to the realization that all
that getting, losing, and breaking even is really an unsupportable way to live, it’s madness,
and can never achieve real satisfaction.

So resist, develop the sort of mind that isn’t dominated by thoughts of getting, losing, or
breaking even.

That kind of mind, how will it be? How will it feel? We’ll try to give this some consideration.

Now, when we lose we’re mad in one way, and when we come out even there’ll still be
the hope for a better result, so that’s another form of insanity, while having made some
gain there’ll be more than the usual craziness. A mind which is normal, clean, bright, and

peaceful has no connection with those three concepts. Rather there’s the relaxation of
nipapetika(sic), that is, of having broken through to the real, then the insanity is gone..

Ignorance is like a prison in that it’s something which restricts our activities, it’s like

something which envelops, which covers over. There isn’t anything which envelops,
imprisons to the extent that ignorance does. Ignorance causes tanhā and upādāna to
arise, and it has this other characteristic, in that it imprisons, it binds us hand and foot to
sensuality, which is an extreme form of binding. To overcome this we need to perceive the

dhamma able to pierce, to penetrate into the real, so that we can break the bonds. This is
fundamental to Buddhism.

If we state the case properly then, in all of this, there are just two categories involved: the

first category, that of getting, of losing, and of breaking even, contains the binders, it’s only
the second category, the fourth kind of saññā, that doesn’t bind. We need to destroy the
binders by penetrating, seeing clearly into the real, into truth.

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