Letting things go

I'll ask you a simple question, Are you happy? not at the present moment but overall. At the moment we can be happy or sad but overall if we evaluate our life, it's filled with misery and suffering. Every time an undesirable thing happens, and it happens most of the time we become miserable.

 There are 2 demons that are responsible for our sufferings: 

1) Craving for pleasure.
2) Aversion to pain.

Let's understand what happens to our body at different circumstances. 

Case 1: Let's say your friend uses cuss words against you in a friendly gesture. Our ear captures a sound, one part of our mind identifies and interprets it, another part categorises whether it's a good one or a bad one and then sensations are generated in our body which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Friend using cuss words may not make us angry but the same words used by a stranger can boil the pot of our anger. Why is it so that exactly same words we hear create two different reactions in our body?? 

Case 2: What happens to our body when we are addicted to smoking or drinking? Smoking or drinking unlike in case 1 is an artificial way to generate pleasant sensations. We are not addicted to alcohol or smoking per say but are addicted to pleasant sensations created in our body after their intake. 

Every time when something happens according to our wish our body generates pleasant sensations and whenever things don't go according to our wish it generates unpleasant sensations. We know from our stay in this world till now that nothing is permanent. Everything is changing every day. I am changing every day at the intellectual level and the physical level. The materials we own keep withering. How you were born and how you are now is not a day change or some change happened on every birthday, the change in our body is continuous. Remember the day of your life when you were the happiest and remember the worst day of your life. Both of them have passed. So, take-up anything and we find impermanence is the law of nature. The pleasant or unpleasant sensations we experience in our body is temporary and we understand this on intellectual level but at the deeper level our subconscious mind still craves for pleasant sensations and averts the unpleasant one. When the pleasant sensations end, we crave and create misery for us when the unpleasant sensations come, we generate aversion towards it in turn generating misery. When with practice it becomes our nature that we neither crave for pleasure nor avert pain, we are actually free and out of misery. The key is to observe things as it is without generating craving or aversion and let it go. 

This is a very simplified theoretical aspect of an ancient Indian philosophy

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