Do Not Live Inside Your Feelings

📖Master’s Reading

We assume seeing is believing, not knowing that most of life's afflictions come from being entangled by the six senses — eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. We feel and pursue with the body, mistaking this for the whole of what is real, forgetting it is only a very brief "feeling." To satisfy worldly passions, the ordinary being blindly chases what it likes and rejects what it dislikes, letting the soul be led entirely by emotion.

Yet feelings are always changing. Consider: today's feeling is gone tomorrow, and today's joy cannot be kept for the next day. To build the whole worth and happiness of life on these fleeting, shifting feelings is like building a house on quicksand — one can never find peace. It draws us into an endless mind of gain and loss, giving rise to the tormenting "eight sufferings": birth, ageing, sickness, death, parting from loved ones, and the rest.

True practice is learning to transcend these worldly feelings. Only by setting down excessive clinging to matter and emotion, no longer turning with outer circumstances, can one break through the heavy prison of the senses. Craving fleeting feeling, we live inside a limited "false self"; only by learning to explore inward and see through the illusion of the senses can we recover the "true self" — hidden deep within, complete in itself, unborn and undying.

🌱Reflection for Daily Life

• Understand that the feelings brought by the six senses are all fleeting.
• Do not build the worth of life on illusory feeling.
• When emotion stirs, pause three seconds and see through its illusion.
• Explore the original mind inward and recover the unborn, undying true self.
• Transcend the fleeting false self; explore inward to recover the unborn, undying true self.