/lit/ - Literature

>>11154703
>Sure. Everything in existence is lined with dukkha, Do you know that crushing feeling of loss when you finish a great story? Or how every beautiful song loses its magic as you keep thinking about it? Or how you consider someone you love, and some part of you imagines their death? When we are honest with ourselves, we find this trace of dissatisfaction in all things. I know what it's like to have friends you love, and how you really genuinely want those days to last forever, but they can't. If we are all honest with ourselves, we know this is not something to be shrugged off, but a fact of life itself.
How do you make the connection between that and "It shouldn't matter what you're feeling"? This is what I don't understand.
If we are feeling desperate or if we are feeling happy, the fact that they both are subject to the three characteristics (impermanence, non-self and dukkha) doesn't mean it doesn't matter if you feel one or the other. I guess we should first define what "to matter" means though. Indeed, the feeling of happiness won't matter in the long run, as it's not unconditioned, but it does matter in the moment. Specially in the way that you react to that particular feeling of happiness. You won't react the same way to a feeling of despair than to a feeling of love; you need to train yourself to control your reactions to them and decide which action (understood as kamma, which means you should include intention and all mental actions/formations) you will undertake in that particular situation and feeling you are experiencing. In this way, it wouldn't be correct to say that "it shouldn't matter what you feel".

>a disciplined monk and a traditional layman
I'd say "a disciple of the Buddha and an uninstructed worldling" to use the same monikers you find in the canon. A disciple of the Buddha can either be a monk or a lay follower. An uninstructed worldling aka run-of-the-mill person does not know the words of the Buddha.

>That part is confusing.
Agree.

>It was realizing that I depended on meditation to bring a transcendental experience and restore my capacity for pleasure, rather than to acquire liberation from the system and strip out the desire for becoming. It is like a textbook example of wrong view, though I do not judge myself for it.
You should congratulate yourself actually. Being able to have that level of self-reflection is not something most people have. Reflecting on your past actions actually helps you to stay closer to the path. Realizing you were seeing Buddhism from the wrong point of view is the same situation the Buddha faced when he realized that the teachings of his previous teachers (Alara Kalama and Udaka Ramaputta) were not the way to true release from suffering.