There are good ships and wood ships that sail the sea, but the best ships are friendships, and may they always be! 

It has been over half a year since we started publishing these dhamma articles, and I hope they have made a positive change in the lives of our readers. I believe that week after week, we have formed a productive and fruitful bond with our readers, and due to their merit power, our small group of writers are able to churn out valuable articles week in and week out filled with enriching dhamma, life-changing advice and some simple hacks, which collectively help you progress on the spiritual journey to achieve the heights of the fulfilling and rewarding life your heart desires. Hopefully, this article is no exception. 

Our readers might be able to recall the first part of this article from about a month or so ago,  titled “The Hidden Cost of Instant Gratification”. This is the follow-up that we promised. For the benefit of the readers who have not had a chance to read the first part, I provide a summary. The world is racing, fuelled by technological advancements which are supposed to alleviate us from the burn of the daily churn, but paradoxically, people feel increasingly pressed for time, and the number of those who suffer from stress-related mental issues is on a steep incline. We discussed how technology has made our lives more efficient, convenient, and connected, but it has also made us dangerously distractable and susceptible to irrational, emotional, and nonsensical decisions. We explored the concept of "hurry sickness" and how relying on autopilot mode can lead to harmful consequences. Then, we discussed how Buddhism can help individuals be happy and achieve balance while leading a busy life. Kindness is the bedrock of Buddhism, which creates a sanctified atmosphere for its followers to attain Nibbana or Eternal Happiness. It is a state of mind where you are okay with anything. Whatever comes your way won’t sway you, be it a compliment or a criticism. This reminds an eloquent stanza uttered by the lord Buddha to describe the mindset of an individual who has completely surrendered to vipāka.
 
Selo yatha ekaghano, 
vatena na samirati
evan nindapasamsasu
na saminjanti pandita

As a rock-solid mountain is unshaken by the wind, so are the wise, who are unperturbed by blame or praise. Thera Lakuntaka Bhaddiya was the recipient of this stanza. Bhaddiya was a bhikkhu at the Jetavana monastery during Buddha’s time. Because of his short stature, he was known as Lakuntaka (the dwarf) by other bhikkhus. Lakuntaka Bhaddiya was famous for his placidity and good nature; even young bhikkhus would often tease him by pulling his nose or ear or patting him on his head. Often, they would mockingly call him "Little Uncle”. But never did Lakuntaka Bhaddiya thera retaliate in anger or rebuke them. Even in his heart, he never got angry with them and always wished everyone well. His even-tempered demeanour soon gained him popularity among his fellow monks, who informed the Buddha about Lakuntaka Bhaddhiya thero’s virtue of patience. The Buddha replied, "An arahant never loses his temper; he has no desire to speak harshly or to think ill of others. He is like a rock solid mountain; As a solid rock is unshaken, an arahant is unperturbed by scorn or praise." The topic of conversation was pleasure and happiness. The difference between pleasure and happiness was explained with reference to cake. If an object has the pleasure you are after, having more of it, spending more time with it, and associating it more frequently should generate more pleasure. Still, in reality, the opposite happens. Therefore, we must conclude that pleasure cannot exist within external objects. While the Lord Buddha himself acknowledged that pleasure is real, it is not something worth chasing after because pleasure is merely the psychological experience of relief from suffering, nothing substantial. In other words, suffering is a prerequisite for pleasure. We will delve slightly deeper into this concept in this article.

Hoping hopelessly

Straight off, I will issue a few bold, perhaps controversial statements: “You only hope because you suffer! You only hope because you are in pain! If there is something you are hopeful of right now, you are suffering right now!” 

Now that I have your attention, let’s discuss this further. Hope is promoted to us as a beautiful thing. If you were to recollect your past and reflect on your present, you cannot help but hope for a better future. How many hopes have you had in your life so far? Undoubtedly, there are too many to count. Consider just the past week - probably hundreds! Starting with hoping the bus, train or rickshaw will get you to the office on time, to hoping to have a successful meeting or an interview, your happiness is based on realising hopes, and that means it is based on conditions. Let’s acknowledge that hoping is a feeling of expectation or a desire for something to happen. It is a positive emotion that motivates people to keep working towards their goals and aspirations despite obstacles and challenges. Hope can be both a conscious and unconscious feeling, and it can vary in intensity depending on the situation and the individual's personality and mindset. It is an essential part of human life and can help individuals cope with demanding situations and keep them on track to achieve their dreams. Granted, some of your dreams would have come true, and you are probably experiencing them fully now. But now that you have achieved them, they will have been replaced with bigger, better, grander ones. It seems one hope has to replace another. “Hope keeps the heart alive” is an adage which portrays hope as the holy grail of a promising life. But is it truly a blessing or a curse in disguise? Hope and contentment are opposites. If contentment is bliss, then when will hope ever make you happy? If you are always hopeful, when will you be content? The truth is, you won’t. Conditional happiness is a myth; it’s a wild goose chase. There is no water in the mirage. To highlight this, the Lord Buddha uttered the following words of wisdom. 

Yatha bubbulakan passe
yatha passe maricikam
evam lokam avekkhantan
maccuraja na passati

If a person looks at the world, namely the five aggregates (pancakhandha), in the same way as a bubble or a mirage, the King of Death (mara) will not find him. According to the Dhammapada, this concerned five hundred Bhikkus who were on their way from the forest back to the Jetavana monastery, failing to make significant progress during their meditation retreat. They returned to the Buddha to ask for a more suitable object of meditation (karmastana). On their way, they saw a mirage and reflected on it. As soon as they entered the monastery compound, a storm broke out; as big drops of rain fell, bubbles manifested on the ground and soon disappeared. Seeing those bubbles, the bhikkhus reflected thus: ‘This body of ours is a mere manifestation of causes, just like the bubbles’, and perceived the conditional nature of the aggregates (khandhas -  rupa, vedanā, saññā, saṅkhāra and viññāṇa). The Buddha observed them through his divine eye from his chamber, sent forth a radiance, and appeared in their vision. He gave the monks a splendid discourse, and at the end of the discourse, those five hundred bhikkhus attained arahanthood.
There’s an interesting theory regarding hopers (people who hope). Two types of people don’t hope. The first are those who don’t hope because they’ve more or less given up on life and are just going through the motions. Those are the ones Benjamin Franklin described as the people who die at 25 but aren't buried until 75. The other type are arahants who don’t hope because they’ve realised the truth and surrendered to karmic energy. They have realised that hoping is a hopeless process! For instance, consider someone who claims to enjoy financial freedom but fears losing wealth. The claim he makes cannot be substantiated. In simpler terms, if you are financially free, you won’t need to worry too much about keeping your wealth secure. If one has to keep someone else or something secure, we would call them a security guard, wouldn’t we? So, if one must keep one's wealth secure, that would also make one a security guard. If you had to do that for the sake of happiness, how can that amount to financial freedom? Is that not financial slavery? Lord Buddha's dhamma will help you transcend conditional happiness and reach unconditional happiness. 

A Deep Dive

One of the more famous sayings by the Buddha is that the mind is a trickster. Saññā is a mirage and viññāṇa is an illusionist. It’s a well-known fact proven by the scientific community that what the physical eye can capture is a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. I.e. visible light. While the healthy naked eye can see 100% of the visible spectrum, we see very little of the total electromagnetic spectrum. And that share is even less than 1%; 3 thousandths of the spectrum, to be precise, from a wavelength of 380nm (violet) - 750 nm (red). These grounds further support the Buddha’s theory.

Here’s the truth. The cosmos is filled with energy. There’s energy all around us. Some of it is more concentrated in space, forming clusters or clumps. When light reflects off these concentrated areas and reaches your eyes, they converge in the back of the eyes. Let’s call this the optical image. This image is formed on the rod and cone cells, which are stimulated. The stimulated cells trigger an electrical impulse, which then gets sent to the brain over the optic nerve. Let’s call this the neural image. A salient point to be made here is that neither of the images mentioned above can be seen. For that, the neural image has to be translated into a visual image. This is the responsibility of the minding process. 

The Minding Process
The minding process involves the mind faculty (mana indriya) interfacing with the brain to capture and analyse the neural image. The neural image is captured as an impression on the mind faculty. This impression is referred to as form (rupa). The captured rupa is then further processed by the minding process, giving rise to the remaining four of the five aggregates, viz, vedanā (sensation), saññā (identification), saṅkhāra (formation), and viññāṇa (perception). The minding process effectively analyses the trigger input (rupa) to produce a sensible interpretation of it. This process executes whenever the mind makes contact with a rupa. Each iteration of it produces a new instance of the five aggregates. Once the process has run its course, perception, which is the aggregation of the four elements which occur before it, takes place. The product of perception is effectively the visual image we see. 

To offer an example to elaborate on this, “seeing an object” is the final effect of a series of processes, initially triggered by light waves from an external object making contact with the eye, forming an optical image. The nervous system conveys this image to the brain, creating a neural image. The mind faculty interfacing with the visual cortex of the brain picks up a mental impression of the neural image, and the minding process which ensues instigates “vedanā” (sensation) and “saññā” (identification). The stage of “saṅkhāra” constructs the thought (citta) according to one’s temperament (mental factors or cetasika). The output of that stage is the sensory experience or viññāṇa; in other words, at the viññāṇa stage, the final decision gets made as to what the original rupa was. But when it gets to this stage, the initial rupa is convoluted. Therefore, when the conclusion is made about the object, your previous experiences and memories are conflated with the original rupa impression on the mind faculty. A record of that sensory event gets recorded as a “viññāṇa dhatu” – a perception element. That record becomes a fragment of memory - “nāmagotta.” Finally, the conclusion, which in this case is the visual image, following further mental processing, is visually (as opposed to optically) projected onto the external image such that it is deemed to have been projected from the external object. This is a very brief account of a complex but fascinating process and one we will detail further in future articles.

At this juncture, may we suggest to our users that it would be prudent to subscribe to our videos on YouTube, which explain this phenomenon more vividly and in-depth (because it is a multimedia medium). You can scan the QR code to get there directly. 

Your external world is entirely a mental projection of your internal world. You might be shocked to learn it only consists of five mental impressions. The five aggregates are the building blocks of one’s perceived existence (i.e. everything one experiences), including all experiences from previous lives, the present and future. As we will see, a sentient being’s entire existence (through uncountable rebirths) and experiences can be described entirely through the five aggregates. This might sound absurd initially, but in reality, we cannot know exactly what’s out there in the external world because what we perceive is a mental interpretation of external manifestations. We live in a self-manufactured, imaginary world. The Buddha showed that the five aggregates arise and fade away in a manner fully explained in terms of causes and their effect. They are conditional, and therefore, the existence of a permanent, unconditioned “soul” or an “ātman” is refuted.  

Reincarnation

If no soul traverses samsara, how should one understand the idea of rebirth or reincarnation? If rebirth were not true, then when you die, your suffering must stop. So, if someone wishes to terminate suffering, would not a simple solution be to do the same with their life? One of our devotees, who happened to be a Doctor of Physics, posed this question to me when he once ventured to our monastery across thousands of miles from Germany. I replied with the following answer, “if rebirth were a myth, then you would be correct. But since it’s not, death is not the answer.” To prove this theory, I used a few examples and ideas. It is well-documented that some children can recall their past lives, and some of these claims have been verified and proven genuine. Secondly, since your body is just a vessel controlled by a mind that keeps manifesting all the time but anchoring itself to a corporeal body, rebirth will happen as long as the mind desires it. In other words, a mind that wants to experience the world will always be reborn, associating with a body. If you like to drive, you won’t stop doing it just because your car breaks down or becomes unusable some other way; you would get it fixed or acquire another. You only stop driving permanently when you don’t have the urge or want to drive.

It's My Life, It’s Now or Never

I want to conclude this week’s article with the famous lyrics from a song by one of the most popular American Rock bands, Bon Jovi. ‘It’s my life, it’s now or never, I ain’t gonna live forever. Don’t waste your valuable life ‘livin’ on a prayer’ or living someone else's and building someone else’s dream. Our life is brief, yet we are too distracted with unimportant things. When our readers leave home in the morning and jet off to work, you might notice flowers blooming and spreading their fragrance to the world around them. But you return from work to see that they have withered away, lost their colour and fragrance. It has reached the end of its life. This must remind you that you have just spent a day of your precious and irrecoverable life. You are marching towards your death. Nature is a pensive reminder of fleeting years. I urge our viewers to pay attention to these harbingers of death and always to be mindful. Therefore, let’s shift our focus to achieving our salvation and helping millions worldwide do the same. 

False programming of our mind has led us to pursue happiness in external objects and people. A mind polluted by defilements is not fit to make life-changing decisions. Ignorance and attachment cause the mind to be vexed, and it tries anything and everything in its power to relieve pressure. Did you know that vexation never killed anybody? It’s only when people try to relieve themselves that they get hurt or even killed. The Buddha described the mind with attachment, like a monkey jumping from one tree to another in search of fruits. He said ‘So plavati hurahuran, pala michchanva vanasmin wanaro’. Adjust the sails of the ship of life and steer towards the shore. Fear not, land ahoy! When you do reach the final destination, a torrent of tears might cleanse your face, but those are tears of joy, not disappointment.
May the Noble Triple Gem bless you all!