Nissarana Noble Sharing

When we go about our day to day life, we experience distractions from, or hindrances to, what we are doing.   This is common, and we have developed the habit to adapt ourselves and go along, at times focussed and choosing not to be distracted or hindered, and at others, falling prey to the hindrances.  Let us now see closely what these hindrances are. 

The first class of hindrance stems from the things we choose to make contact with.  We choose to make contact with things associated with sight, sound, smell, taste or texture, or physical feeling of ease or comfort, and the climate.  So, we are distracted by any of these, and fail to be attentive with what we are doing or saying.  Similarly, we are distracted when we meditate. We hear things, smell, taste or feel things, and experience comfort and climate.   We are distracted from our meditation object, and our minds are arrested and diverted.  We tend to follow the experience, formulate a fairytale, fabricate evidence, or try to articulate an experience, etc rather than mindfully experience the concentration objective. 

The Buddha has shown in many discourses how individuals free themselves from defilements and their consequences. One needs to appreciate a few things within themselves, if they are to adopt the practice of forgiveness. This is the only way to free oneself from the past, so one can prepare towards enlightenment. 

One needs to first realise that we are all, a heap of memories of our past and hopes and plans of the future. The present is about experiencing the consequences of the past, and collecting more memory through sensory contact. There is a lengthy explanation as to how this is achieved.  It is best that one accepts that this is what happens or this also can happen (with a reasonable level of scepticism). Amongst the fundamentals that one needs to understand about oneself is, why one “saves and hordes” all these memories. We store experiences of kind, compassionate, pleasant, happy, good, right, generous, and forgiving, events, and we also have experiences of angry, hateful, unpleasant, unhappy, bad, wrong, selfish, revengeful, and events.  While we have pleasant outcomes from the store of pleasant experiences, funnily, we seem to have the unpleasant ones in the forefront of our minds and they seem to preoccupy our existence with paranoia.