The Fabrication of Pain (short extract)

"This is one of the purposes of doing meditation to begin with — to see how much of our experience we’re fabricating. We’re fabricating a lot more than we think.

“Fabricating” here doesn’t mean that you’re lying, it simply means that you’re creating things, jerry-rigging things together, to make some sense out of your experience, or to get something out of your experience. But the way you jerry-rig can carry lots of problem with it. A lot of things that bother us in life are not simply “givens.” We’ve taken some raw material from our past karma and have shaped it into something oppressive. That’s the kind of pain that the Buddha is focusing on — the pain that comes from craving."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Fabrication of Pain"

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