Have you ever had the experience of thinking that you lost your glasses only to find, after a frantic search, that you were wearing them the whole time? This is the situation that the Buddha described to us. Because we do not yet fully understand that what is in front of us is already good enough, we spend our lives searching for something else.
This sort of understanding is not the conventional understanding that comes from reading and thinking. What I mean by “we don’t fully understand” is that the pattern of observation and thought that we experience does not yet point towards the truth. Our task as meditators is to adjust those patterns so that they start to point in the right direction.
In Pali, we refer to this ideal phenomenon as Sampacano which translates roughly to comprehension or “knowing what we are doing all the time.” So, in Buddhism, understanding or comprehension is a process or habit rather than a state of mind acquired from study. The more that we observe correctly what is happening, the more we will begin to experience happiness and satisfaction. This kind of happienss is not fleeting. It persists because it is based on new and improved life-style.
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