On Encountering Nibbida

Found this bit from a Dhamma talk by Bhante Thanissaro that seems relevant.

"All kinds of happiness require effort in one way or another. The question is, “Is the effort worth it?” In terms of fabricated things, conditioned things, many times the answer is No. In fact, if you make any conditioned thing an end in and of itself, the effort isn’t worth it, for ultimately it will leave you high and dry.

Yet the Buddha realized that conditioned things have another side as well. Not only are they conditioned, they’re also conditioning. In other words, as conditioned things they’re dependent on other causes; they arise and fall in line with those causes’ arising and falling away — sometimes immediately, sometimes over time. But then they themselves give rise to other things. The Buddha’s major discovery was that even though certain things are conditioned — in other words the elements of the path are conditioned — they can lead to an opening to the Unconditioned. And this is what makes the path worthwhile, what gives hope to our lives.

In Thai there’s a term for the state of mind where all you can see is the bad side of conditioned things: Everything passes away, passes away, passes away, and everything starts seeming hopeless, pointless. It’s called narrow equanimity, small minded equanimity. In other words, you get disenchanted with everything, but the disenchantment doesn’t lead to the opening to the Deathless. You stay stuck there on the disenchanted side. If you stay stuck there, it’s easy to get hopeless, apathetic, depressed.

But the Buddha pointed out another side to conditioned things, too. A potential for true happiness lies here in the practice. We’re fabricating conditioned things. Right View, Right Resolve, all the way down to Right Concentration: These are all conditioned things. They’re the highest of all conditioned things. But even though they’re the highest, you don’t stop there. They’re a path. They open up to something even bigger.

So make sure that you look at life from both sides." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu “Single-minded Determination”, Meditations2,

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