When
either of our 5 senses/mind,
their respective sense objects/mind objects and consciousness come in contact,
feeling is produced. Either this feeling is that of pleasure,
displeasure or neutral.
Based on the pleasurable / unpleasurable feeling produced, our
tendency is to immediately get either attached / repulsed by it respectively.
Based
on this attachment / revulsion towards the feeling we often form a
view about the sense experience - 'I like it' or 'I dislike it'. The
extent to which we do this, is mostly not noticeable unless we develop our
mindfulness to a certain extent and notice our subtle swings in mood with each sensory input. We do this very subtly and almost habitually.
Why so?
We
have probably developed this mechanism in order to gain pleasure and avoid
displeasure - after all only by tagging it all and remembering it, can we know
what to peruse and what to avoid in future.
And
often it does seem to lead to pleasure when we get what we want or are able to
avoid what we wish to avoid.
Downside
If
we look closely, we find that the more tags we have, the more it creates
long-term unsatisfactoriness, anxiety, fear, grief, greed, hate, etc. All these
harmful states of mind arise so as to:
- get what we 'LIKE' and
avoid what we 'DISLIKE';
- maintain what we 'LIKE'
and continue avoiding what we 'DISLIKE';
- not lose what we 'LIKE'
and not gain what we 'DISLIKE';
Sometimes,
we notice that the amount of anxiety, fear, grief or unsatisfactoriness is
not worth the momentarily pleasure we get once in a while.
Furthermore,
we create wrong views. The information stored in our memory about ‘LIKE’ or ‘DISLIKE’
is obsolete. We often can’t recall clearly why we took some decision, or
arrived at some conclusion, or the reason of our liking/disliking something,
yet we feel safer to rely on our past memories and tags that we had set for our
future reference. But we must investigate how unreliable this potentially could
be. For certain things it might not matter that much, however, some other
things that we are habitually doing and is causing misery for us or others,
needs such investigation.