There's a wonderful sutta by the Buddha called the Salatha, which is the Arrow Sutta.

And it's known for the first half of the sutah where the Buddha basically says that in life we all get shot with suffering, but that the difference

between someone who's got a spiritual practice and someone who doesn't have a spiritual practice is that the person who does have the spiritual practice just feels the pain knows it's going to end and doesn't add any personalizing resistance to it.

It doesn't say, why me, why did I get shot?

Doesn't add all the needless thinking, needless resistance to the experience, just

leans into the experience knowing and takes care of the wounds without getting into all the fuss of why mean.

But the Buddha says that the un-instructed person makes the experience all the worse by not just having the pain of the arrow, the arrow being a metaphor,

but adding all the stressful thinking of why does this happen to me?

Why am I the one who gets hurt, abandoned, insulted, mistreated, etc?

The argument in life is that in life we all experience not only old age suffering in terms of illness and grief and death.

Well we also suffer little things the Buddha said, difficult people, frustrations,

disappointments, we, the Buddha said, get stuck with people who are disagreeable, and we get separated from people we care about.

And so this is what happens when you sign up for human birth. It's not personal. It's just part of the journey.

But the tendency to forget the universality of our experience and instead try to claim and own the crap that happens to us in terms

of why is this happening to me adds a whole lot of suffering.

And yet that's where most people end the teaching. They don't talk

any more about how the Suita goes on, but is quite often the case some of the most interesting tidbits the Buddha saves for the end.

So the Buddha in this says when a normal person has a terrible or uncomfortable experience, they generally

crave sensual pleasure. Why is that? Because they don't understand that there's any other way to respond to discomfort or

pain other than to resist it.

They fail to see, and here's the part we'll be talking about tonight that every experience has an allure which in Palis Asada a drawback

Adinava and an escape, Nisarana.

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