Awareness in Buddhist Meditation

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of a search for happiness contains the seed of its failure, because it
continues the very cause of the conflict within the ego.
Dukkha, therefore, which is frequently translated as sorrow or
suffering, is actually much more than that, as it forms one of the
three chief characteristics found in everything that is a composition
(saṅkhāra) or a conditioned event. The intrinsic unrest, imbalance,
disharmony of whatever state that is dependent on conditions for its
arising, continuation and cessation, is the inherent conflict, innate
in every complex. This applies most of all to the psychological
complex which forms an individual. Every complex is a conflict
(sabbe saṅkhārā dukkhā).
In the natural stream of life where everything is impermanent,
the misconception of continued activity gives rise to the thought of
a continued ‘self’-entity, underlying this activity as a substance or
a soul. This misconception of a ‘self’ as a permanent ego obviously
places the natural impermanence of the total process of life in direct
opposition. This opposition between an illusory ‘self’ (which
in a struggle for survival must oppose all that is impermanent) and
the actual process of life and thought constitutes the conflict which
thereby forms an essential part of every complex.
The conflict, therefore, is natural and even essential, so long
as this opposition is maintained, the opposition between the actual
impermanence of all that is, and the ideal permanence which is the
object of all strife and striving. An ideal, however noble and sublime,
finds its source in the human mind itself as an idea or concept, and
can, therefore, never surpass its limitations and can never become
actual.
It is this constant frustration of the limitations of the impermanent
process of life and thought, endeavouring to surpass those
boundaries in a fruitless attempt to surpass itself into a self-created
ideal world, it is that frustration which constitutes the problem of
conflict, the first Noble Truth, which must be seen and lived to be
understood. Truth not only appears sometimes, but actually is so