Teaching #7: Life's Compositional Nature
Even during the pleasant moments of your life do you not experience an underlying unease about the future? This worry and anxiety is a manifestation of the third type of suffering the Buddha identified—life’s inherent unsatisfactoriness due to its insubstantial compositional nature. Each moment arises due to certain conditions, then it just disappears. There is not a lasting or substantial “there there” in daily life, thus life is often described as being like a dream.
Chapter 4, Pg 35
For your reflection: Did you have a parent or grandparent who as they got older started to describe life as being like a dream? Take some quiet time to reflect on your life and see if you can access this perspective. Can you see that discovering the compositional nature of life can at times free your mind from its fierce attachment to having things be a certain way?