THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS By Ajahn Sumedho - DharmaFlower.Net

eing terribly refined, having a great intellect and a taste for greatbeauty, makes anything coarse unbearable because of the attachmentto what is refined. People who have devoted their lives to refinementonly find life terribly frustrating and frightening when they can nolonger maintain such high standards.RATIONALITY AND EMOTIONIf you love rational thought and are attached to ideas and perceptions,then you tend to despise the emotions. You can notice this tendencyif, when you start to feel emotions, you say, ‘I’m going to shut this out.I don’t want to feel those things.’ You don’t like to be feeling anythingbecause you can get into a kind of high from the purity of intelligenceand the pleasure of rational thinking. The mind relishes the way it islogical and controllable, the way it makes sense. It is just so clean andneat and precise like mathematics - but the emotions are all over theplace aren’t they? They are not precise, they are not neat and they caneasily get out of control.So the emotional nature is often despised. We are frightened of it. Forexample, men often feel very frightened of emotions because we arebrought up to believe that men do not cry. As a little boy, at least inmy generation, we were taught that boys do not cry so we’d try to liveup to the standards of what boys are supposed to be. They would say,‘You are a boy’, and so we’d try to be what our parents said we shouldbe. The ideas of the society affect our minds, and because of that, wefind emotions embarrassing. Here in England, people generally findemotions very embarrassing; if you get a little too emotional, theyassume that you must be Italian or some other nationality.If you are very rational and you have figured everything out, then youdon’t know what to do when people get emotional. If somebody startscrying, you think, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Maybe you say, ‘Cheerup; it’s all right, dear. It’ll be all right, there’s nothing to cry about.’ Ifyou are very attached to rational thoughts, then you just tend todismiss it with logic, but emotions do not respond to logic. Often theyreact to logic, but they do not respond. Emotion is a very sensitivething and it works in a way that we sometimes do not comprehend. Ifwe have never really studied or tried to understand what it is to feellife, and really opened and allowed ourselves to be sensitive, thenemotional things are very frightening and embarrassing to us. Wedon’t know what they are all about because we have rejected that sideof ourselves.On my thirtieth birthday, I realised that I was an emotionallyundeveloped man. It was an important birthday for me. I realised thatI was a full grown, mature man - I no longer considered myself ayouth, but emotionally, I think I was about six years old some of thetime. I really had not developed on that level very much. Even though