For a successful striving against suffering, thinking can become a mischief maker not to be underestimated, as you will know from many personal experiences. Nobody has the faculty of clearly thinking from the first moment on, the physical forces, sensation, perception, conception and becoming conscious are still but one chaotic pressing. Therefore the developing human – you, your own, the Buddha – looks instinctively for a secure, firm support. This offers itself with the experience of “I”. Everything seems to encourage him in this: I stand, I see, I hear, I think, I will, I can … “I” grows to be the great measure for life.

Soon, however, man learns that this measure is without a reliable scale. There are millions and millions of “I’s” who more or less have, or at least think they had, standards of their own which they want to employ and use successfully. This could perhaps be corrected by some organizing or educational endeavours. But in a short time these endeavours disclose themselves indeed as well meant, but  impracticable. We can organize solely with the help of some secure, legitimate and reliable correlative. But most alarming is the statement that there is none. Hence the beloved, carefully cultivated and caressed “I” reveals itself as a highly recalcitrant quantity “X”. Sometimes this does not suit him, sometimes that; now he is too hot, now too cold; now things go too quickly, now to slowly; this moment he thinks himself well understood, the next fundamentally mistaken. In short, far from being a secure correlative, “I” becomes a plainly frantic chaos of heterogeneous desires: I will not get ill – and am getting ill; I will not get weary – and am falling down with fatigue; I am sick and tired of living – but I know not what life really means; I am ardently in search of the grand, the beautiful, the sublime – and, in my carelessness, “I” am overpowered by suffering in the form of joy, by the ugly in the form of the beautiful, by bad luck in the form of luck. And still, this great grotesque, this diabolic-satirical play is but a grandiose error sprung from wrong thinking and cognition. Quiet, objective consideration, however, shows that the individuality, this indivisible, inseparable occurrence of totality, affords a power stronger than that of suffering.

It endows with the faculty of practical seeing, a practical experiencing: “Soundness is the highest good and extinction of delusion is most sublime well-being, happiness, highest bliss” (Majjhima Nikaya 75).

Soundness that is vital energy attentively checked and gathered with the use of the sense organs and the five groups.

Extinction of delusion that is the state of liberation from the compulsive erroneous idea: this “I”, condensed in the conscious process, were mine, is myself. To see things like that, means to convulse the practice of the five groups, and the whole individuality and means senselessly opposing an incorruptible Lawfulness. If life could indeed be exhausted in nothing but the power of suffering the necessity of the transistoriness of the five groups would be the sole manifestation of life force. Neither of us would be here, then. Life would be one single frightful outcry from misery and pains. But it is not! For the force of suffering (as perishableness) has for its antithesis freedom from suffering (as immortality).

Confidence is the root of such practical knowledge, its basis being quiet, sensible envisaging of the reality. And yet, all the positive human faculties and forces would not suffice for the labour necessary here, were there not what is called “equalization” in the Buddha-Dharma – evolution, the unfolding of those faculties and forces. Having confidence means to examine this power of evolution carefully. It enables man to operate the strong and at times exceedingly strong force of evolution in thoughts, words and deeds for the benefit of himself, of others, of both of them.

Now, thinking, as you may often come to find, has two aspects: one of cognition and one of greed, the latter making man rather easily blind - face to face with reality. He cannot become aware of the fact that what he is taking for something constant, abiding – in short for his “I” – is but the culmination of the physical processes ever changing, arising and passing away, of sensation, perception, conception and of their compilation in the conscious process of “I”. Man cannot – or will not – see and understand that in the course of life-dynamics nothing static, steadfast is to be found and that the moment of consciousness always again brings about the delusion of “I am”. Though he is shown by reality with utmost clearness a permanent becoming and passing away; though to be born and to die are evidently the polar manifestations of the stream of “life” – man sticks to his illusion. Should he test himself in earnest he must agree that there cannot be made any valid, convincing objection against lawfulness and that it is rather the idea of his strong and wilful individuality could possibly be without essence, without substance, hollow and void which fills him with fear and anxiety. It is the erroneous thought: This “I”, this belongs to me; this is mine, which man takes for constant, for the very heart of his individuality. Whereas the present shows him in every phase of life that emptiness, nothing less the nought, is rather force.