Friends:

Sensing is a Representation and not a Reality!

The need to control and master the senses is obvious, since it is this ability to sense that enables both all pleasant & painful experiences of this world.

However, paradoxically, it is exactly this spontaneous and quite impulsive rush after the immediate, but only short-lived satisfaction induced by any pleasant sense reaction, that is both the seed and root of much suffering.

This other side of the coin is created by the delayed side-effects:

Thus do the urge after momentary pleasant feeling, create lust and greed.

Thus do the urge away from brief painful feeling, create hate and aversion.

Thus do the urge for absence of neutral feeling, create neglect & ignorance.

These 3 roots of Suffering are always lying hidden and latent within the untrained mind: Ignorance is obscuring the true nature of things making them only appear as lasting, agreeable and ownable. Hate induces hostile aversion and opposition towards even very advantageous phenomena such as learning, morality, meditation, and friendship just because these may once have been associated with a brief unlikable painful feeling!

These instantaneous reactions overwhelm the untrained mind and make it act contrary to its own and other's interest: It rushes ahead in the hunt for instant gratification, oblivious of the fact, that the paradoxical fruit of sense delight is this much delayed, yet inevitable misery, in the form of infinitely repeated rebirth, ageing, sickness and death!

On a much deeper and more subtle level do the six sense sources create a misapprehended pointing to an illusory reality, by mistaking a sensation for a true reference to a world really existing "out there" independent of mind:

'I see the world therefore do it exist!', which is as absurd as postulating:

'I saw the phenomenon on a film therefore is this phenomena real' insofar as any sensation only is a inner mentally created 'film' or 'representation'
of some form of contact between a 'sensor' (eye, ear, nose, tongue, mind) and its 'sensitivity' for the object (form, sound, smell, taste, touch, idea).

In a similar way do the 5 clusters of clinging also induce a misunderstood pointing, by mistaken reference to an assumed & constructed entity 'Ego',
'I' or 'me' "In here", while all there really is, is a five-fold flux of changing properties, endlessly arising & ceasing right there, where they momentarily arised!

Right there does the untrained mind also create and reinforce the basic root of this abysmal conceit: "I Am" or "I exists"!!!

Only the Buddhas explain:

Sabbe Sankhara Anicca!

All constructions are impermanent!

Sabbe Sankhara Dukkha!

All constructions are suffering!

Sabbe Dhamma Anatta!

All states are self and core-less!

More on this deepest self-deception: The conceit that "I Am!" (Asmi-mana):

http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/II/Pride.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/Conceit_I_Am.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/I-dentification.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/Prison_of_Pride.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/IV/Anti-EGO-Tool.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/IV/Anatta_No_Self.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/II/Ending_Pain_Itself.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/IV/No_Agent_is_Inside.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/II/Solo_Self-Deception.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/II/Mistaken_Reference.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/II/Input_'I'-dentification.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/IV/Selfless_and_Harmless.htm
http://What-Buddha-Said.net/drops/II/Clinging_to_the_notion_I_Am.htm

Do these objects reside outside in the world or inside the mind or both?
Have a nice & noble day!

Friendship is the Greatest!
Bhikkhu Samāhita _/\_ 
http://What-Buddha-Said.net
Sensations are only Representations!
Related Buddhist site: http://What-Buddha-Said.net

Group Home: http://groups.google.com/group/What_Buddha_Said

May all beings become thus Happy!
Friendship is the GREATEST!
Have a Nice Day!

Bhikkhu Samahita
Ceylon