Again I read the House Builder from the Buddha and connected it to. your everyday relationship and the Noble Truths of the Buddha and how to stop the house builder from nailing me to a cross. Oh, lots of dots connected here. Hang on to your seats.

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“Through the round of many births I roamed without reward, without rest, seeking the house-builder. Painful is birth again & again. House-builder, you’re seen! You will not build a house again. All your rafters broken, the ridge pole destroyed, gone to the Unformed, the mind has come to the end of craving.”

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Seeing the House Builder is see thee hammer in your hand pounding nails of negativity into your mind. When you SEE that hammer in your hand, the House Builder goes to the unformed, or disappears. The SEEing and the Action is the same. Seeing kills the House Builder that has been building this haunted house we have been living in all out live. Sometimes all at once, sometimes one board at a time, which is the normal way.

We are terrified of being homeless and without a house, even if it is a house of pain, and all houses are storehouses for our painful memories and out basement full of horrors. This is the metaphor for all the horror movies with the haunted house. We built that.

We don’t SEE the house builder because we believe someone else, the world, my wife, my boss, or even myself is the house builder. Blaming yourself is not seeing the house builder because blaming yourself just creates another room in the house. The goal of the Buddha Dharma or teaching is to be homeless, to be a metaphorical monk with nothing but an alms bowl and a shawl. To live free of our houses of horror…our conditioned mind.

I changed the title to Don’t Live in a Haunted House, which is a great metaphor for the mind that is conditioned by memory and our story of regrets. I am interested—and I assume you are—to stop building this haunted house of pain. Vowing to top building the house will not do. Believing someone else is building the house will not do. We have tried all that. It’s time for something new.

The Buddha has a very simple recipe: You are the house build; See yourself building the house: the house building of pain stops. That’s it. It’s very scientific and medial: See the symptom; treat the cause; end the dis-ease.

Whenever I see the games I’m playing; whenever I see my urge to be special; whenever I see my resentment when I’m not respected….I see the House Builder. On Facebook we build houses all the time with boards of opinion. Our house locks us into our position. We all live in a tract of world with tacky tack houses all in a row.

Why do I suffer? We really ask that question when our plans don’t work out and our best intentions go astray. Why do I suffer, Lord, I did everything right. I was a good child. The House Builder talks may create confusion because I might ask why I would want to make myself suffer. Why would I pound nails into my hand (Christ metaphor). The problem is our logic, our Classical Greek Logic that says everything is what it is. So…suffering is suffering. I’t can’t be grade or the cessation of suffering. Good is good and bad is bad. Nothing can logically be good/bad. That is ambiguous. But life IS ambiguous. Every good quickly turns into a bad, and bad turns into good. Nothing is fixed but our logic.

Why do I suffer? We really ask that question when our plans don’t work out and our best intentions go astray. Why do I suffer, Lord, I did everything right. I was a good child. The House Builder talks may create confusion because I might ask why I would want to make myself suffer. Why would I pound nails into my hand (Christ metaphor). The problem is our logic, our Classical Greek Logic that says everything is what it is. So…suffering is suffering. I’t can’t be grade or the cessation of suffering. Good is good and bad is bad. Nothing can logically be good/bad. That is ambiguous. But life IS ambiguous. Every good quickly turns into a bad, and bad turns into good. Nothing is fixed but our logic.