9
" I looked around for that welcoming light I'd heard about, but I didn't see it. Instead, everything around me seemed to glow and shimmer in the sunlight. I heard beautiful sounds-not the voices of dead loved ones, but the laughter and singing of my children when they were tiny. I saw James, young and shirtless, chasing them through Mama's garden. Off in the distance I saw Barbara Jean and Clarice, and even myself when we were kids, dancing to music pouring out of my old pink and violet portable record player. Here I was with my fingers brushing up against the frame of the picture I'd been painting for the last fifty-five years, and my beautiful, scarred husband, my happy children, and my laughing friends were right there with me. "
13
" To be completely objective we must say:
All men are mortal.
Lionel Samaratunga's son is a man.
Therefore Lionel Samaratunga's son is mortal.
So stated, it is quite generally true, and is the concern of no-one in particular. It is so generally true that it would serve in a textbook of logic as an example of a syllogism in Barbara (though usually, instead of Lionel Samaratunga's son, it is Socrates whose mortality is logically demonstrated).
But how many students of logic are going to shed tears when they read that Lionel Samaratunga's son is destined to die? How many have so much as heard of Lionel Samaratunga, let alone of his son? (And anyway, how many students of logic shed a tear even over the death of Socrates, of whom they may perhaps have heard?) But if you were to come across this syllogism unexpectedly, it is not impossible that you might feel emotionally moved (as perhaps at this very moment you may be feeling a little uncomfortable at my having chosen an example so near home). And why should this be so? Because you are fond of Lionel Samaratunga's son and cannot regard this syllogism in Barbara, which speaks of his mortality, quite so objectively as a student of logic. In other words, as soon as feeling comes in at the door objectivity flies out the window. Feeling, being private and not public, is subjective and not objective.
And the Buddha has said (A. III,61: i,176) that it is 'to one who feels' that he teaches the Four Noble Truths. So, then, the Dhamma must essentially refer to a subjective aniccatā—i.e. one that entails dukkha—and not, in any fundamental sense, to an objective aniccatā, which we can leave to students of logic and their professors. (Feeling is not a logical category at all.) "
― Nanavira Thera