Ajahn Chah

A grating, discordant sound is simply that.

The Buddha said that rich or poor, young or old, human or animal, no being in this world can maintain itself in any single state for long.

Everything experiences change and deprivation.

This is a fact of life about which we can do nothing to remedy.

But the Buddha said that what we can do is to contemplate the body and mind, to see their impersonality, that neither of them is me nor mine.

They have only a provisional reality.

It's like this house.

It's only nominally yours.

You couldn't take it with you anywhere.

The same applies to your wealth, your possessions and your family.

They're yours only in name.

They don't really belong to you.

They belong to nature.

Now this truth doesn't apply to you alone.

Everyone is in the same boat, even the Lord Buddha and his enlightened disciples.

They differed from us only in one respect and that was their acceptance of the way things are.

They saw that it could be no other way

So the Buddha taught us to probe and examine the body from the soles of the feet up to the crown of the head and then back down to the feet again.

Just take a look at the body.

What sort of things do you see?