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Originally Posted by JustBe
Can you elaborate further on this? Thankyou.
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It's hard to stop my head from going full into Buddhist philosophy on this one, but better to say it as I think it in the way it seems to work for me. The main point is Buddha's statement that volition is kamma. In this way, your volition as it is now is your kamma, which is generating both immediate manifestations and also potential for future manifestations.
Manifestation just means what arises as your conscious experience, but because all your experience is sensory: sight, sound, smell, taste, felt sensation and thought perception, which all work through the nervous system, everything in experience unites at the level of felt sensation.
This is important because 'craving' (which I'm calling reaction) arises from the unity which is feeling and not from disparate senses such as sight, smell and sound. For example, an addicted person craves a cigarette, but the reality is, some sensations manifest in the body, which are the withdrawl sensations, and the person reacts with strong aversions to those feelings, while also strongly desiring the sensations which come from breathing cigarette smoke. In fact, that person does not crave a cigarette at all. They are reacting with aversion to some sensations while desiring other sensations - and the cigarette is merely a means to avoid the former and get the latter. In this way, the reaction (or the volition) arises from felt sensations, and not the other disparate senses.
This illustrates how a person can't be still because their life is avoiding the discomforts and chasing the pleasures of physical sensation, which keeps them running from 'this' and chasing 'that', which is their 'volition'. Hence, the teaching says, from feeling volition arises.
Remembering the volition is kamma - volition is 'cause' of ones manifest conscious experience. In the kamma paradigm of cause and effect, volition is cause and the manifest is effect. Because the volition is not an effect, the manifest experience does not determine your volition. However, people are generally conditioned and habitualised to react adversely to uncomfortable feelings and react with strong clinging and desire to pleasant feelings, and are unconsciously running from the former and chasing the latter continuously, and being bound in this is 'suffering'. 'Suffering' is by definition being stuck in this Kammic cycle by the bonds of desire and aversion, which are the two sides of 'tanha' ('craving'). 'Liberation' is liberation from the kammic cycle via the cessation of tanha, which is the cessation of volition, which is the cessation of kamma/cause, which is the cessation of suffering.
The meditation we now call 'mindfulness' is fundamentally the cessation of volition, which is the cessation the reaction calld 'craving' (tanha). This is done deliberately, like, 'I will be here and know the truth of my breathing sensation'. But the meditator soon starts to notice, a small itch arises, a huge reaction to that itch, sore back, oh so unbearable. Thus they learn the first truth: there is suffering. At the early stage they haven't realised yet the second truth: there is a 'cause' of suffering, but it doesn't take long to realise you generate so much suffering through your mindless reactivity - that volition is the cause, and even where your manifest experience is determined and fated, your volition in this moment is not - and you need not suffer. This brings the third truth: there is an end to suffering. However, they have not yet realised the fourth truth: the way to end suffering.
The meditation is 'the way'. It begins on the gross, hard, solid level which a person is conscious of, but there are subtle levels of sensation which the mind is not sensitive enough to perceive, so one has to practice acute perception to hone the mind into a very sensitive, keenly perceptive instrument. You start to become conscious at subtler and subtler levels - 'feeling within feeling' - along with the reactions of volition that you generate to these newly found subtle sensations. This is the path from the gross, hard and solid to the subtle, fluid and dynamic (energetic?); and resolving the 'contents' or 'sankara' that have been hidden deep inside.
That's all I can think of. I know I missed out a lot, but perhaps that's for another time.