I'm not sure that all of you know the eight worldly dhammas. They're also referred to as the eight worldly conditions. They are four pairs of opposites, something that we encounter throughout our life and they are something that even the Buddha encountered in his life, these eight conditions. Depending on how attached we are to them in a positive or negative way, we create pain, we create mental pain in particular. The eight are praise and blame, fame and obscurity, pleasure and pain, and gain and loss. Normally we like four, we don't like the other four. Normally we're happy with the birth of four, we're unhappy with the birth of the other four. We're happy with the death of four, and we're unhappy with the death of the other four. So most people like to get praise, gain, pleasure and fame, and they don't like the other four. Ironically though, on occasion, people want the other four, and that's when they're wallowing in self-pity and feel they should suffer, they should not be deserving of anything pleasant.
I'll also mention that when I refer to them as the eight worldly dhammas, the Pali word is spelled with a small "d", because Dhamma with a capital "D" means the truth. So that's a different word, it actually means something else. These eight worldly dhammas or conditions are very important to recognize. Any time that you have any sort of mental hindrance, you can ask yourself, "Which of these eight worldly dhammas am I attached to?" There's always going to be one. Last night, Rosemary mentioned that we can use the five hindrances for mental noting. And we can note "planning" and we can note "remembering," and we can use a lot of different words for mental noting. You can use the eight worldly conditions also in your mental noting. If you find you're attached to fame, you can note to yourself, "fame, fame." If you find you're attached to obscurity, note to yourself "obscurity, obscurity" and so on. As much as I know about the mind, there's not a single mental bit of Dukkha which does not come from attachment to these eight worldly conditions. If you can find one, let me know!
The Buddha got blamed, the Buddha became obscure, people wouldn't know who he was, the Buddha got pain. He got all the negative four, also. He got the positive four, but he was never attached to them one way or the other. And this is something important for each one of us, not to get so attached to them one way or the other. It's always nice, say we're doing a job, if we do a good job. And it produces some gain, and we get pleasure out of it, and people praise us and we get fame out of it, it's very nice. But if our whole world centers around doing something just to get fame, doing something just to get the gain, get the pleasure, and so on, if our whole world centers around just doing something in order to get those, then it's not the same thing. And we're going to always struggle, we're going to have pain every time that we don't succeed in getting all of this praise and gain and such. So now you can work more with the eight worldly dhammas.