One of the scriptures that's in the free "20 Suttas" e-book that I edited, which if you haven't got already you might like to get it to read, in one of them the Buddha's talking to a young Brahmin priest. And he's explaining to the Brahmin how to obtain the truth. He goes through a series of developments explaining them to the young Brahmin and the Brahmin goes, "Oh, yeah, okay, now I understand how to obtain the truth." But the Buddha then says, and this is actually one of the few places in the Suttas where I feel the Buddha has a smile, he says, "But young Brahmin that's not the final arrival at truth." Now you can almost feel that this young fellow is super perplexed now, he thought he had it. He'd been challenging the Buddha, and the Buddha explained something and he took it in, and he'd go, "Okay, I got it." But the Buddha is now saying, "No, that's not the final arrival at truth". So the young Brahmin says, "Okay, what is the final arrival at truth?" And the Buddha says, "You must do as I said over and over and over and over."
So this person understands that their Dukkha is small compared to others, yet they still haven't found the answer to their Dukkha, that's fine. They're saying that they tried the techniques, but still cannot find peace of mind. Well, we're telling you to try these techniques again and again and again. The D/D method that we taught the other night is exactly what helps to understand that our Dukkha is small compared to others. That's fine. So that almost indicates to me that maybe this person understood that part of the D/D method and realizes that it is true, but we're also saying don't expect it to disappear straight away. It's just not that easy.
Think of chopping down trees. Some trees are small, some trees are huge, some trees have hard wood, some have soft wood, but when you actually chop, is it the same action? Just over and over and over. Now, when you're chopping real trees then you come to know as soon as you hit it the first time, the second time, the third time, you come to know whether this is hard wood or soft wood; you come to know from experience, if you've done it a lot, generally how long this tree is going to take to chop down, depending on its size, depending on whether it's hard or soft. And you can kind of guess how long this one will take. Then as you're chopping away, you see the progress and you almost know when that last chop is coming. You're very close to it, you can really tell, then it's gone.
That's great when you're chopping real trees. But when your chopping the stuff in here, all the Dukkha creations, you don't know how big the tree is, you don't know how hard the wood is, you don't know these things. But you still have to just keep chopping, chopping, chopping. If you chop in the right way, your tree is definitely going to fall one day, but you may not know when it falls. And when I say chopping in the right way, if any of you have ever held an axe, then you know there is a handle and there is a head, and it's sharp on one side and it's flat on the other.
Chopping with the sharp part into the wood is what you have to do. But maybe you have it turned around and you're chopping with the flat end, that won't do anything. Or maybe you have the whole thing twisted around, you're actually hitting with the handle. So if you're having a lot of trouble letting go of whatever Dukkha you have and you think that you have the techniques right, but it's still not working - okay, talk to your teachers again - clarify that what you're doing is actually the right method. That's important. If you feel you've really done a lot of work and that something should be happening, and if nothing's happening, talk to your teachers and see what's going wrong.