There’s a stage of insight where the body is seen mostly as a source of discomfort. You don’t have to stub your toe, just sit still long enough and the pressure starts to hurt. You get hungry after a few hours: a sort of discomfort. You have to pee because of a particular form of pressure. As long as we are in a body, it keeps throwing dukkha at us.

The past few weeks, I’ve been seeing something similar in the mind.

When my pañña was less strong than it is now, I had already noticed how a huge share of thoughts are in the category “This is something clever I could say and it would impress people”. I’d enjoy the clever witty thoughts inside my own skull, but there was the wish that I’d find myself in the exact right social situation to use the lines. Sometimes I did and made people laugh or think I’m clever: a worldly pleasure.

Now that I can see the mind more clearly, I can see that a moment before the thought comes the tendency to the thought. I want the worldly condition of approval/being admired, and that creates a sort of pressure, same as the body creates pressures on us. In an attempt to satisfy that dissatisfaction, thoughts arise.

“Just as a tree cut down grows up again While yet its root remains unharmed and sound, So with the tendency to crave intact This suffering is ever reproduced” (Dhammapada 338)

“Though feeling is condition, still Without inherent tendency No craving can arise, and so From this the perfect saint is free” (Visuddhimagga)

The tendency feels like a subtle mental pressure, so subtle I couldn’t notice it without a few hundred hours of sharpening my awareness. The mental dissatisfaction causes the hyperactivity of the mind we’re all so familiar with (papañca or some kinds of citta).

The tendencies in turn are said to depend on vedanā, but I haven’t penetrated to that yet.