"Monks, these nine perceptions, when developed & pursued, are of great fruit, of great benefit. They gain a footing in the deathless and have the deathless as their final end. Which nine?

The perception of unattractiveness (of the body), the perception of death, the perception of the foulness in food, the perception of no-delight in any world, the perception of inconstancy, the perception of stress in inconstancy, the perception of not-self in stress, the perception of abandoning, the perception of dispassion.

These nine perceptions, when developed & pursued, are of great fruit, of great benefit. They gain a footing in the deathless and have the deathless as their final end."

I'm finding that the the further I progress in my practice, the more convinced I become that it should be possible to end craving and aversion entirely, and so end suffering entirely. The main reason I hold this view is because of the very natural correlation I've observed between my understanding of the fundamental nature of reality and the degree to which I suffer. It seems so counter-intuitive that at some point one could come to full completion and yet the other could continue indefinitely at some greatly diminished level. And also just considering the squirming, twitching, selfish nature of craving and aversion... how could it possibly arise from anything other than ignorance?

In Thanissaro Bhikkhu's excellent book "The Paradox of Becoming"[pdf], he points out that the Buddha actually taught the nine perceptions, and that the three characteristics distillation arose later. Reading through these (and the rest of the book), it's clear that a much greater emphasis was placed on cultivating dispassion, and that practitioners were encouraged to develop a much deeper and more intense sense of the inadequacy and downright repulsiveness of conditioned phenomena. I suspect that the real meaning of the 'unsatisfactoriness' characteristic has been lost on many on this forum - I certainly always took it to mean merely that no phenomena can bring lasting satisfaction, that the illusion of self was the real problem. But actually, uprooting desire appears to be treated as a separate issue and of equal importance. I can't help but think this is one of the main reasons several people here could come to find "arahatship to be lacking".

*Edited to add link*