Life is hard; There is suffering!
Everyone knows this to be true, yet we live in denial: excusing our hurts and losses, regretting painful memories, fearing unfulfilled desires, blaming others, and escaping the reality of suffering in addiction. The truth is that suffering is an integral part of the ever-changing movement of Life. Still, no original blueprint exists for how our minds work, and this lack of understanding of our thinking is suffering. Throughout history, humans have attempted to create systems to understand and control our thinking, to build an ideal society that can alleviate human suffering and answer the mysteries of our minds and the afterlife.
There is a cause of suffering.
Suffering is an undeniable part of life, yet it has no clear beginning. However, as Buddhism teaches, there is a cause of suffering. I believe this cause of suffering is resistance to Life’s constant flowing energy. The endless universal energy that makes our heart beat, lungs breathe, and blood flow through each of us. Resistance happens when flowing energy is blocked by the formation of matter; material things like our body matter, and psychological things like our thoughts matter—when they create our self-image, our families, cultures, religions, and politics, all of which cause resistance. So, suffering from resistance is constant, as evidenced by the deterioration of the human body over geologic time and the degradation of our self-esteem from mental scarring in psychological time. Our body ages, and the original innocence of our creative intelligence gets hidden behind the veils of the self-image we create from our past. The barrier of thought blocks our emotional positive energy of Love from flowing into the world or distorts it into the negative emotions of shame, guilt, fear, or anger. Thus, the resistance of our physical and psychological matters, is the cause of our suffering.
There is an end of suffering.
Self-love is not just a key but a powerful tool in alleviating suffering. By nurturing our bodies and healing our emotional wounds, we can diminish the resistance we create by forcing Life through the “I” of our “self-image:” the eye of the needle that is our ego. This mental image that only exists in psychological time can block the flow of energy within us, leading to suffering. When our mind loses touch with the sensation of life energy flowing through our body, it becomes cut off from Love in the present moment and imprisoned by fear, feeling trapped in time—thinking without Love is suffering. All that remains in the isolated mind is the self-sustaining ignorance of repeating the past, our addiction to thinking, and our constant fear of basic survival—living without Love. When fear is present, our natural intelligence of understanding how the mind works cannot exist, and when the understanding of Love is absent, suffering happens.
The truth is when life bombards the mind-body with physical and mental suffering, and we hit bottom in our addictions, we have to wake up to recover the awareness of our feelings and embrace the pain with Love to refocus our total attention on the flowing energy of life happening in the present moment. We can no longer rely on our thinking alone to deny, avoid, or escape suffering over time, which is fear. We must feel through the pain, understanding that our ego, thinking without feeling Love, is the source of our suffering. We must face suffering with fearless vulnerability and embrace our pain with Love to begin healing, which is the end of suffering in the present moment.
There is a Path that leads to the end of suffering—Now!
As illuminated in Buddhism, the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment is not just a roadmap but a direct, immediate route to the qualities of the mind that keep it linked with a loving heart to diminish our suffering. It commences with mindfulness of our thinking, focusing on understanding how our mind works. Then, we lean on that understanding of the mind to act unburdened by the survival of the ego and without causing harm to ourselves or others, including animals, nor do we harass or exploit them for our benefit. Lastly, we perceive the world as we perceive ourselves with love and understanding of what is—Life—unfolding in the present moment. The Path of Enlightenment can limit suffering by understanding how our mind works to connect with the energy of Love coursing through our heart, to view the world with our original innocence in awe of its true nature, the unknown unfolding now.
VAB — 10-MAR-24
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