Suffering
Most of our suffering is self-inflicted. It isn’t unavoidable, as some religions suggest, nor is it due to impermanence, natural “afflictions”,e.g., death, or the acceptance of a “self” concept. Rather, it’s the unwillingness to accept the facts of life as we experience them, attachment to ideas,e.g., beliefs, feelings, and harmful life habits.
Our greatest “afflictions” are arrogance, stubbornness, will, desire, and lack of surrender. All others are “curable.” This unwillingness to confront the facts of our lives begins with a circle of troubles.
Our suffering mind is a combination of attitudes, feelings and behaviors, that create a field of misery. Over time, this becomes a long path of endless attachment and worry over artificially important dualities with sometimes short excitements and certain permanent suffering. in which we go around the central issues – avoiding the “heart of the matter” by rejecting immediate or direct experience. The result is a life full of illusions, with its accompanying frustrations, disappointments, and myriad problems. This series of mental complications we call the suffering mind