The Cause of Suffering
The cause of suffering is a lack of enlightenment, which is caused by a person's attachment to desires and aversion to suffering.
Desire divides the cosmos, it separates you from yourself. Desire creates time, the pairs of opposites: Attraction and repulsion.
You identify with your self. You have a personal history. You have commitments. There are things that you want to experience and other things that you want to avoid.
Human life is painful because of desire. We desire things and we chase after them. We are afraid of things and we run away from them. The self can be measured by what it avoids and what it seeks and by its past remembrances.
Desires surge through us. And when those desires are not fullfiled we are unhappy.
The world doesn't cause us pain by the fact that it exists, but we cause ourselves pain because we attach ourselves to circumstances. When those circumstances are in conflict with what we want or don't want, we experience pain.
When you want something or when you have an aversion to something, you are immediately in a problematic situation. Your happiness is now a victim to fortune.
Physical circumstance will not cause happiness. Or if it does, there is the fear of loss, the loss of the object of desire. Now you are a slave to it. You have become bound to it.
Once you are in the world of desire, it is a real bitch to get out of it. That is why almost everybody is unhappy all the time, because everybody is in the world of desire.
Your mind is turbulent because you're filled with desires, frustrations. You want too many things. You are afraid of too many things. It is necessary to overcome both attraction and repulsion to still the mind.
Aversion is another type of desire, not wanting something. Aversion is as powerful a karmically binding force as desire because it engenders action.
Attachment always causes pain to the perceiver. You like this life and don't want to die. This comes about because of individualized perception.
The world of desire is the world of karma. All action is generated by desire. It is the desire to live that causes us to reincarnate.
People are kept in line in society because they fear punishment. The assumption that underlies this mentality is that a human being will follow their desires without mitigation.
Most people are scattered around life by desires. They chase their desires; they run away from their fears.
Thousands of desires flood the mind, and you can follow them if you choose to. But they don't lead any place. They are dead ends. They won't make you happy.
Don't think that your career matters, your wife matters, your husband, your friends, your possessions. If you do you will suffer greatly. You will suffer greatly because they are all transitory.
I don't think it's possible to be funny if there is anything you still want or anything that you're afraid of. You're humor will be incomplete.
You only become funny when you have a complete reverence for life and you realize that life is ecstasy, limitless ecstasy. Since there's no attraction or aversion, you can open yourself up to everything.
You suffer because your fixation to things prevents you from enjoying the immortality of conscious awareness.
Running away from your attachments only brings you closer to them.
If you ever care about things, that means they have power over you.
Those who reject the world and run away from it may appear to be liberated, but we don't know what they would do in the world.
The fulfillment of desire does not necessarily make you happy because there is a satiation factor. You can get some apple pie and eat it. If this is what makes you happy, why not eat ten?
