Suffering is caused by craving and aversion. Getting something you want (money) is not necessarily happiness. To become truly happy, one must separate them self from all things we are attatched to. Wanting something you cannot have leads to suffering.

This is one I'm having trouble with. We're supposed to detach ourselves from everything, at least on a mental level. Great things have come from wanting (medical research), but those people were not happy while wanting.

I need a discussion of this. All of you that understand more or less the Second Truth, please give me your input.

Does it simply mean "Live in the moment"?

Bump guys, help me with this.

Yes wanting something you cannot have can lead to suffering.

The way i get around that is not needing the best of everything, dont need the best car, the best cell phone, etc.

Learn to recognise advertisments where ever they are.

Its human nature to want things. Setting goals is what got us out of the circle of being hunted by lions. Its how we live our lives.

To detach yourself from everything would be a fucken boring ass life. your minaswell be a vegetable

More is less.

*bows*

quote:Originally posted by HandOfZek:

Suffering is caused by craving and aversion. Getting something you want (money) is not necessarily happiness. To become truly happy, one must separate them self from all things we are attatched to. Wanting something you cannot have leads to suffering.

This is one I'm having trouble with. We're supposed to detach ourselves from everything, at least on a mental level. Great things have come from wanting (medical research), but those people were not happy while wanting.

I need a discussion of this. All of you that understand more or less the Second Truth, please give me your input.

There's lots of good books and on-line so I'm going to presume you want personal opinion, and that's all this is http://www.totse.com/bbs/biggrin.gif (http://www.totse.com/bbs/biggrin.gif) I am a seeker not a teacher!

To understand the second Noble Truth first it may help to understand the nature of suffering referred to. The english translation of suffering loses a lot of the original language term of "dukkha", meaning: 'hard to bear', dissatisfactory', 'off the mark', 'frustrating', and 'hollow'. So life is difficult, sometimes hard to bear, sometimes dissatisfactory, often off the mark, often frustrating and hollow.

Life is difficult because of craving and aversion, it is instructive and liberating to realise the source of one's misery is mostly one's own desires. "It is our attachment and our identification with what we crave that causes suffering". For example: So often when I reflect, it is the things of ego, the desires for wealth and power, the egoic impulses to look good, to attract attention, these things empower the ego, but because of the truth of non-permanence, nothing lasts and this causes the egoity great difficulty in resolving reality as opposed to how the ego wants it to be.

The more space allowed to ego, the more one is deluded into self-identification with the ego via cravings and aversions and the more one suffers. Life in my world includes having desires promoted via all sorts of mediums, the seductions of advertisers and other vested interests, are designed to grab the ego's attention and it is difficult to escape this constant bombardment where, one is not only receiving input on a conscious level but also thru subliminal messages.

It seems we humans love fantasy, we love to go to the movies and immerse ourselves in them, to identify with the main characters, we are encouraged to do this - feeding the cravings.

quote:There is a one word antidote to thirst or craving: wisdom! The wisdom of freedom from craving. The secret teachings of Tibet tell us we can rediscover our innate wisdom, awareness, and inner joy through spiritual practices, including meditation, self-enquiry, prayer and the cultivation of our naturally warm, tender, loving heart. Wisdom is the means to transcend craving and transform a treadmill existence into a lovely inspiring garden walk. This is true freedom.

Speaking to his disciples the Buddha said, 'Whoever in this world overcomes this craving so hard to transcend will find that suffering falls away like drops of water falling from a flower.'

All quotes from the "Awakening the Buddha within", by Lama Surya Das, my current read, loaned to me by a fellow seeker. For me the key is as said above, awakening, focusing on love, true unconditional love not soppy sentimental emotionalism. Discriminating between the things of ego and spirit by comparison. Are my desires in harmony with love, do they promote a mind that is patient, kind, etc., (not likely http://www.totse.com/bbs/biggrin.gif (http://www.totse.com/bbs/biggrin.gif)) or are they promoting of jealousy and pride?

That's where I'm at in the present, focusing on the true nature of love and comparing my thoughts, words, actions, habits and character as a means of highlighting the desires of ego in the hope that realisation of the facts of life will be effective in exposing the delusions of ego. Please add your thoughts!

Peace http://www.totse.com/bbs/smile.gif (http://www.totse.com/bbs/smile.gif)

Advancement should be carried out through the joy of improving yourself or your environment. Not for desire of the rewards.

Awesome posts, that cleared my head a good deal.

<3 and thanks, yo.

that sounds an awful lot like marxism...

Maybe this'll help--if you need anything to be happy, you are addicted to it. Ideally, happiness comes from within.

There is a difference between "want" and "choose".

Some rare babies are born with a defect that makes their skin inflexible, so it all breaks open and they live in horrible screaming agony for the few years they survive. If only they understood that suffering comes from wanting, and happiness comes from inside, then they would be cool.

quote:Originally posted by Viraljimmy:

Some rare babies are born with a defect that makes their skin inflexible, so it all breaks open and they live in horrible screaming agony for the few years they survive. If only they understood that suffering comes from wanting, and happiness comes from inside, then they would be cool.

Wow, you don't get it at all. It doesn't mean pain. redzed already addressed this when he went over the meaning of "dukkha". If those babies distached themselves from desire the WOULD stop suffering. They wouldn't stop feeling horrible pain every moment of their short lives, but they would stop suffering from it.

quote:Originally posted by Kykeon:

Wow, you don't get it at all. It doesn't mean pain. redzed already addressed this when he went over the meaning of "dukkha". If those babies distached themselves from desire the WOULD stop suffering. They wouldn't stop feeling horrible pain every moment of their short lives, but they would stop suffering from it.

And I say you are full of shit.

quote:Originally posted by Viraljimmy:

Some rare babies are born with a defect that makes their skin inflexible, so it all breaks open and they live in horrible screaming agony for the few years they survive. If only they understood that suffering comes from wanting, and happiness comes from inside, then they would be cool.

The desire in this case is the desire to live.

quote:Originally posted by Viraljimmy:

Some rare babies are born with a defect that makes their skin inflexible, so it all breaks open and they live in horrible screaming agony for the few years they survive. If only they understood that suffering comes from wanting, and happiness comes from inside, then they would be cool.

At that stage I'm sure the baby would have no idea what was going on and all it would feel would be a feeling. The way I see it is that physical pain only becomes suffering when we fear what implications it has.

quote:Originally posted by ---Beany---:

At that stage I'm sure the baby would have no idea what was going on and all it would feel would be a feeling. The way I see it is that physical pain only becomes suffering when we fear what implications it has.

That's not true at all, or eating hot peppers wouldn't be unpleasant. I know a habanero won't hurt me at all, but it sure as hell makes me suffer. And I'm sure babies scream in agony for fun, not because pain really bothers them... http://www.totse.com/bbs/rolleyes.gif (http://www.totse.com/bbs/rolleyes.gif) Pain can get so bad you can't even think. There's not even a desire for the pain to end, there's only the pain. I wonder why it still bothers me!

Pain causes suffering independant of any desire, just like a good massage would feel pleasant even if you didn't want it.

quote:The desire in this case is the desire to live.

Yeah, huge bleeding cracks in your skin only make you suffer because you want to live. It's not like pain can get so bad you want to die. Oh wait...

Edit: Not to say there isn't any good in the Buddha's doctrine. Mental anguish can be eliminated by his methods, and there are those cases of monks setting themselves of fire and remaining calmly in the Lotus position until they are just a charred husk...

[This message has been edited by Twisted_Ferret (edited 01-19-2007).]

quote:Originally posted by Viraljimmy:

Some rare babies are born with a defect that makes their skin inflexible, so it all breaks open and they live in horrible screaming agony for the few years they survive. If only they understood that suffering comes from wanting, and happiness comes from inside, then they would be cool.

You ARE correct in noting that sometimes, grossly defective infants survive. As a rule, their defects are due to choices made by the parents--alcohol abuse, use of other mutagens, exposure to x-rays, things like that.

This is a problem of misinterpretation.

The word dukkha is most commonley translated as suffering because the language differences make accurate translation difficult. The man below put's it well.

quote:The Spiritual Universe, Fred Alan Wolf, PhD ...suffering is a direct consequence of dukkha rather than an equavalence. Dukkha refers to the principle of imperfection, impermanence, emptiness, and insubstantiality. As a physicist, I would add to this list: uncertainty; indeterminism; canstant change or flux; the arising of chaos from order and order from chaos; discontiinuity; the vacum state of all things; the quantum nature of reality; the principle of uncertainty; the probability nature of reality; physicist Ludwig Boltzmann's unit of entropy, k, which governs the relationship of the transformation of ordered energy to chaotic temperature; and the existence of physicist Max Planck's unit of action, h, which governs the knowledge uncertainty inherent in all material things.

quote:Same sourceDukkha causes:

1. Garden-variety suffering that we all experience when things remain as they are or change as predicted. The first law of emotional inertia;

2. Garden-variety anxiety and excitement we all feel eventually fade away. The second law of emotional entropy;

3. The action of events that moves us, which we experince as conditioned reality. The third law of emotional action.

Garden-variety suffering includes everything from having to smell the breath of someone with a bad case of gum disease to the loss of a loved one - all forms of physical and mental distress....As long as things remain the same or change as we expect them to, no matter how bad they are, it is better than having anything at all upset them. This is akin to Newton's first law of motion: bodies tend to remain in either a state of reast or of movement in a straight line.

Something apparently unexpected happens. We feel excitement or anxiety. But then our feelings change. Time passes and we find our joys or sorrows turning to blahs, our ah-has turning to ho-hums. Such is the Dukkha of change.

The third law, the action leading to conditions of ever-changing physical and mental forces, is the most important. In it lies a clue to what the Buddha meant by the I, the soul, the ego, or the self and how he came to dismiss these concepts as pure illusion...By buttressing up our egos, we suffer the fewest changes. By letting down our guards, getting that weight off our shoulders, we are able to change. Each day something in us, the I, is buffetedd about by emotional forces. The effect it has on us depends on how much I we hold onto. The conditions we put before ourselves shape the I. These conditions limit our thinking: They are shields we put up to protect ourselves or shields we let down to free ourselves.

For the Buddha our big illusion arises in our attaching significance to the I. Even the thought that I exists is nothing but the arising of dukkha, and the concomitant result is emotion, in this case the emotion of the mind arising as thought.

If every sentient being on the earth were enlightened pain or suffering would still exist. To say otherwise is a misunderstanding of what the Buddha was talking about. If I step on a thorn, pain will arise. I will suffer. But, I is an illusion.



[This message has been edited by Seriously (edited 01-19-2007).]