WHO SUFFERS, AND WHY?
To extend what the Buddha said: “The cause of human suffering is ignorance” (not knowledge ‘ignorance’ but ignoring one’s inner self-knowing) we humans distort the experiencing of reality – of what is – when we name it, ‘personalize‘ it – label and believe we think, feel and thus ‘know’ reality ‘as it is’. And that one, in fact, is the individual ‘person’ one believes one to be. We fundamentally sin ie. ‘miss the mark‘ in believing that words that arise in the binary (O/1) either/or mind actually are real and accurate and tell us most, if not all, we need to know.
We innocently inherit our cultures suffering; we live and have our supposed being in moving and manipulating to control our personal experience based on totally conditioned, traditional and cultivated fragments of ideas and ideals stored in faded and fading memory. That conditioning of desires and fears sets up our ‘world’ view of right/wrong, good/bad, etc. and in so doing – apparently- these beliefs conjure division, separation, and discord with all its conflicts and confusions.
In fact, in truth, reality is not personal – not known or knowable by mind’s conceptual symbols, by a personal ‘me’ and ‘you’ with preferences and denials. In fact, as Lao Tzu seemingly said, “the entire universe and everything in it flows with a mysterious, unknowable force called the Tao.” These are words that point to the reality of one, undifferentiated beingness which is unknowable; that said, one can come into the direct recognition beyond suffering, that one is the Tao, aka, awareness, aware of being nothing but the flow. 🙂
