"The Buddha noted that suffering always arises due to the indulgence of some form of desire. If our house burns down, we are miserable because we desire a house that hasn't burned down. When we get sick, we suffer because we crave health.
For most of us, most of the time, it's hard to remember that pleasure and pain always goes hand in hand. We forget that we cannot have one without the other. So we seek to maximize pleasure and do our best to avoid pain. But the great masters know that life doesn't work that way. Everything in our universe comes to us in pairs of opposites, and opposites are always changing from one to the other. Pain replaces pleasure, pleasure replaces pain, over and over again, endlessly. Nothing in the material universe ever remains the same for long. But when we finally understand this truth at the most profound level, we have a chance to change the rules of the game.
Buddha taught that there is a way out of suffering, and that way is to eliminate desire. If we can retrain the mind so that it no longer craves, so that it no longer prefers one thing over another-so that good and bad, pleasure and pain, hot and cold, love and hate, are all the same to us, then suffering ceases of its own accord." -- Richard Hooper, The Parallel Sayings
For most of us, most of the time, it's hard to remember that pleasure and pain always goes hand in hand. We forget that we cannot have one without the other. So we seek to maximize pleasure and do our best to avoid pain. But the great masters know that life doesn't work that way. Everything in our universe comes to us in pairs of opposites, and opposites are always changing from one to the other. Pain replaces pleasure, pleasure replaces pain, over and over again, endlessly. Nothing in the material universe ever remains the same for long. But when we finally understand this truth at the most profound level, we have a chance to change the rules of the game.
Buddha taught that there is a way out of suffering, and that way is to eliminate desire. If we can retrain the mind so that it no longer craves, so that it no longer prefers one thing over another-so that good and bad, pleasure and pain, hot and cold, love and hate, are all the same to us, then suffering ceases of its own accord." -- Richard Hooper, The Parallel Sayings