you are the cause of your own suffering

[Jim D.]

I have played guitar since age 19. Transitioned in interpreting a muscical pieces the way I would sing and play it without straying from the melody. Then transitioned into composing music for my own pleasue. I now feel like Paul Simon...I just turned 70 and just don't have the desire to coninue playing and employing the discipline it takes to be on top of my game. Once in a while I'll pick up my Alvarez and play it...tell myself I will work on the Blues Tune I composed working little rifts into the composition...but then time goes by and my calluses grow softer and then nothing for a while.

 

I go in spurts with my art. My last project(s) where Sumi-e Bamboo, and Koi Sumi-e impressions.

[Nungali]

This is imo an absolutely necessary understanding if one is to find healing.

 

As long as people think something other than themselves is the cause of their problems, there's no possibility of true healing.

 

YOU create your own experience; YOU choose either love or fear; YOU create either a happy or unhappy life.

 

If you blame something or someone outside of yourself, you'll forever see yourself as a victim and never find salvation.

 

How about applying all that to yourself and not projecting it onto others ? 

 

 

I create my own experience; I choose either love or fear; I create either a happy or unhappy life.

 

 

I find it is totally  arsey to project that on to the more unfortunate, oppressed and controlled people on the planet. 

 

Please dont tell me your karmic philosophy applies to innocent victims of famine, war zones, forced migrations, pogroms, genocides ....    

 

[Jim D.]

People in prison have been able to over come the most deplorable conditions with a change in persepective and attitude. Read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksndr Solzenitsyn

[silent thunder]

Denmark is a prison...

I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite spaces were it not that I have bad dreams...~   Hamlet

[roger]

How about applying all that to yourself and not projecting it onto others ? 

 

Thanks, Nungali.

 

In total honesty, I fully agree with you.

 

Peace.

[Marblehead]

Thanks, Nungali.

 

In total honesty, I fully agree with you.

 

Peace.

 

Well, I disagree with me.

[Jim D.]

I am therefore I suffer

[blue eyed snake]

I suffer, therefore ( i think) I am

 

[Jim D.]

I think that I am suffering, but it it's the Coke...it's geeking me out.

[Marblehead]

Y'all stop your freakin' suffering!!!!

 

Hehehe.

[Jim D.]

I am the cause of my pooping. Shit happens!!!!!!!!!!! 

[Marblehead]

And bears do it in the woods.  Watch your step.

[silent thunder]

and watch where the Huskies go... that ain't no snowcone.

[Marblehead]

and watch where the Huskies go... that ain't no snowcone.

 

Well, since we got this started:

 

And don't be eating no yellow snow.

[Jim D.]

Sometimes I piss and moan. But it gets no where.

[Jim D.]

Posting the way I do sometimes brings me suffering. But hey, I'm not dead yet.

[Marblehead]

Posting the way I do sometimes brings me suffering. But hey, I'm not dead yet.

 

You are who and what you are Jim.  And you (or I) won't please everyone all the time.

 

But time wounds all heels. 

 

Wait!  I think I stated that incorrectly.  Oh well.

[Jim D.]

I am glad you appreciate me MH. I thought I might have put you off when I came back with an answer about the guy trying to scare and suppress me by telling I could get fined for a false complaint. I don't even know if what he said was true. Well, let 'em try and collect. You can't get anything out of my SSI

 

I made a decision long ago when I got into Recovery that if you like me, or don't like me...It didn't matter. My living did not depend on how popular I was or became. I just wanted to get off the hamster wheel.

[Rara]

This is imo an absolutely necessary understanding if one is to find healing.

 

As long as people think something other than themselves is the cause of their problems, there's no possibility of true healing.

 

YOU create your own experience; YOU choose either love or fear; YOU create either a happy or unhappy life.

 

If you blame something or someone outside of yourself, you'll forever see yourself as a victim and never find salvation.

This is fundamentally true. I keep seeing someone very close to me just not getting this and unfortunately I have had to leave them to it.

 

And that's the thing...it is merely perspective and it's taken me years and years to get to a place myself where I can treat life like this day in, day out (let's see if it lasts too...I tend to relapse haha)

 

But also, in regards to the title, whenever I see the word "suffering", it now seems entirely unnecessary. Yet it is necessary, because the only way to "undo" it is to understand that the perspective of suffering is still there in everyone, just simply because of the way we are conditioned as the human race.

 

So I can't blame anyone that doesn't handle themselves well when "suffering". But I guess my own cultivation and current happy self can lead by example at the very least. No lectures, just be!

[Rara]

well you want to talk about "free will" again ;-)... I think that is a highly debatable term... granted there is an ultimate end game and choices that are made - but so much is driven with limited and relative choices made from limited and relative states which are not exactly "free".

Yes, this is all very difficult if one has not been exposed to (or accepts) a "better way"!

[Rara]

I dunno. I think the ever-popular you-create-your-own-reality meme is of dubious utility. Sure, it can be helpful to kick yourself in the butt when you´ve been stuck in victim space: if you´ve created the problem then you are empowered to do something about it -- blah, blah, blah.

 

But then someone gets cancer. Did that person create her reality too? Perhaps she did but it´s not always helpful or nice to say so. Some people are born to parents who beat them or have sex with them when they´re three. Some people find themselves in the middle of a collapsing bridge when the earthquake happens. Oops.

 

Sometimes shit happens, and the mystery of it all is bigger and more unknowable than the you-create-your-own-reality brigade would have us believe.

 

Liminal

Last year, my cousin unfortunately lost her life to cancer. But ever since hearing the news, the people I saw upset was everyone around her. I never saw her without a smile, joking away.

 

That said, that by all means isn't to say I can talk about how she really felt inside and I have no idea what she was like behind closed doors. But she still made the choice to not let it eat her up as much as any other cancer sufferers I've known (and heard about)

[Rara]

I'm curious how you address circumstances that are out of your control then in your model. ie. the plane your family is in is struck by lightning and crashes into the ocean.

 

Should you not mourn? Suffering is entirely natural. Suppressing it leads only to delusion and imbalance. Even if you knew why you felt a certain way; it wouldn't change a damn thing would it?

React how you wish Mourning is a valuable tool in reaching the realisation that the intensity of the hurt is a temporary thing. The degree on how you choose to recover is down to you.

 

Yet there is absolutely nothing wrong with missing a passed love one.

[Rara]

This is only a superficial level of understanding, it doesnt pierce deeply enough into the reality of everyones subjugation to the manifest world, as it is. In simple terms, you cannot control the weather - you cannot "determine your own reality" by cancelling a rainstorm. You can choose to put on a rain coat - that is how you "determine your reality" in regards to the weather.

 

The problem I have seen in many of these thoughts, and other similar "revelations" influenced by the traditional methods and scriptures, writings, etc. - is they always reflect back to the idea of the self as the "owner" or "doer" or some such absolute position.

 

The legacy of the ancient wisdom is still very much in effect, very influential - and with that is all the psychological and social mechanisms which were appropriate for dealing with the world and other people, at that time. These days, you cannot apply the same influences without creating some big problems along the way. Its all part of the process of maturation, but to assume that ancient wisdom and the perspectives involved are always correct and appropriate is a real error. Ancient times were quite different - especially in regards to society and how people are regarded, but also in countless small ways as well.

 

What seems all too lacking is some very real insight into the material of self-nature, in regards to the composition of the elements, the forces which move them, and so forth. Does this human body need food? Is your self causing you to need food?

 

Of course there is always lip service!! Hell this forum is practically nothing but lip service, amongst all the other "entertaining" bits. But its quite easy to tell who is bullshitting when you know what to look for.

 

Insight isnt a quote, a slogan, a motto, a koan, a poem. You cannot see a movie unless light is projecting through the film onto the screen, but the light is not the movie... and it never changes, it just blinks endlessly. You try to show someone the light, they will say "hey - wheres the movie?" or "hey where can I find a movie about light?".

It's a bit of an over-simplication, but the OP has some grounds for the statement.

[Rara]

That is one of my favorite piano pieces... simple and profound.

 

I have found much Music to be a profound aid. It acts like a carrier interrupt signal for both persistent inertia of negative emotional states and overt mental static. Not quite as potent as silence and following the breath, but it's more social.

Please post a playist.

 

This thread is awesome

[Jim D.]

The Buddhist seem to believe that suffering is a byproduct of what we focus on.

 

AA Program have slogans that read  "Keep it Simple Stupid, Don't Project, Let Go and Let God, Don't Rent Space in your head, Static in the Attic" etc.

 

There are Books that talk about The Power of Positive Thinking, and becoming what you think about the most.

 

There are Cancer survivor groups who's mission is to cope with their disease through meditaion, and the curative factors found in the Group esperience.

 

Counselors use techniques such as Rational/Emotive, Albert Ellis to help their clients sort out and problem solve self defeating thoughts. People generally use terms such as "you always, you never, if only they could of, would of, should of, or awfullize events etc. to blanket a circumstance or set of events, or a Construct they cannot describe immediately...and have no awareness of their participation in the negative emotional state for which they have created for themselves.

 

Music and exercise are two modalities which help ACOA's break the cycle of anger and anxiety.

 

Philosophical thinkers have recognized the source of our mental pain as interanl and that it is something we have control over.

 

In the example of pain, I believe the body system shifts into survival mode. Physical pain is a matter of suffering and engenders negative thinking, and unless controled with medication can be unbearable.