posted on Jan, 3 2012 @ 07:10 PM
Suffering is a universal quality of life but people ignore it because they want to be happy, but their desire to be happy is what causes their
suffering, because what they desire is empty. Emptiness of all things, that is the world we live in. Wealth is empty and makes us suffer more than it
helps, because we constantly worry about losing our wealth. Pleasure is empty because it is an illusion, and the attachment to pleasure leads to
addiction, and addiction to suffering. Even wisdom and enlightnment cause us to suffer when our ego misleads us, we think we are enlightened but we
are not, so our wisdom is empty of true meaning.
But that doesn't mean life is dismal, even with all the suffering, because there is a path set out to end the cravings which lead us to suffering.
The middle path between the two extremes of pleasure and pain, birth and death. It is the right path, the path of truth and wisdom, which revolves
around the fact of suffering and its cause as desire. By following the path we have right desire which liberates us from unwanted desires.
And what is the right path? Right speech which refrains from lying. Right action which refrains from immoral action. Right livelihood which is to
refrain from negative lifestyles. Right mindfulness of what we have learned to be true. Right effort to seek wisdom in its proper form. Right
concentration to devote ourselves properly to the path of purity. Right understanding which reflects on the noble truths of suffering and its cause,
desire, and finally right thought which is to produce a thought not tied down to or attached to any thing, but free and unlimited because it is
formless.
When we have a conception of self, we have a form and limitation of self. When we have no conception at all, we have no form or limitation at all.
If all physical things bring about suffering, the absence of physical attachments is nonsuffering , or true bliss.
If form, feeling, perception, experience, and consciousness is empty, then the opposite is fullness.
And for those who doubt this is real, who think this may be simply death, the Buddha assures us that this state can be experienced in this life.
Experience, an aggregate as it is, can at least give us a picture of this state, and it is the light within our mind, accessible in a state of
meditative absorption by which the mind is liberated from all thoughts, all consciousness and turned inward. Then, by regaining consciousness and
experiencing the first sensation that occurs, an aggregate it may be, it is the closest representation of our true nature we can experience.