Stop the war inside

"We will never succeed outwardly until we also learn to stop the war inside. That is our work here." Ajahn Chah




When I consider my life it all looks, in my memory, like a long, endless war. It wasn't. In many ways my difficult life would appear to be a cake walk to others. I feel like I've stepped into puppy poo and to others it looks like I've stepped into cake icing and whipped cream. What felt like a fall into a pile of thorns may look (to others) like I fell into a truck load of nickels. All my advantages are nothing, if I continue the war that has been going on inside me for 57 years.

One of the biggest obstacles to happiness, for me, has been FAIRNESS.

I want stuff to be fair. When something is not fair, I feel like I must do something to change what is unfair into something that is fair, or I must find someone else who can hear my complaints regarding unfairness, and this other power will take action to make what is unfair FAIR.

The idea that anything must be FAIR gives me an excuse to be depressed, and to be self-destructive as I surrender to my own RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION. I have been known to "cut off my own nose to spite my face." It is common. People who feel wronged on a business deal will sue, and end up spending more to proove they were right than they lost on the business deal that sparked the law suit. Why would someone spend $500,000 to prove that their opponent cheated them out of $50,000? It is this sense that FAIRness exists and that the principal of being prooven RIGHT is worth more than the money. But once you win -- once you have established that you were treated unfairly, has anything really changed? The main change tends to be that I am poorer and suffering more than I was before I went on this quest to be proven that I was right when I said I'd been treated unfairly.



"Suffering confers neither privileges nor rights; it all depends on how one uses it."Elie Wiesel

Suffering not only can be used -- suffering is used. Suffering is always used. Suffering is used to increase suffering. Misery loves company so much that it infects others like an Ebola-like mood virus, and it replicates itself to ensure that suffering and misery will continue to exist.

But with by shifting the way one thinks suffering can become pain, and pain is not at all the same thing as suffering. Suffering always contains the concept of fairness/unfairness. If you have pain and recognize it as the body telling the brain that there is a problem that must be addressed to ensure the survival of the SELF then pain is just a natural process of communicating life and death information to the SELF. Suffering is pain that dwells on how unfair it is that the pain exists. "In a fair world," one thinks, "I would not feel this pain."

Suffering stops with the idea that the pain is somehow wrong to exist. Pain is a problem to be addressed. Suffering is a crime and the sufferER is the victim and someone (the cops, the courts, or God) must step in and redress this wrong.

No matter how you slice it, it's still balogna.

"There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in it's hand. You seek problems because you need their gifts."

~Illusions

Introduction to the gentle journey

". . . we easily get stuck in believing . . . that the way we've framed everything in our thoughts is how things actually are."

Steve Hagen

Four days after moving from central Florida to Oklahoma City, I failed to yield, our car was hit by a truck, and my wife has spent 6 days in the hospital and faces follow-up surgery to get back to a repaired self. We left Florida with great hopes that things would be a lot better when we returned to the place where we met and were married. Often the journey of life looks anything but gentle. Problems follow problems. Our pain makes it difficult to remember painlessness, and as for pleasure, forget about it if you're in pain. But if life is difficult it is because my mind brands it as difficult.

"Anguish emerges from craving for life to be other than it is. . . . In yearning for anguis to be assuaged in such a ways, we reinforce what creates anguish in the first place: the craving fro life to be other than it is. . . . The more acute the anguish, the more we want to be rid of it, but the more we want to be rid of it, the more acute it gets."

Stephen Batchelor

Nothing that happens is as significant as what I think about what happens. Wanting, craving, desire, yearning are thoughts that turn the events of life into good or bad. Without want, craving, and desire, nothing that happens is good or bad, it is just what happens.

This does not mean that I don't suffer. It doesn't mean that I am not hurt by events, or that I am pained and unhappy by certain consequences and outcomes, because I am.

". . . look for moments of rest between waves of tears and anger and . . . rest in the awareness."

Kornfield

Living in awareness that good and bad are mental concepts will not eliminate our human reactions. We will still think, and feel that this event or that happening is either good, or bad. We still suffer. We still die. But even when we suffer, if we live with awareness, or what the Buddhists call mindfulness, we can't suffer in ignorance. There will remain at some place in our brain, this thought that it is our thoughts that are hurting us. We can suffer and surrender to hopelessness, or we can take on our problems and pains to gain insight, awareness, mindfulness, strength and peace.

"It is from hardship rather than ease that we gather wisdom. We need to develop the capacity to draw strength from our hardships . . . to ignite the thunder flame of our own heart and let it illuminate the stormy night."

Aung San Suu Kyi