The Cycle of Suffering

The root causes of suffering are ignorance, attachment and aversion.

There is a thought stream in our minds that ignorantly believes itself to be a permanent “self”, and it attempts to reinforce this self by attaching to thoughts, feelings and experiences (let’s call them TFEs) that it ignorantly regards as “pleasant” due to our conditioned minds, and it desires those TFEs to last forever.

But all phenomena is subject to change - this is the universal law of existence. So the TFEs that the self has become attached to will eventually fall away and become TFEs that no longer resemble those that the self has become attached to.

This attachment causes aversion toward the new TFEs, and this aversion causes the self to label the new TFEs as “unpleasant”, and the self struggles to embrace these new TFEs, which reinforces the self since the self yearns for the “pleasant” TFEs to return and this causes us to become disjoint from the present moment.

But these TFEs will also eventually fall away and be replaced by TFEs that resemble those that the self is attached to, and since the self was reinforced while fighting the “unpleasant” TFEs, this creates greater attachment to the “pleasant” TFEs, which causes a bigger aversion to the “unpleasant” TFEs and, if it remains unabated, the cycle of suffering becomes stronger and our suffering becomes greater.

This is the Cycle of Suffering.

Submitted September 10, 2020 at 02:32PM by phatmanp https://ift.tt/2ZlbFPh