What is suffering?
It's an experience that you can learn from.
Do you believe in fortune tellers?
If they are wrong do you suffer of did you have the wrong fortune teller?
Do you feel good when hitting a double during a baseball game or do you suffer because it wasn't a home run?
Do you disown your kid for jumping off the garage, causing you and him suffering?
Suffering is part of your reality, don't loose the lessons.
Place your hand in boiling water, it causes pain and suffering.
You learn from the experience so you don't do it anymore, right?
Do you stop boiling water? Of course not.
You get caught speeding in your car, the suffering of a court fine.
Do you stop driving, of course not.
You can make a hundred examples of you own.
Your creator made you adaptable, flexible enough to try new things, learn the good or the bad, make your adjustments and then carry on.
The only way to avoid suffering is to stop living a full life.
If a family member makes you mad, simply consider why they're mad and offer your thoughts and concerns.
Your emotions quickly appear and then they fade away.
The person that made you mad, might have been emotional at the time and would love to take it back. Have you ever said anything you regret, of course you have.
You didn't stop talking.
Emotions create thoughts and thoughts control your actions.
Emotions are from your creator and can be practical and helpful or take over your entire life. Your real pleasure comes from being around real people. Friends and family can replenish you or cause you suffering.
Suffering is an emotional state in most cases.
If you're thirsty, take a drink of water.
If you're suffering, have a conversation with a friend.
So how do people remove suffering?
If a neighbor makes you mad, what do you do?
If you have stopped talking to your neighbor because their dog barks that's a bad conclusion. You no longer talk to
the dog owner that can help you and of course the dog still barks.
Is suffering only skin deep?
If you are in a dispute with a family member, which is more important, winning the argument or the family member?
To eliminate your suffering must be a good thing, you feel better. Other minds have other opinions and initially you might not agree. People make you mad. They tell you what to do or what you're doing wrong, devastating so some. So to eliminate your suffering you eliminate the person.
If you feel better, it must lead to happiness.
Happiness is an emotion, a quick surface and a deep dive in a matter of seconds. Most people never realize their life is a mental life. What you think, is what you do.
But, the elimination of your suffering often brings about suffering of other people. If you have children you understand.
No, is a big word to a child.
The word No, gets bigger as we get older.
You don't want to cause pain for other people but NO you cannot jump off the bridge.
You don't want to cause the suffering of others.
In order to protect yourself you creator taught you how to create some distance from something that may or will hurt you, causing your own suffering.
You avoid people that hurt your feelings and you also avoid people that tell you NO, even when it was good advice.
If you start seeing other people, as people that hurt you, in time you stop considering their feelings, they become objects.
This is typical within scientific management, stop watches and clipboards filled with your actual production vs. stated company goals.
If you continue to fail the standards at some point you are objectified.
You are no longer a person, just a number, and people ignore your feelings and you will be terminated as an object of production, not a human being.
Your production was too low.
The company eliminated their suffering.
They eliminated you.
You most likely objectify people all the time.
I don't like him, I avoid him, he is an object now, easily discarded.
You objectify people deliberately, you decided.
You did it to avoid discomfort, to limit your own suffering.
When you dislike a person, you objectify them, allowing you to be unkind to them without suffering the natural repercussions, that empathetic connection that your creator allowed you.
You protected yourself and removed your suffering by allowing the other person to suffer.
Now that person is in the out group.
Your suffering really has not ended it has just changed forms.
Guilt and shame lives inside you now because of the things you think and do. Your creator and your mind keeps score.
Your convenient scapegoat lives inside you forever which causes you damage for your entire life.
Your suffering did not end, it was embedded inside your soul.
Be nice to people.
Like people, before they like you.
When you don't agree, be polite.
Don't yell at people and don't suck your thumb.
Be the adult.
Don't be feeble minded.
Learn how to learn.
Take advantage of your so-called suffering and learn from it.
Your creator wanted it that way.
Life is suffering.
