Self Suffering

Good evening!

We’re having a nice moment on a spring evening, which is said to be worth a thousand pieces of gold – priceless.

I visited Ed, who recently had a stroke, in the hospital. When I visited him, he introduced me to the other visitors. He mentioned my telling of the great ocean and its bubbles.

So, I said to him, “You are coming closer to the ocean.” He said, “I’m too close.” Maybe our minds get easily damaged, but they are also easily developing.

Later on, Shuri said, “A woman living nearby had a stroke and became a very good person, not too critical of others, living here and now, not in the past or future.”

I recalled a book titled “My Stroke of Insight,” given to me by Cornelia at the Great Sky Sesshin; she herself had experienced a stroke, telling truth.

The author of the book was a brain specialist. At first, she didn’t want to come back from the sate of euphoria, but later she wanted to tell her story of the whole process.

This morning I talked about the threefold suffering: natural, social, and individual. But the Buddha said, “A pinch of salt makes a bowl of water salty, but it doesn’t make a great lake so.”

So, eventually our sufferings depend on us. There are only individual sufferings – how we cultivate our minds, how we see the truth, and how we control our emotions, volitions, and conceptions.

The three poisons, two roots of delusion and craving – fundamentally delusion of ego – make suffering. The Four and Eight Sufferings are said, in short, to be the five aggregates rampant.

The Twelvefold Dependent Origination shows how sufferings come. If we cultivate our minds, we reach unconditioned peace and unsurpassed awakening, tasting immortality.

All sufferings come from one delusion of ego, two roots of delusion and craving, three poisons. The final solution of suffering is in sitting. Only practice makes perfect.

3/25/11