Friday, October 24, 2014

What causes suffering?

An open ended question, there.

Perhaps it should be defined first:

: to experience pain, illness, or injury

: to experience something unpleasant (such as defeat, loss, or damage)

: to become worse because of being badly affected by something

Some of that is emotional pain.  The cause of physical pain can be readily identified.  Some of the definition is subjective, then.  If something is unpleasant, that is subjective, as one's pain may be another's pleasure.  To become worse is also subjective, because others may take it as an improvement.  But physical pain cannot be denied as an objective reality.

For the purposes of discussion, the subjective part of the definition is where the question lies.

Your suffering is literally in your own head.

 I can literally tell a story about that one, but won't.  It is the truth, though.  Suffering is just in your head.  All of it is a state of mind.  That state can change in an instant.

Shakespeare wrote something to the effect that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.  Oh, yeah.  Thinking makes it so.

No, this is not postmodernism I'm referring to nor advocating.  I'm advocating the use of reason.  But that isn't entertaining.  It is boring.  And that makes me mad and I suffer for it.  Yuk, yuk.


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