Surya Das (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We are all going to suffer our losses. How we deal with these losses is what makes all the difference. For it is not what happens to us that determines our character, our experience, our karma, and our destiny, but how we relate to what happens. ~ Lama Surya Das, “Practicing With Loss”
The mind, dividing experiences into subject and object, first identifies with a subject, “I”, then with the idea of “mine”, and starts to cling to “my body”, “my mind”, and “my name”. As our attachment to these three notion grows stronger and stronger, we become more and more exclusively concerned with our own well-being.All our striving for comfort, our intolerance of life’s annoying circumstances, our preoccupation with pleasure and pain, wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, praise and blame, are due to this idea of “I”.
~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
The first of the Four Noble Truths is the Truth of Suffering.
What is suffering? Buddhism describes three levels or types of suffering. This is called ‘the suffering of suffering’, the second, ‘the suffering of change’, and the third is ‘the suffering of conditioning’.
The suffering of suffering: the suffering of birth, sickness, aging, and death.
The suffering of change: things we would normally think as pleasurable.
The suffering of conditioning: What is the nature of things? Eveything happens in samsara is due to ignorance
(complied from ‘The Four Noble Truths’ by H.H. The 14th Dalai Lama, fourteenth printing – 2009)
Suffering, in fact, can be helpful in many ways. It spurs your motivation and as many teachings point out, without suffering there would be no determination to be free from samsara. Sadness is an effective antidote to arrogance. ~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
I feel that an individual whose actions are motivated by the wish to bring others happiness necessarily meets with less misfortune that one who does not.
Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort or another are the same for us all. But the sufferings which undermine our internal peace – anxiety, doubt, disappointment – these are definitely less. ~ His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama
A Buddhist's Journey 