For people who see reality as inherently empty, the relative yummies of pleasure, enjoyment, entertainment, drama, beauty, intensity are as good as it gets. Ani Trime, Buddhist nun and friend: “If mindfulness is not fun, what’s the sense of doing it?”
Are you surprised that your suffering is no better or worse than any other human’s suffering?
If all I am is human, I’m not enough like other earthly beings to live with them innocently because I’m too obsessed with my self, my species.
The notions better and worse don’t really come up when I think of my suffering and other people’s suffering. Rather: My suffering matters more to me (is more direct, urgent, powerful) than the suffering of others. I’d say this is close to a psychological law, the Law of Self-centeredness, though there may be exceptions.
My suffering matters most because it’s mine. It’s the only suffering I know. I can only imagine the suffering of others. Suffer enough, it seems, and you want to die, and many do kill themselves to escape their suffering.
When it comes to sufferers, there are those who are athletes, heroes, people who have survived more suffering than most people could bear. But does it matter?
I think what matters is that I understand why my suffering is the same as every other human’s suffering; why all human suffering has more to do with thought than what’s actually happening.
My understanding also.
I’d say the same in essence (thwarted desire), but different in detail. This provides opportunity for people to think-feel: My suffering is unique, I’m special!
Me too, but what matters more than who’s suffering, is what suffering is. We agree that suffering involves thought, and that’s what makes all human suffering the same. As far as we know, animals and insects don’t complicate their suffering with thoughts.
Is it accurate to say that our relationship with thought is our problem, the cause of our suffering? If it is, why don’t we (the human brain) bring this relationship to order? What do we have to lose?
Do I know what I have to lose to come to the end of human suffering? If I do, then I don’t care to lose it, and I’m holding on tight. But if I don’t know what I have to lose, it could be anything and it could be nothing.
So what am I to do?
Perhaps we are loyal to our suffering self as you would be loyal to an old friend. I feel this way at times. Though Rick is largely a fictional story, rather than dropping the story, I feel I owe it to him to see it through, stay with the story until his death.
This is my place of stuckness. I’m holding on to Rick-hood because, though flawed, I’ve put huge energy and care into optimizing it for the challenges of this life. I am wary of Rick, know its downsides horribly well, know most of its tricks. But what I don’t seem to want / be able to do is let go of Rick.
At the age of 5 I would escape from school at break time, just to go near the sea, sit on a rock and pose questions to myself while observing life, human suffering, and the difficulty of relationships as I gazed at the horizon.
Many years later, as an adult, talking one day with my late older brother, he told me that when I was 3 years old, I was at home one day, in the middle of the stairs leading to the first floor, crying inconsolably, while my mother upstairs and my father downstairs were screaming at each other.
Perhaps it was there that my passion for wanting to understand human suffering (mine and that of others) was awakened. From a simple question that any 3 year old child could ask himself in that situation: ‘Why are they fighting, aren’t they supposed to love each other and through that love, take care of me?
And let me say here (you can believe me or not), that neither resentment nor hatred arose in me at any time (neither then, nor later over the years).
It may be that in that staircase episode I have explained, I was not worrying about my own suffering, but about the suffering of my father and mother, and the harm that their particular suffering was causing them both.
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Interesting. Perhaps you have a relatively low ego quotient, are naturally predisposed towards seeing things from a non-ego-centered point of view?
If you and Rick are one and the same, Rick wants to stick around. He’s not ready to live without himself, and that’s what all of us here are dealing with, whether we know it or not.
Reading between the lines: What Rick doesn’t want is to let go of Rick.
Well, yeah, I mean how could Rick let go of Rick? Rick = Rick, right?
And, yeah, why would Rick want to lose Rick? That’s like suicide.
I really don’t have to do anything, just become part of the observed. Don’t change a thing…just be the observed. Nothing has to change except that ‘distance’ between you and the observed. It’s not a real distance anyway.
I really don’t know, but some people who have shared their suffering with me (let’s call it that way to encompass what would be their worries, problems, etc.), have told me afterwards that when they talk to me they feel that they don’t have to pretend anything, or pretend to be someone else.
No, let’s just say that, for whatever reason, I have always been able to listen to my own suffering and that of others without the self interfering at all during that listening; and that sometimes that listening even goes beyond the specific time that the conversation with the other person may have lasted (as if the conversation continued without the physical presence of the other).
In any case, I can tell you that I am not totally free of the self (which helps me to understand even more deeply the root of the suffering that pervades us all when it makes its appearance – even if that appearance is increasingly sporadic).
Sounds like you’re doing well, thanks for sharing. 
How does this work? I say I am X, then I say I can’t let go of X. Which is it?
Am I X or am I the creator, owner, director of the character X who says he can’t live without X?
X is my masterpiece, and I am so identified with X that I live for it and will die for it.
Maybe its not evident that I believe that an understanding of what harm and suffering is, will mitigate its effects - that understanding is a solution to the problem.
Or maybe the question really is : why do I feel that a world with less suffering and harm is better than a world full of harm?
Is a world that does not include torture, violence, starvation, better than a world that does include those things?
Maybe this is a philosophical question? Maybe we are interested in philosophical questions? And this is a difficult one to argue for - we can’t get an ought from an is; we cannot avoid agency or subjective preference.
So I don’t have a logical argument, as to why I am more interested in exploring the human experience rather than something else (ie why I prefer cheese over chalk) - its probably just my conditioning as a social animal and human that I want us to fulfill our potential.
We are powerful and we are doing a lot of harm. That harm is unnecessary.
Yes
What do you mean? What limits it?
Are you suggesting curiosty is necessarily based in fear, in the desire for power? Curiosity is necessarily ego-driven?
What about the statement : Self centered curiosity, is necessarily limited. (?)
There is a difference between greed and curiosity.
And my greatest disappointment. And everything in-between. I am all I ultimately know. I am the constant in an ever-changing world. I am everything. I am God.
I see this as a Ground Zero understanding: it’s conditioning all the way up and down.
Is there anything we think-feel-do that is not ego-driven? Or at least ego-touched?