Charlotte Joko Beck 496 words, 19K views, 13 comments
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On Dec 22, 2009Teo wrote :
It is surprising that the excerpt on suffering is from the text called “Everyday Zen”. It sounds more like “Everyday Christianity”, and this is why it evokes reflections from the readers focused on duality: ”suffering as a temporary hardship”, “The opposite of happiness is suffering”, “a physical existence must always involve some amount of suffering”
Zen approach is radically different; suffering is a bliss that doesn’t fit our conception of existence. Suffering doesn’t exist externally to us, like something we have to go in and out and tolerate while we are in. No, it is what we wish to call the experience we choose to go through. The same experience different people or the same person in different periods of his life call differently. Simplifying: One-legged person will recall as happiness the ‘suffering’ of muscle pain in his once existing leg.
There is no suffering; there is only our limitation of comprehension. An experience that i intend to call ‘suffering’ is a pointer to my limitation. Acknowledging this limitation is what I hope the author of the “Everyday Zen” text called for.
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On Dec 30, 2013Speak wrote :
Thank you for "getting it."
On Feb 25, 2023Bob wrote :
Stress talking about attachment to our ideas leading to our suffering. The first noble truth
On Dec 22, 2009 Teo wrote :
It is surprising that the excerpt on suffering is from the text called “Everyday Zen”. It sounds more like “Everyday Christianity”, and this is why it evokes reflections from the readers focused on duality: ”suffering as a temporary hardship”, “The opposite of happiness is suffering”, “a physical existence must always involve some amount of suffering”