How can you live stress-free and without suffering?
Life seems to be about suffering. Strangely, everyone suffers, but there are all sorts of things to suffer over — relationships, finances, health concerns, aging, appearances, housing issues, and so on.
Everyone wants to be happy, but few know how to go about this, which is why we have so many vices, so much violence, and so much mindless entertainment.
Where does suffering come from? This can be discovered by anyone merely by observing the mind, thoughts, what you tend to think about, and who or what it is that is noticing the thoughts.
Thoughts create suffering. We live with an endless cycle of trying to get pleasure and to avoid pain. We desire things that we think will make us feel satisfied, happy, whole, better, more attractive, richer, more prestigious, calmer, more excited, and so on.
Desire leads to suffering, regardless of the suffering.
So the question is how do we make life easier and stress- free. The answer is that we first have to look at it in a different way. We try, but fail, to figure it out with the same exact instrument that is causing the problem — the egoic mind.
It is the egoic mind that cause suffering, because it is a belief that you are a person separate from the wholeness of life. When we buy into the world of the egoic mind, then we live according to its suffering.
The egoic mind is a mind that is influenced since infancy by parents, religion, teachers, authority figures, culture, relatives, and so on. It is created by a bundle of thoughts and is not real. It changes over and over again, but there is a “you” who does not change and notices this sense of self which is the egoic mind. This particular “you” does not need anything because it is already complete.
If you can continuously explore this non-egoic self — this real “you” at the core — then you will find that the play of life continues, but the response to it changes. When you learn that you are the wholeness of everything then you have realized that this egoic self is no more than a belief and you do not buy into its world of suffering.
By analogy, we can sit in a theater and watch a movie and become emotionally involved, laughing, crying, and lamenting. But we know it is just a movie with characters, a plot and setting, and a strong theme. We can enjoy it, love it, hate it, and suffer with it, but we know that when the lights come on we can leave the theater and leave it all behind. The light on the screen makes the images go away; they aren’t real anyway. The metaphor is right there: turning on the light, en-lighten-ment.
Life is like this. It is a play on the screen of consciousness. And you are that screen and not the character you think you are. If you can realize this by persistent observation, then the suffering and stress dissolves with the false sense of self.
