Suffering: Not the Only Truth

 Sometimes I go about in pity for myself.  And  all awhile I am being carried by great wings across the sky.

Ojibwa saying

We get so lost sometimes don't we, in our own personal challenges and sense of "suffering"?  We master the first of the Four Noble Truths.  We know that suffering exists.  

But as Jack Kornfield reminds us in his video by the same name...suffering is not the end of story. There are three more truths to consider.  There is a cause for suffering and it isn't anything "out there".  It is our reactivity, our greed, our resentment, our attachment to the world of form, our tendency to believe everything the ego mind tells us that causes suffering. There is also a way through suffering and a path to peace, joy, happiness and the ultimate experience: love. We just tend to stop and get stuck on the first truth...that suffering exists.  We often fail, therefore to, to see beyond it. 

The great power is not to be afraid of suffering.

If we knew what caused suffering, we could end suffering.  If we knew that the cause of suffering was primarily overidentification with thinking and circumstance, we would detach from thinking and circumstance wouldn't we? We would observe it...not as us...but as something just passing by our awareness.  We would not hate it or push it away.  We would simply view it with "Loving awareness", with "amazement" and with peace.  We would then realize that we were not only observing with loving awareness...we were loving awareness...and we would offer ourselves freely to the world. 

Suffering, then, is not the end of the story.  It is merely the beginning that leads us toward the end.

What is the end of the story?

A loving heart.  Suffering takes us to a loving heart. 

All is well!

Jack Kornfield ( September 26, 2020) Suffering is not the end of the story.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPcArisRmH8