Suffering
Faisal Hakami
9/4/2020
We humans suffer, quite a lot, yet we don’t sit to think about the core idea of suffering, how did it start? How did we get there? We are smart, we built cities and explored the deepest states of atoms, yet we still suffer, why? For me, I think that desire is suffering, having all those desires cause nothing but more suffering, and the key to happiness, well there’s no one key, but one is having one desire at a time, nothing more.
When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
When you have that one and only desire, focus on it, leave everything else, and you’ll get it.
Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy. Having more than one desire at a time will cause nothing but suffering. That is the thing that cause our suffering, is having all those desires at one time and then finding out what relies under, as it was mentioned in Buddhism Without Beliefs below.
Craving can vanish in awakening to the absurdity of the assumptions that underlie it
Buddhism Without Beliefs. P. 26
As it was mentioned in class, part of what causes anguish is holding into things, our desires, wanting things to last, wanting life to be otherwise what it is.
A story of a time that I suffered might not be related to my concept of suffering, but it is something that affected me for a while, if not forever. It is something personal to me that happened in 7th grade when I got into a car accident that caused the death of a friend of mine, I was only a passenger, yet I felt responsible. I had so many questions for a while, what if I got into the car early, would it have happened, and my friend lived? What if I told them to stop driving crazy, would I have stopped the accident? The way I dealt with it was by having another desire, leaving everything else behind. I had one desire which was to learn all about content creating, from graphic design, to editing videos and photos, to learning all the 3D software, to even web developing (there was no click and drag website services at the time). I spent many nights learning what others would consider useless things at the time, but what was behind it is that I wanted my mind to be busy with this one and only desire. I pretty much lost all those skills that I gained because it was temporary, but it made my suffering of the death of my friend end, not quite, but it is the one thing that kept me pushing.