Some Buddhistic teaching

From a book bought in Kathmandu

By enlightened master Chagdud Tulku

To understand how suffering arises, practise watching your mind. Begin by simply letting it relax. Without thinking of the past or the future, without feeling hope or fear about this thing or that, let it rest comfortably, open and natural. In this space of the mind, there is no problem, no suffering.

Then something catches your attention - an image, a sound, a smell. Your mind splits into inner and outer, self and other, subject and object. In simply perceiving the object, there is still no problem. But when you zero in on it, you notice that it's big or small, white or black, square or circular; and then you make a judgement - for example, whether it's pretty or ugly. Having made that judgement, you react to it: you decide you like it, or you don't like it.

That's when the problem starts, because "I like it" leads to "I want it". Similarly "I don't like it" leads to "I don't want it". If we like something, want it and can't have it, we suffer. If we want it, get it and lose it, we suffer.If we don't want it but can't keep it away, again we suffer. Our suffering seems to occur because of the object of our desire or our aversion, but that's not really so - it happens because the mind splits into subject-object duality and becomes involved in wanting or not wanting something.

We often think the only way to create happiness is to try to control the outer circumstances of our lives, to try to fix what seems wrong or to get rid of everything that bothers us. But the real problem lies in our reaction to those circumstances. What we have to change is the mind, and the way it experiences reality.

Our emotions propel us through extremes, from elation to depression, from good experiences to bad, from happiness to sadness - a constant swinging back and forth. Emotionality is the by-product of hope and fear, attachment and aversion. We have hope because we are attached to something we want. We have fear because we are averse to something we don't want. As we follow our emotions, reacting to our experiences, we create karma, a perpetual motion that inevitably determines our future. We need to stop the extreme swings of the emotional pendulum, so that we can find a place of centeredness.

Great, isn't it? This is one of the keys to me, how it works. And still you can keep feeling emotions...