It is quite a revelation when you realize that although pain is very real, suffering is largely made up by the mind. Its often resisting the experince you are having right now.
A good example to practise on: Being stuck in traffic is not the Problem. Its wishing you where already at the place you are trying to get too thats causing distress. If you come at it like a Zen master you will still be stuck in traffic for just as long but you wont be suffering because there is no resistence to the experience you are having.
Valid reply; the suffering we create in our own world (brain).
The values we give to our lives, and that we stand by; the more importance we give them the more "distress" we suffer when someone breaks them, I think.
It is the level of intensity in the meaning of life we attach and believe in that is creating our force and our downfall. ...I think.
We're all different; but I'll give you an example(s) for discussion advancement:
- Your 12-year old daughter gets hit by a drunk driver and she died at the hospital few hours later.
- You work hard all your life, and you have good insurances, and you have a heart attack, and it leads to physical failures, and there was a small close in the insurance paper that wasn't covered. You lost all your life savings and you cannot afford a lawyer, and you lost your home and your wife.
- You are a successful stock broker and financial adviser; many of your clients lost all their life savings and they blame you for the crash (stock market).
- You are young, 25-years old, you work real hard as a logger, and someone steals your full season paycheck.
- You have a major surgery, and you lose both eyes and ears.
We're all different, and depending of our own values and the level we attach to them; how we cope with some of those circumstances will define the degree of "suffering". Yes, it's in our brain, and it's also real.
I can give you more examples, and the level of "suffering" is proportional to each brain of each person in each circumstance.
If some people's brain are above all calamities of life, and that their emotional state are under total control; perhaps the "suffering" is less intensified...maybe, but I doubt it.
Here we have it easy; we are older, wiser, financially comfortable, living in peaceful zones of the planet, relatively healthy for retirees, and we eat good and exercise well...physically (sex) and mentally (music listening). We are the elite, the crop of the cream. We don't suffer much at all, and when we see close friends suffering around us, we understand to the extent of our own "suffering" experience in life.
We're all different, and the intensity of our joy and pain is related to our life's values and emotional uniqueness in real experience.
It's like that with music listening; the music recordings we like, the gear we use, the movies we watch, the screen where we see them, and all that jazz.
* That older folk in that video; I like him. :b