Suffering arises not from life's inherent difficulties, but from our resistance, clinging, and the illusion of a separate self. True peace is found in accepting life's fluid, dualistic nature and recognizing our interconnectedness with the universe.
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The meaning of life is just to be alive.
It is so plain and so obvious and so
simple. Yet everybody rushes around in a
great panic as if it were necessary to
achieve something beyond themselves.
Have you ever noticed that suffering is
not so much in the pain itself, but in
the way we cling to it, resist it, and
try to escape from it? It's curious,
isn't it? The moment you resist a thing,
you magnify it. The moment you push
against a thought, you give it strength.
And so much of what we call suffering
isn't in the rain that falls upon us,
but in the way we curse the storm.
Now, I'm not suggesting that life is
free of difficulty. Far from it. Life
has always been a dance of opposites.
Pain and pleasure, gain and loss, birth
and death. They are as inseparable as
the front and the back of a coin.
But here is the trick. You see,
suffering is not the same as pain. Pain
is simply what is the sting of loss, the
ache of the body, the tears of parting.
These are natural as the tides. But
suffering, suffering is the story we
weave around it. It is the why me. It is
the clinging, the holding on, the
desperate attempt to control what was
never in our control. There is an old
saying in Zen, let go or be dragged. And
this is precisely the matter at hand.
When you stop clutching, when you let
the river flow, you find that the water
carries you. But when you stiffen, when
you insist on paddling against the
current, you exhaust yourself. And then
of course you call that exhaustion
suffering. Now imagine this for a
moment. Suppose you are sitting in a
concert hall listening to the most
marvelous symphony. The violins rise,
the horns call, the drums thunder, and
then there are those soft silences
between notes. If you tried to cling to
one particular note, one particular
moment, you would miss the music
entirely. And yet that is what so many
of us do with life. We clutch to the
past. We resist the present. And we
demand that the future turn out just so.
And in this struggle we suffer. Muddy
water is best cleared by leaving it
alone. Isn't that delightful? You stir
up the pond and then you panic wondering
why you cannot see. But if you would
only stop meddling, if you would let the
water settle on its own, it becomes
clear again. This is the essence of
ending suffering. To stop trying to
force clarity, to stop grasping for
control, to let life be. And yet
here comes the paradox. The very moment
you try to let go, you will find
yourself grasping at letting go, you
will say, "I must stop suffering. I must
drop it. I must let it go." And suddenly
suffering is right back in the room
laughing at you. So what do you do? You
don't do. You notice. You watch. You
become aware of this game you are
playing. And in that very awareness, a
kind of miracle happens. The grasping
begins to loosen on its own. This is why
I often say man suffers only because he
takes seriously what the gods made for
fun. Life is a game, a play, a cosmic
hideand seek. You are it pretending not
to be it. You are the universe playing
at being a person. And the moment you
recognize that this whole drama isn't
meant to be taken with such deadly
seriousness, you begin to laugh at your
suffering. And what happens when you
laugh? You loosen. You breathe. You
live. Think of a child. A child falls,
scrapes its knee, and within moments
they are up again, laughing, running.
The pain is there, yes, but it has not
yet solidified into suffering. Why?
Because the child has not learned to
weave long stories about it. They
haven't yet learned to cling. But we as
adults become very good at storytelling.
We carry our wounds like treasures,
retelling them, protecting them,
building identities around them. And in
this endless narration, we suffer far
more than the original wound ever required.
required.
So, let me tell you a story, one you may
have heard before, but it bears repeating.
repeating.
There was once a Chinese farmer. One day
his horse ran away, and the neighbors
came and said, "Oh, that's too bad." And
the farmer simply replied, "Maybe." The
next day, the horse returned, bringing
with it seven wild horses. And the
neighbors came again and said, "Why, how
wonderful." And the farmer said,
"Maybe." The day after his son tried to
ride one of the wild horses, and he was
thrown off, breaking his leg. The
neighbors rushed in. Oh, that's
terrible. And again, the farmer said,
"Maybe." The very next day, conscription
officers came looking for young men to
draft into the army. But because the son
had a broken leg, they passed him by.
And the neighbors cried, "How
fortunate." And the farmer has always
replied, "Maybe."
Now, the point of this story is not
about being clever or detached. It's
about seeing that life is endlessly
unfolding, and our judgments of good and
bad, fortunate and unfortunate, are
terribly short-sighted. When you see
this, you begin to loosen your grip on
things. You stop suffering over each
twist of the plot because you realize
you are not meant to judge the story.
You are meant to experience it. Man is a
little bit afraid. He wonders what will
happen next. But that is precisely the
adventure. The attempt to escape
suffering is often the very root of it.
You fear the unknown. You fear loss. You
fear death. But all of these are part of
the adventure. The trick, you see, is
not to get rid of the storm, but to
learn to dance in the rain, not to
abolish the silence, but to hear the
music within it. not to conquer death
but to realize that death is what makes
life so exquisitly alive. And so if you
wish to stop suffering now
don't begin with the attempt to
rearrange life. Begin with the way you
see it. Look at the river. Look at the
sky. Look at your own thoughts rising
and falling like clouds and see they
were never under your control anyway.
When you allow them to flow, you
discover a strange thing. suffering
evaporates and in its place there is a
kind of deep wordless peace. It is not
the peace of having solved everything
but the peace of no longer needing to.
The more a thing tends to be permanent,
the more it tends to be lifeless.
Suffering comes from our desperate
attempt to make the impermanent
permanent. We want the joy without the
loss, the life without the death, the
gain without the risk. But this is to
want a one-sided coin. and a one-sided
coin does not exist. When you see this,
when you truly see it, you stop fighting
the rhythm of life. And in that moment,
suffering dissolves. So perhaps the
invitation is not to escape suffering,
but to see through it, to recognize it
as a trick of the mind, a tightening
where loosening is possible. And in this
recognition, right here, right now, you
are free. So we have this feeling of
being a lonely little me inside a bag of
skin looking out at a world that is
foreign and often threatening.
We feel that we came into this world.
But did you or did you come out of it
like an apple comes out of an apple
tree? Have you noticed this peculiar
illusion we carry? the sense that we are
strangers in the universe, accidental
visitors, isolated egos inside these
fragile shells of flesh. We imagine
ourselves tossed into a world that does
not belong to us, that is indifferent or
hostile. And because of this illusion,
we feel lonely. We feel afraid. We feel
the weight of being a separate self, a
drift in a vast, uncaring cosmos. But
pause for a moment. Ask yourself
honestly, did you really come into this
world? Or did you come out of it? Just
as a leaf comes out of a branch, just as
the wave rises out of the sea, the
universe has been unfolding for billions
of years. And here you are, a
blossoming, an expression, a ripple in
its eternal dance. You are not a
visitor. You are the happening itself.
Consider the wave. A wave curls upon the
ocean surface. It rises, takes form,
gathers strength, and if it could think,
it might say, "Look at me. I am a wave.
I am important, separate, special." But
the wave also fears. It sees its own end
approaching as it tumbles toward the
shore. It trembles at the crash,
thinking it will vanish forever. And so
it suffers. But what the wave forgets,
what we forget, is that it is never
separate from the ocean. Its water is
the ocean's water. Its motion is the
ocean's motion.
The crash upon the shore is not the end
of the wave, but a transformation. It
returns to the sea just as it always was
the sea. You are that wave. You may call
yourself by a name, John or Jane, but
your true identity is oceanic. You are
the universe itself playing at being a
temporary ripple. And when you see this,
fear dissolves. Loneliness fades because
you realize you cannot fall out of the
ocean. You cannot be lost. You are the
ocean forever folding into new forms.
Now let's deepen this. The universe is
not merely ocean but a great play of
opposites. Light and dark, sound and
silence, life and death. We live in a
system of polarity. The crest of the
wave cannot exist without the trough.
The heartbeat itself systol and diastol
contraction and expansion. If the heart
stopped alternating, you would not be
alive. Yet what do we do? We try to
cling to one side and reject the other.
We worship the light but curse the
darkness. We chase pleasure but resist
pain. We want to live but we fear death.
And here is the trick. You cannot have
one without the other. It's like trying
to play a game of chess with only white
pieces. Or trying to listen to music
with only sound and no silence. The
opposites define one another. Without
the background of night, the stars would
not shine. Without silence, music would
be meaningless. Without death, life
would lose its urgency, its beauty. But
suffering arises when we forget this is
a game. When we treat one side as an
enemy to be conquered rather than a
partner in the dance. The yin-yang
symbol, you see, is not static. It's
always turning, always flowing. The
black contains the seed of white, and
the white contains the seed of black.
They chase one another like lovers, like
dancers. The universe is not at war with
itself. It is in love with itself. It is
playing. It is dancing. And you, you are
one of its graceful movements.
Now, let's take another metaphor.
Imagine life as a grand theater. The
curtain rises, the actors step onto the
stage, and the play begins. To be a good
actor, you must believe in your role. If
you are playing the tragic hero, you
must weep real tears. If you are playing
the clown, you must laugh with all your
heart. But the great actor never
forgets. This is a role. The tears are
real. Yet they are also play. When the
curtain falls, the actor steps off
stage, removes the costume, and goes
home. Now, here is the human
predicament. We have forgotten we are
actors. We are stuck on the stage,
utterly convinced the play is reality
itself. We take our role as John or Mary
with such seriousness, such gravity that
we suffer as if the play were eternal.
But what happens when you remember, when
you see that the role is temporary, that
the curtain will fall. You do not stop
acting. In fact, you act even better
because you can give yourself fully to
the role knowing it is not the whole of
you. You are not just the actor. You are
the audience watching the play unfold.
You are the playwright weaving the
story. You are the stage itself upon
which the drama appears. And when you
realize this, the tragedy loses its
sting. The comedy sparkles and even the
sorrows of life become part of the
magnificent performance. But perhaps the
deepest illusion of all is the sense of separation.
separation.
This feeling of being a lonely little
me, trapped in a bag of skin, peering
out at a world that is other. Science
will tell you quite correctly that your
body is made of stardust.
That the iron in your blood was forged
in the heart of stars that exploded
billions of years ago. That the breath
you inhale right now was exhaled by
trees. And the breath you exhale is food
for them. You are not separate from the
environment. You are the environment.
You don't live in the universe. You are
the universe living as this particular
form for a little while. The illusion of
being separate is the root of fear and
thus the root of suffering. Because if
you believe you are only this fragile
ego, you must constantly defend it,
protect it, cling to it. And of course
it feels terrifying to lose it. But when
you see through the illusion, when you
realize you are the ocean, the wave, the
actor, the stage, the whole cosmic
drama, then death itself loses its
teeth. Because how can the universe lose
itself? It is only changing costume,
only shifting masks, only moving from
one dance to another. Let me share with
you one final image. The Hindus say the
universe is a game of hideand seek. God
or Brahman hides from himself by
becoming us, by becoming the world of
forms, by pretending to be you and
forgetting. Why? Because there is no fun
in playing a game where you already know
the ending. So the self hides from
itself, takes on the disguise of you and
pretends to be lost. And the whole
adventure of life is the thrill of seeking.
seeking.
But sooner or later, the game reaches
its turning point. The mask slips, the
curtain is lifted, and you remember,
"Ah, it was me all along. I was the
seeker and the sort, the hider and the
finder, the player and the game." And
then you laugh because you realize
suffering was never more than forgetting
the playful nature of it all. You are
the aperture through which the universe
is looking at itself and exploring
itself. And when you know this, not as
an idea, but as a lived reality, life
transforms. The fear of death loosens.
The grip of loneliness fades. The
seriousness of suffering dissolves
because you remember you are not merely
in the cosmos. You are the cosmos. And
this whole drama with its joys and
sorrows is your play. So how does one
stop suffering? Now the ego's first
instinct is to find a method, a
technique, a new thing to do. To try
even harder to control the game. But
that is like a person trapped in
quicksand struggling. It only sinks them
deeper. The way is not to grasp but to
let go. We human beings are funny
creatures. When faced with a challenge
of suffering, our first thought is
always, "What should I do?" We want a
prescription, a technique, a map. We
want some clever method that will
finally fix it all. But do you see the
trick here?
The very one who is suffering, the
grasping anxious self, is the one trying
to end suffering. It's like a dog
chasing its own tail or like a man in
quicksand who thrashes and flails only
to sink deeper with every effort. The
harder you try to be free, the more
tightly you bind yourself. Because the
very act of trying is rooted in
resistance, and resistance is the seed
of suffering. This is why control never
quite works. You say to yourself, I must
let go. I must relax. I must trust. And
already you are clutching at relaxation,
grasping at trust, forcing yourself to
let go. It's absurd, isn't it? And yet
this is the human predicament. We try to
control the uncontrollable. We try to
clutch the river with our hands. Then we
wonder why we come up empty. Letting go
is not something you do. It is what
happens when you see that there is
nothing to hold on to. It's like opening
your hand and realizing it was empty all
along. It is that we are constantly
labeling events as good or bad,
fortunate or unfortunate, based on a
tiny sliver of perspective. But the
truth is we do not know. We cannot know.
The story is still unfolding. Our
endless judgments, our compulsive
labeling, they are the very roots of
anxiety. We live in constant tension,
afraid of what may come, desperate to
hold on to what we call good, terrified
of what we call bad. But if we could
live like the farmer with that soft
smile of maybe suffering would dissolve
like morning mist. So then what is the
alternative? If not control, if not
judgment, what is left? Attention. Pure
unfiltered childlike attention. Instead
of trying to change what is, try simply
to look at it. Feel the anxiety in your
chest. Don't call it bad. Don't try to
fix it. Just feel it as it is. Listen to
the sound of the rain on the roof. Don't
call it pleasant. Don't call it
unpleasant. Just listen. Look at the
light filtering through the trees. Don't
say how beautiful. Don't say how
ordinary. Just look. And when you do
this, something miraculous happens. The
world which had grown flat and gray
suddenly becomes alive again. Everything
shimmers with mystery as if seen for the
first time. You become like a child. And
for a child everything is g whiz. The
most ordinary pebble is a jewel. The
most common insect is a dragon. The
whole world is vibrant, alive, radiant.
Now I must warn you to live this way
feels like living without a net because
the ego desperately wants guarantees. It
wants security, certainty, a safety rope
to cling to. But life offers no such
thing. And that, my friends, is its beauty.
beauty.
The tree does not ask for a guarantee of
spring. It simply blossoms. The bird
does not demand a contract with the sky.
It simply spreads its wings and flies.
Living without a net is to realize you
don't actually have to let go because
there is nothing to hold on to. There
never was. You see, all along you have
been like a man clutching at empty air,
imagining it was a rope. And when you
finally look, you laugh because there is
nothing to release. You are already
free. This is the wisdom of unknowing.
We are so desperate to know, to pin
down, to fix, to explain. But what if we
could rest in the vastness of not
knowing? What if we could meet each
moment without the burden of labels,
without the need for certainty? Then
life would not be a problem to be
solved, but a mystery to be lived. The
river flows and you flow with it. The
wind blows and you bend with it. The
stars burn and you burn with them. There
is no plan to follow, no secret key to
find. There is only this, this moment,
this breath, this dance. And when you
see this, you discover a peace deeper
than answers. The peace of not needing
to know. The peace of simply being. And
here comes the final joke of it all. The
very thing you have been searching for,
freedom, peace, the end of suffering,
was never hiding. It was here all along.
It's like looking for your own head. You
can twist and turn, peer into every
mirror, ask every teacher, but you will
never see it directly because it is what
you are looking from. In the same way,
you are the very freedom you seek. You
are the very peace you long for. You are
it always already here. And the moment
you stop searching, the moment you stop
touching, you see it like a joke that
was waiting all along. And then perhaps
you laugh. The real you is not a puppet
which life pushes around. The real deep
down you is the whole universe. And when
you realize this that there is no rope
to grasp, no net to fall into, no
separate self to protect, you stop
struggling. You stop suffering and you
live. Not tomorrow. Not when you figured
it all out, but now always now. So here
we are, my friends, at the final turn of
this little journey together. We began
with a knot. The knot of suffering. The
sense that you are a lonely little
creature cast a drift in a vast and
hostile universe. And perhaps along the
way you've noticed that knot beginning
to loosen. Not by force, not by pulling
at it, but simply by seeing it for what
it is, an illusion. You see, all along
the suffering was not in life itself,
but in the way we held on to it. The way
we tried to freeze the dance into a
still photograph. the way we insisted on
being the permanent guest in an
impermanent party. And life of course
refuses. Life moves, it dances, it
breathes. And so our suffering was the
friction between our demand for solidity
and the universe's endless fluidity. Now
let us tie the threads together. We
began with separation, a skin
encapsulated ego, looking out through
the eyes as if through tiny windows,
fearing the world outside. We discovered
that this little self, this lonely eye,
is no more than a mask, a role in a
play. And behind the mask, why behind
the mask is the entire theater, the
stage, the lights, the script, the
orchestra, the audience, all of it, is
you playing hideand seek with itself.
And what a marvelous trick it is to hide
from yourself so thoroughly that you can
forget your true nature, only to
rediscover it with a rush of laughter
and tears. For what is enlightenment but
a cosmic game of peekab-boo?
You hid and now you see. And so let me
remind you of something very important.
Life is not a journey with some grand
prize at the end. It is a symphony. You
don't play the symphony to get to the
end of it. No one listens to Beethoven's
ninth and says, "Oh, I can't wait for
the final note. That would be absurd."
No, you listen for the play of notes,
the rise and fall, the silence between
the sounds. Life is precisely like that.
It is a song and you are invited to sing
along, not to rush to the final chord.
The meaning you see is not waiting at
the finish line. The meaning is now in
the laughing child, in the sound of rain
against the window, in the pulse of your
own breath. The tragedy of human
suffering is that we forget the music
and try to turn it into a race. We
strain to arrive all the while missing
the very thing we came for. The dancing
of the notes. And this is why you see
the masters, the sages, the poets, they
laugh. They laugh not because they mock
life, but because they finally got the
joke. They realize that there was
nothing to get. Now think for a moment
of a dancer. A dancer does not dance to
arrive at a particular spot on the
floor. If they did, the quickest way
would be to walk directly there. No, the
dancer dances because the movement
itself is the delight. So too with the
universe. It does not spin galaxies into
being because it needs them to arrive
somewhere. It spins because spinning is
its joy. You are not here to accomplish
some divine checklist. You are here
because the cosmos could not resist the
artistry of making a U. You are its
pirouette, its laughter, its brushstroke
of color. But remember this, the dance
always includes its opposite, the spin
requires the stillness, the music
requires the silence, the wave requires
the trough. So don't imagine that to
live in harmony means to avoid sorrow or
to escape death or to outrun the shadow.
To live is to embrace the shadow as the
partner of the light. To hold both hands
in the dance. Suffering only arises when
we insist on clinging to one hand and
rejecting the other. Think once more of
the wave. The wave rises, curls, and
crashes. And all the while it trembles,
saying, "I must not end. I must hold
myself together. But the truth is the
wave never ends. Its water was the ocean
all along. When it falls, it simply
returns to itself. And you, dear
listener, are precisely the same. You
are not something apart from this grand
ocean of being. You are the ocean
waving. And when you fall, you do not
end. You return. So breathe. And in that
breath, realize it is not you breathing.
It is the cosmos breathing through you.
And so perhaps you wonder what am I to
do now? And the marvelous answer is
nothing in particular or rather
everything. There is no prescribed
action, no secret key, no final step.
The great relief of awakening is that
life no longer needs to be conquered.
You don't need to force it into meaning.
It is meaning already. Just as a flower
does not bloom with an agenda, you do
not need one either. You are not a
problem to be solved. You are a mystery
to be lived. Try this tomorrow morning.
As you step outside,
don't name anything you see. Don't call
it tree. Don't call it bird. Don't call
it sky. Just look. Just listen. Let the
universe wash over you without the
filter of labels. You will find it is
alive, shimmering, miraculous, because
you have stopped trying to make it fit
into the tight little boxes of thought.
So, let me invite you now. The next time
anxiety rises, see if you can notice it
not as an enemy, but as a ripple in the
dance. The next time sorrow comes, see
if you can cradle it gently like a
violin note in the symphony. And the
next time joy visits, welcome it, but
don't cling to it. Let it pass too. For
everything is part of the rhythm.
Remember, you are not merely listening
to the music. You are the music. Let us
end then with this. You are a function
of what the whole universe is doing.
In the same way a wave is a function of
what the whole ocean is doing. You are
not a puppet dangling on strings nor a
stranger lost in a foreign land. You are
the land, the strings, the puppeteer,
the play, the laughter, the tears. So
when you suffer, remember it is the
universe stretching itself into form,
into contrast, into dance. And when you
let go, you realize that you were never
separate at all. So go now, not with
heavy commandments, but with curiosity.
Look out the window, see the sky, the
leaves, the people passing by. Hear the
hum of life around you. Don't name it,
don't judge it, just let it sing to you.
For in the end there is no end. Only the
eternal music, the endless dance of
energy. And in that knowing suffering
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