dukha — the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience

This article came from a friend's comment that "atrocities need to be spoken and heard; the emotions acknowledged and integrated before people can get over it and move on with their lives".

This too, but without revelling in it... without 'out-suffering', so to speak, everyone else... Toothache hurts, but my toothache hurts much, much more than your toothache...
All suffering is suffering, Suzanne. On the level of sheer frustration if not on that of the actual pain experienced. Sure one must be open to listening to and allowing the expression of the suffering of those who have passed through extreme trauma, but ultimately what it boils down to is that all suffering is suffering - the suffering of not getting what one wants, of getting what one does not want, of change and upset, and of suffering itself, be that pain or frustration - these are the four basic facets of suffering which, as the Buddha said, 'should be experienced - in one's own body and one's own mind' so as to be understood.
But it's also taught that suffering stems from a cause: that the cause is not knowing how to comport oneself in the world as it is - not knowing how or what to want... in a word: bewilderment or ignorance - unawareness - witlessness (all these words are linked to the Sanskrit... vidya = awareness, wit in the ancient sense; avidya = iggerance, literally unwit)...
Interestingly, for causes to fructify the entire ensemble of the contributary causes and the supporting conditions have to fructify at the same time, and these, too, are intimately related to our total misunderstanding of what it is that's going on here - our total misreading of being.
However, it is true that if something is an effect it has to have a cause, and, if you remove the cause then the effect will, of itself, disappear.
Removing ignorance may seem impossible, or, at the very least, so daunting as to be utterly unapproachable, but it is said that if one examines reality carefully and thoroughly, one develops what is known as the correct view. If one then lives in accord with this, carefully keeping to it and not slipping back into unawareness, if one is mindful and concentrated, keeps one's speech, conduct and thought in line with it, then the path to the dissolution of suffering opens up of itself and one may follow it to its end.
In other words, it's not the situation you try to dissolve, but the positive-negative grasping to the situation that ignorance entails - i want this; i don't want this... When these dissolve, the situation itself is subtly transformed; it actually becomes an opportunity for learning. As long as you continue to project on others and on the situation itself - to cling to it positively or negatively - you are simply moving the chess pieces round on the board.
I don't know if you know the Buddhist diagram of the so-called Wheel of Life? A fearsome-looking red man holds in his hands and is devouring a disc containing illustrations of the six possible realms of becoming, surrounding which are twelve illustrations of the process of becoming and the centre of which is marked with a pig, a cock and a snake symbolising the cause: ignorance, desire and aversion? - To the left of this diagram, there is generally a picture of a buddha pointing across the diagram to the right, where the above-mentioned 'eightfold noble path' is listed as another way of going about things.
There's quite a good description of the details of this here , for all the fact that Yama - the Lord of Death or first person ever to die - is shown not as red but black and that the noble path is represented as the paradise of Buddha Amitabha which has more to do with other-power (the saving power of faith) than with self-power as explained above.
As long as we wallow in our suffering, we only compound it... NO-ONE else is responsible for it, ultimately. They may be the contributary cause or the condition, but the ultimate fact of suffering is ours alone to assume responsibility for. As long as we're blaming 'it' or 'them', we are definitely looking in the wrong direction.
This is the very root of the Buddhist teachings, this is what Siddhartha Gautama realised under the Bodhi Tree: It's our own mind that's playing tricks with us - our own hopes and fears - our own bewildered grasping at meaningfulness in and projection of meaning onto the fleeting and ill-recognised experiences of our minds - that is the cause of our suffering. Did he not say: 'I see you, O builder of houses. No longer shall you build your mansions here,' at which point all hell broke loose as his various yearnings tried to keep him within their pernicious hold... That's how the story goes...


He persisted, and asked the earth itself to bear witness. Symbolising the end of anger and grasping, mara's weapons (mara=the demon of limiting concepts: that the body-mind is the self, that death is the end, that one is too sinful and weak to ever understand and self-sufficient pride) turn to flowers as they touch him and his beautiful daughters turn to old women before his eyes (he could, of course, have turned them into flowers too, but saw a need - think - regarding the prevalence of carnal desire). He is unshakeable in his knowledge that the builder of houses has lost, and the goddess of the earth rears up out of it before him to bear witness that he has, indeed, woken up from his eternal dream.

To this end, one needs to assume responsibility. That's what I'm saying.
I'm not negating the horror people suffer because of what they believe is real; they do, indeed, suffer terribly, and it really is terrifying and scarring and debilitating... But it's also a waste of time - a waste of this precious human incarnation which is so brief and so subtle and so beautiful.
In the Lankavatara Sutra it says, Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise. What this means is that we have to understand where the fault lies. It lies here; not there.

This is NOT a path for everybody. For the most part, dinner should be served well before there's any talk of 'philosphy' let alone 'liberation', I know. I grew up in Africa and have seen India and Nepal.

Then again, anybody can enter it at any given instant...

Let me now shut my mouth before I choke on this foot.


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