Earlier this year, my wife and I was wondering how it felt like to have a dog. We watched some Youtube videos about puppies, how cute and adorable they were and how dogs were so smart and fun to play with. I can say that my wife is a dog person and so am I. One day, she looked at a dog adoption website and found this one particular dog…
Without further ado: My homework on my wrong views about ‘suffering safe zones’, the two sides of suffering and happiness, and whether I can really call something sukka if what is outside of it is dukka… This contemplation around the topic of suffering will be divided into 4 parts: What suffering it really is /looks like, how my wrong views about it arise and why they arise/the purpose they serve…
Mae Yo once told me to go look at the idea of preserving, to contemplate on refrigeration, because us humans are always trying to preserve. I’m no different, I’m always trying to either preserve a particular space/time/self, or– as my recent NY life has shown me– get back to the good stuff I failed to preserve. But thinking about the women and the wine glasses, the interdependent nature of suffering…
Mae Yo’s homework always sounds so simple, “go and see the two sides of comfort and suffering.” But seriously, what does that even mean? I understood that I was supposed to be having some deep penetrating insight into the relationship between Sukka (happiness) and Dukka (suffering) but I was stuck. It was time for a tool, not just any tool either, but the big guns…I needed an Ubai. For days…
After I realized that the “reward” that I deserve is not really a reward after all (previous blog), now I start to look at the purpose of having to finish those tasks. When I work everyday for 7 to 8 hours a day, why do I do it? I gained money out of it. I need the money to pay mortgage, utility bills, buy foods, and other expenses. Did I…
When I returned from Hawaii, my mule encounter fresh on the brain, I made an appointment to talk to Mae Yo. I had, after all, identified a huge tendency of mine, a deep wrong view in which I divide the world into neat little partitions: areas of suffering and areas of comfort. I live for those corners of comfort, my spaces of refuge from suffering — that peace, that joy,…