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Showing posts with the label Depression

The Buddha says it is possible to find something that doesn’t change, and it’s going to be a happiness that doesn’t change. Trust him when he says that it’s really worth whatever effort goes into it.

"We’ve seen so much of the changes in the world, and we’ve realized that the only way the heart is going to find any true peace is to find a happiness that’s not going to change on you. The Buddha’s good news is that there is such a happiness. It does exist and it is attainable. So as you experience grief over the way the world is changing — and when you look around you at the world at large, it is pretty discouraging. But we have to remember that each of us is creating his or her own world, and it is possible through your actions to create a world in which the deathless is possible. You’re creating a new you; you’re creating a new world. The two go together. You’ll be going beyond them at some point, but you need to use them to get beyond them, which is what the training is for. So even though there’s some grief in the realization that you’re not there yet, it’s grief with hope, which is the opposite of depression. That’s grief with no hope at all, which is basically what’s bein...

The hunger ends not because we’ve simply decided that there really is nothing out there worth feeding on, so we might as well not feed anymore. The hunger is still there. The Buddha's approach totally satisfies it.

"I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people depict the Buddha’s teachings like this: There really is no happiness in the world, and contentment lies in just admitting that fact and basically giving up on the search for happiness and learning how to be equanimous and unaffected by anything. That’s the best that can be expected. There is no transcendent. There’s nothing unconditioned. It’s just a matter learning how to accept where you are. That’s almost too depressing to think about, if that’s what it was all about. But fortunately, it’s not. The Buddha did find an ultimate happiness, one that is totally satisfying — so totally that it’s more than anything you could think about, more than anything you could imagine. Can you imagine not hungering? For most of us, just that idea stretches our imagination a lot. We’re used to being hungry and we find satisfaction in things that seem to satisfy the hunger, at least for a while. We forget that a lot of the things that are appealing i...