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Quote by Louis Yako

“The AIDS pandemic forced humans to cover their genitals with condoms. The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing them to put on masks. It is as if many people weren’t already going through life putting on a million masks and changing them based on convenience and self-interest. It is as if countless humans on this planet weren’t already forced to keep their mouths shut and endure the misfortunes imposed on them by the ‘fortunate’ few. I wonder which body part we will be forced to cover next. I wonder if, in the first place, all of this is happening because our eyes were covered all along. Are we heading to a time when staying safe becomes akin to a death sentence with stay of execution?”

Quote by Louis Yako

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Louis Yako

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“Suffering, in fact, can be helpful in many ways. It spurs your motivation and as many teachings point out, without suffering there would be no determination to be free from samsara. Sadness is an effective antidote to arrogance.”

SufferingBuddhismEnlightenmentAwakeningSpiritual TransformationMindtrainingPath Of The Bodhisattva
Book:The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva
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“But since these rolls of bread and wine bottles are needed by me, and your faces with their hollows and prominences are beautiful, and the table-cloth and its yellow stain, far from being allowed to spread in wider and wider circles of understanding that may at last (so I dream, falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended) embrace the entire world, I must go through the antics of the individual. I must start when you pluck at me with your children, your poems, your chilblains or whatever it is that you do and suffer. But I am not deluded. After all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”

SufferingVirginiaEscapismWaves
Book:The Waves
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“Just as the Buddha taught, it’s important to see suffering as suffering. We are not talking about ignoring or keeping quiet. When we don’t buy into our opinions and solidify the sense of enemy, we will accomplish something. If we don’t get swept away by our outrage, then we will see the cause of suffering more clearly. That is how the cessation of suffering evolves.”

SufferingAggressionOutrageBuddhist Teachings
Book:When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
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“... the notion that happiness and suffering are morally symmetric deserves our most meticulous scrutiny. It may, of course, seem intuitive to assume that some kind of symmetry must obtain, and to superimpose a certain interval of the real numbers onto the range of happiness and suffering we can experience — from minus ten to plus ten, say. Yet we have to be extremely cautious about such naively intuitive moves of conceptualization. … [I]t is especially true when our ethical priorities hinge on these conceptual models; when they can determine, for instance, whether we find it acceptable to allow astronomical amounts of suffering to occur in order to create “even greater” amounts of happiness.”

HappinessSufferingEthicsUtilitarianismPrioritization
Book:Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications
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