What is the cause of suffering?

Suffering is created by your blindness and then received by your consciousness. If your food is hot, but you are hungry and eat it, then your mouth gets burnt.

Suffering has no form, you cannot describe its colour, you cannot point at the suffering itself.

Suffering comes from your physical nature, your desire, your emotions, and your thoughts.

Suffering comes when your chakras are out of balance.

Physical Suffering

This occurs when your four elements are out of balance.

• Earth: too much food and you become obese, not enough and you starve.
• Water: too much and you drown; not enough and you dehydrate.
• Fire: too much and you get heat stroke; not enough and you get hypothermia.
• Air: too much and you hyperventilate; not enough and you suffocate.

Desire Suffering

Too much desire makes you feel that you never have enough so you feel lost. No matter how hard you work, you are never sure that you will get what you want, or you worry that you will lose what you already have.

Emotion Suffering

When your emotions are hurt, you feel like it’s the end of the world. Your Ego can’t handle the pain, nobody cares about you, nobody loves you, and living is meaningless.

Thought Suffering

This occurs when you can’t stop thinking and calculating. All the calculations create worry, and an addiction to worry. Each calculation multiplies the worry and finally creates fear. Then you still have to hide it and pretend that you are fine.

Question (Red Bull):

Is suffering blindness from not being completely aware?

Answer (Sifu):

A baby has blindness, but does not always suffer. You can smile joyfully while you analyse suffering.

A baby receives a lot of suffering: it gets hungry, it gets cold, it gets dirty nappies, it gets lonely, it gets scared…

Suffering is information that our consciousness is not in harmony with; suffering is consciousness that is out of harmony. Consciousness has no form, therefore suffering has no form, but consciousness that is out of harmony will appear to have a form, yet you can never find the suffering itself.

So suffering is an illusion. How can this be? If your consciousness is not in your body and someone cuts it into a million pieces, your consciousness doesn’t die. Because your Ego is locked into the Physical I, you are trapped by the illusion of your body, and you lose the ability to disconnect your consciousness from your body’s suffering.

The bodhisattvas can connect to the body in a way such that they don’t have Physical I.

When Siddhartha was still a bodhisattva, he practiced in a lifetime called “Never Anger, Merciful Anger Control, Spiritual Character Control”. If anything bothered him in this lifetime, he didn’t want to create any angry feeling or intention, or let it show in his face or body. Because he was deeply aware that the body is not him, he could do that easily. But he was to face a big test.

When he was meditating – being aware that his body is not him, that his consciousness is free – a prince came to him, surrounded by bodyguards and beautiful female servants. After the girls served the prince, he felt tired and went to sleep.

Then the girls decide to pick some flowers and came across Siddhartha sitting there as a bodhisattva, glowing with light and looking incredibly joyful. They knew right away that he was not human. They forgot all about the flowers and bowed to him, asking for him to help them learn spirits. Siddhartha started teaching them that they were not their four-element body.

The servants began to realise that they were slaves to their prince and to their bodies. Even their beauty wasn’t real; it was just an illusion. They realised that their hearts were not free, and despite their comfortable and carefree life, they were not free. And then they developed the wisdom to know that the true heart can be free. They sat down and began to meditate with the bodhisattva.

At this moment, the Prince woke and was annoyed that the servant girls were nowhere to be seen. As Siddhartha Bodhisattva was joyfully helping the ladies become spiritual, the Prince approached with his bodyguard.

“Which devil dares to take my ladies away?” shouted the Prince. “Show me your true face, devil! You are not holy!”

But the women had already learned wisdom, so they went to protect Siddhartha. The Prince was so angry that he took up a sword, intending to kill them. At the last moment, he changed his mind and ordered his bodyguards to tie the women up. He told them that he will prove Siddhartha is a devil. He swung his sword and chopped off Siddhartha’s nose, but Siddhartha’s eyes remained peaceful; his lips still smiled joyfully, even with blood streaming down his face.

That pricked the prince’s ego, making him even angrier. “You try to challenge me, devil?” he said. Then he grabbed Siddhartha’s arm and cut it off. Siddhartha still showed no anger; his eyes remained calm. He was peaceful, filled with mercy, staring at the prince like someone who pities the person who is harming themselves.

The mercy in his eyes made the prince furious, so he chopped off Siddhartha’s remaining arm and legs. Still his eyes didn’t change, his smile didn’t change.

“How dare you look at me with mercy? I will pluck out your eyes!” shouted the prince, but when he looked into Siddhartha’s eyes, he saw the spiritual light of true kindness and care. He couldn’t do it. “I am sorry,” he said. “You are not a devil; I can see you have no anger or hate. It is I who am the devil.”

At that point the bodhisattva energy shone from his body. He said to the prince, “Your regret will help balance your Hell karma. Every life is equally important and perfect, as important as your father the king. If you learn and care for every life, your karma will help you into Spirits in your next lifetime. If you take the personal position and use your Ego to create suffering, then that suffering will come back to you.”

Then everyone bowed to Siddhartha.

That is amazing control: no anger, still merciful, still kind, and still caring. That is bodhisattva level: that suffering is an illusion. Red Bull, your fear of the acupuncture needles creates tension, stiffness, and pain; a body that is stiff cannot relax. So truly, there is a way to refuse the suffering.

Life is full of joy, but joy and suffering are both illusion. Joy needs wisdom to exist. Good character needs an open heart and sharp, sensitive awareness. Suffering doesn’t need any of these things. It comes from not caring, being rough, being insensitive, and having fear, worry, Ego, and greed.

So to create joy is more difficult than to create suffering, and that is the test of life. When you are naturally able to follow the harder path, then wisdom appears. True wisdom stays joyful and frees your life from tension. This is easy to say, but hard to do.

Philosophy is not just words; it takes many lifetimes to be able to live the philosophy. Suffering is your jail. With more wisdom, you can be aware of the things that life is trying to teach you. The system of life wants you to be in harmony with change, and share every moment of the present.

So, learn to understand the truth of life. When your heart is aware of the system of life, this is called dharma. Not going against dharma is following dharma. Following dharma is called Dharma High Wisdom. That will bring you joy, and then you can share your joy with other people. That is called Pure Kindness.

When you have joy and share it to help other people, and you can see the bright side of life, Pure Care will appear. When you can observe every different life and know how to care for them in a personalised way, then wisdom appears because every consciousness is in a different position, in a different blindness, and in a different Ego.

A bodhisattva who wants to share joy will find a different convenient way to teach life. That requires unlimited wisdom because there are unlimited life forms. To reach that level of wisdom, a bodhisattva lives a million lifetimes. Each lifetime they try to create joy and bring it to different planets and life forms. They transform the new wisdom into joy; this lets them learn different, unlimited, amazing wisdom from different planets with millions of different life forms.

Finally, wisdom comes full circle and the bodhisattva becomes Buddha. All of you are the seeds of Buddha. Your name, your physical body, your character is a temporary illusion that comes from many causes, but truly, you are the seeds of perfect spirits wisdom. To develop that wisdom, you have to understand what the perfect seed wants you to learn: don’t have any Ego.

If you purify the Ego, then your mirror will never get dusty.

• Dragon Warrior = no fear.
• Spiritual character = no worry.

You are already lost and think you are human, but the mirror has been covered by dust. You are spiritual seeds of spiritual consciousness. You have to awaken. When you are awakened and knowing your true self, then you are able to clean the dust from the mirror every day. You are not human.

I showed you how I can change my face to look like someone else, how my hand moves faster than your eyes can follow, how my body can change, so I’m not human right? But truly every human can do this if they learn how to control their energy.

In Tai Chi, you bring power from your foot, keep your shoulders relaxed, and rotation takes the energy into your fingers. Life has no limitations, but each limitation needs a lot of wisdom to overcome it. Why can my body disappear? Because every cell, every atom, is magic. My creation power is connected to the whole universe. If the universe can create transparent glass, then the body can create transparent glass. It can create freedom from tension, like a jelly fish. Every piece of the universe is magic.

From a talk on 30 October 2011.