Review Ending unnecessary Suffering by Peter Ralston

[Natasha Tori Maru]

@Breakingthewall

When Ralston says that thought generates the suffering - you are tripping up a bit here.

He isn't placing blame on the person for generating the suffering - he is just pointing out that they are doing it and active in its cause.

There is no blaming or judgement. It is just the truth of the matter.

Do you think you are the one attributing blame to this fact, because (in your view) it makes the person responsible?

This is circumvented by Ralston also clearly pointing out people are unaware of this going on within them. There is no blame or responsibility - simply a lack of awareness. Ignorance only - with no negative connotations.

And he aims to bring this hidden process into the persons awareness - so they see they can prevent it happening. 

Thereby raising the consciousness of the person.

[Breakingthewall]

2 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

This is circumvented by Ralston also clearly pointing out people are unaware of this going on within them. There is no blame or responsibility - simply a lack of awareness. Ignorance only - with no negative connotations.

And he aims to bring this hidden process into the persons awareness - so they see they can prevent it happening. 

Thereby raising the consciousness of the person.

What I see is that the core of this idea seems logical and obvious, but it has a basic flaw. It's similar to the core of Dyer and Tolle's ideas. Let's see, he says that you create unnecessary suffering with your mental activity, remembering the past or fearing the future. If you become aware of how you do this, you'll realize you're sabotaging yourself and stop doing it.

The matter is not even remotely that simple, and I know this from experience. When you create constant mental suffering, you do so because the structure of your psyche is broken. You, as a psychic structure, emit a constant vibration, and that vibration can take the form of negative thoughts, anger, hatred, shame, etc. This is not because your consciousness is low or because you do this due to some processing error. It is because this is the manifestation of your structure, and you cannot stop doing it because you are that. It's extremely frustrating trying to stop doing it because it's impossible.

The only thing that works, and I speak from experience, is to profoundly and radically change your structure. This is brutal work that requires absolute deconstruction and a vision of what you are to the utmost depth, which must end in a true opening to your true, total nature. Anything else won't work. Addressing the symptom (the thought) as if it were the root doesn't work and is extremely frustrating. Hence my comment (a bit stupid, I admit).

Edited Thursday at 04:56 AM by Breakingthewall

[Breakingthewall]

7 hours ago, AION said:

@Breakingthewall you are constantly misinterpreting his work. It is getting tiring to constantly have to correct you. Obviously there is necessary suffering but his book is called ending unnecessary suffering (that one creates with unnecessary additions of the mind) 

That's fair, without reading the book any opinion is superficial. I admit that I get triggered by those ideas because I have been trapped in that paradigm, trying to stop suffering and it's impossible, the solution is deeper . But my opinion is just about short videos

[Natasha Tori Maru]

2 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

It's extremely frustrating trying to stop doing it because it's impossible.

I will point out - in your experience.

The only reason I say this is because Ralston's work triggered this realisation for me. It is true for me, in my experience. And I have reduced my own suffering substantially. I still do suffer - however this is due to more work within myself needing to be done to realise where the internal friction is.

8 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

The only thing that works, and I speak from experience, is to profoundly and radically change your structure. This is brutal work that requires absolute deconstruction and a vision of what you are to the utmost depth, which must end in a true opening to your true, unlimited nature. Anything else won't work. 

Well yes - Ralston is saying that the structure you have is causing suffering, and his work involves unravelling that structure (deconstructing). I think maybe there is something missing in understanding here. Perhaps just language terminology.

10 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

Addressing the symptom (the thought) as if it were the root doesn't work and is extremely frustrating. 

Ralston means the thought IS the 'structure' that you are elaborating on above. The thought doesn't cause the structure - it is the structure that needs to be pulled apart.

I actually think you agree with Ralston. Your terminology and metaphors differ is all

[AION]

You just have to change your thinking. Don’t make it a rocket science with structure of this or that. 

[Breakingthewall]

@Natasha Tori Maru

Imagine you're a woman who comes from a family of successful professionals, very focused on social status. During your childhood, your relationship with your parents was acceptable; they were demanding but not bad people. From childhood, you internalized that you should be accepted, fulfill your role, not be less than your siblings. Love? Well, I guess so, some. They do their best. 

You managed to live up to expectations, found a partner, a job as a lawyer, and had children. None of this really interested you much; the basis of your movement was not to be left behind. Do you love your children? Well, you think so. You try the best for them, although dealing with them was always tense. And your husband? Do you know him? You think so. He's a good person, he doesn't treat you badly. Everything is so strange, alienating. Sometimes you daydream about your family dying, and you immediately feel enormously guilty. Besides, what would you do? Alone, in middle age, sad. Sadness. Everything is strange, alien. You start having obsessive thoughts about your health and that of your children. You don't understand why, you don't understand anything. You go to the psychologist, you explain things, it helps you let go, but the sadness continues, and old age and death are right in front of you.

Then, are your thoughts the cause of your suffering, or a consequence of an energetic structure built in a whole life in contact with an environment that creates those structures? It's real, built in decades, layers and layers of structure. You must be, let's say determinate and smart to penetrate to the bottom and destroy it. Maybe you should be someone determined to conquer the reality. Unfortunately, the most probably is that woman wont be that , but there are medicines, and some videos about self help to have some illusion that you are creating your suffering, and if you stop thinking everything would be wonderful 

Edited Thursday at 12:03 PM by Breakingthewall

[Breakingthewall]

4 hours ago, AION said:

You just have to change your thinking. Don’t make it a rocket science with structure of this or that. 

Imo the thing is very simple, suffering arises because you are disconnected from yourself, from the truth, your real being, then you feel empty, and you try to fulfill that emptiness with anything, pleasure, ego, anything. As it's impossible from you anxious vibration arises in the form of thoughts. You are absolutely alienated, because the environment demanded it, was impossible another option.

The only solution is be connected, open to your true nature, but you have built a psychological structure from childhood that closes you in a bubble, then you have to break it, but it isn't simple because you built that structure because if was the most optimal possible. You are the flow of reality flowing and you shape yourself in the best way possible. Then, changing that structure is not a simple game at all, you need to open yourself to the real power of the reality and flow intuitively, change the information that is print in your cells. Then if you believe that it's something so simple as changing your mental activity, you won't break the surface , and do it is needed. The work is absolutely serious, you have to be a pioneer, absolutely determined to go beyond everything.

Edited Thursday at 12:43 PM by Breakingthewall

[Sugarcoat]

9 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

 

The matter is not even remotely that simple, and I know this from experience. When you create constant mental suffering, you do so because the structure of your psyche is broken. You, as a psychic structure, emit a constant vibration, and that vibration can take the form of negative thoughts, anger, hatred, shame, etc. This is not because your consciousness is low or because you do this due to some processing error. It is because this is the manifestation of your structure, and you cannot stop doing it because you are that. It's extremely frustrating trying to stop doing it because it's impossible.

The only thing that works, and I speak from experience, is to profoundly and radically change your structure. This is brutal work that requires absolute deconstruction and a vision of what you are to the utmost depth, which must end in a true opening to your true, total nature. Anything else won't work. Addressing the symptom (the thought) as if it were the root doesn't work and is extremely frustrating. Hence my comment (a bit stupid, I admit).

I second this. I had to literally dissolve layers to my psyche to overcome most mental suffering 

Edited Thursday at 01:47 PM by Sugarcoat

[Natasha Tori Maru]

11 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

Then, are your thoughts the cause of your suffering, or a consequence of an energetic structure built in a whole life in contact with an environment that creates those structures? It's real

It's not or - it's AND. 

In addition - it's not real. That's the story the thoughts are perpetuating. You call them 'energy structures'. These energy structures don't serve you - that's why you are trying to get rid of them.

It's the same as saying 'the thoughts don't serve you - get rid of them'

The part you haven't realised is that the thoughts aren't REAL. Because you generate them. They just seem real to you. To everyone.

A rock doesn't need to 'think' to be real.

A tree doesn't need to 'think' to be real.

And so on and so forth.

You and Ralston are saying the same thing.

Only it appears to me you think thoughts are real?

[Breakingthewall]

9 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

rock doesn't need to 'think' to be real.

A tree doesn't need to 'think' to be real.

A rock or a rose are different structures, a human another. "Thinking" is the same as a rock eroding or creating new molecular bonds due to pressure or whatever it does. Thinking is a manifestation of what you are. If you were terrified in Auschwitz,  later you don't perpetuate it with thoughts; it's in your cells. You are that energetic structure that reality has shaped. If you think you are the one who perpetuates it, you are referring to the ego, and the ego is the product, not the producer.

The point is that if your structure is closed, disconnected, is going to vibrate anxious, and this vibration is the thoughts. If you want stop suffering you have to open yourself as an structure, and it's not achieved stopping the thoughts, that's a kind of mental violence that just hide the depth of the closure

[Natasha Tori Maru]

1 minute ago, Breakingthewall said:

A rock or a rose are different structures, a human another. "Thinking" is the same as a rock eroding or creating new molecular bonds due to pressure or whatever it does. Thinking is a manifestation of what you are. If you were terrified in Auschwitz,  later you don't perpetuate it with thoughts; it's in your cells. You are that energetic structure that reality has shaped. If you think you are the one who perpetuates it, you are referring to the ego, and the ego is the product, not the producer.

The point is that if your structure is closed, disconnected, is going to vibrate anxious, and this vibration is the thoughts. If you want stop suffering you have to open yourself as an structure, and it's not achieved stopping the thoughts, that's a kind of mental violence that just hide the depth of the closure

We will never agree because consciousness is behind a rock. A tree. Consciousness is everything.

Thinking is different to a physical force - one is real. The other, thinking, is not.

Thought it not fundamental.

Oh well, you won't change your mind. Keep seeking.

c'est la vie

[Sugarcoat]

Just because something is internal doesn’t mean it’s your making. You might be identified with thoughts, the voice and the image, you identify as the thinker. But in the same way you are the breather, but you don’t control your breath as you go about your day, in same way you don’t control your thoughts when you go about your day. 
 

Stopping thought that arise with force is like a use of willpower. It’s possible to stop with will power, but the thoughts will keep arising with force over and over as long as you don’t resolve the deeper issue. Which is that your thoughts are arising secondary to your psyche, at the same time as your psyche contain your thoughts. You need to break down that aspect of your psyche related to the repetitive thoughts to stop them from arising, will power isn’t sustainable it’s a temporary solution for most. As long as the psyche is intact your thoughts will keep arising. By “your psyche” I also mean your sense of self

It’s possible to overcome suffering even if not 100% your own making. So don’t be afraid of recognizing that

[Breakingthewall]

3 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

We will never agree because consciousness is behind a rock. A tree. Consciousness is everything.

Thinking is different to a physical force - one is real. The other, thinking, is not.

Thought it not fundamental.

Oh well, you won't change your mind. Keep seeking.

c'est la vie

Even if your structure is made of consciousness, it's an structure. I mean, someone wants stop suffering. He doesn't mind if reality is conciousness, just stop being scared, disconnected, anxious. Then he should see his structure, understand what he is as structure, if the foundation is conciousness ok, but the suffering is there

[AION]

Ending suffering shouldn’t be the end all be all of things. The truth can cause a lot of suffering but it is a process that is worth while. I think you have it ass backwards. Suffering is just a force of nature. Of the psyche. A necessary part of the mat-rix. Not feeling suffering while you should feel suffering is where the real damage happens. People numb themselves with alcohol and drugs for this reason. 

[Breakingthewall]

1 hour ago, AION said:

Ending suffering shouldn’t be the end all be all of things. The truth can cause a lot of suffering but it is a process that is worth while. I think you have it ass backwards. Suffering is just a force of nature. Of the psyche. A necessary part of the mat-rix. Not feeling suffering while you should feel suffering is where the real damage happens. People numb themselves with alcohol and drugs for this reason. 

Yes, but we're talking about constant psychological suffering, not the specific suffering caused by a cause that compels you to resolve it. Permanent suffering is fundamentally the same, but it's very difficult to identify the cause because the cause is your structure. That is, suffering is an essential vibration of who you are and is constant 24/7, even if you don't always notice it. It's quite dramatic, but this is how most of humanity lives.

The cause of psychological suffering doesn't have to be severe trauma; it's a closed psychological structure. Severe trauma closes, but it's not the only cause. Nowadays, we tend toward functional structures, with minimal trauma but in need of validation, totally oriented toward the social as the supreme value. Partner, friends, place in society. This seems perfectly logical, but it's closed. You reflect on others but aren't open to your true nature. You constantly operate from a place of lack. And the most problematic thing is that there doesn't seem to be any problem. It's the ideal world, but enclosed in a capsule, so no one sees the mammoth in the room, and they believe the most logical hypothesis: you're generating suffering by thinking incorrectly. Learn to think correctly, and there will be no suffering. This is blindness to a level that is crazy. 

People today have more underlying mental suffering than a galley slave in the 15th century (just an exaggeration, but maybe not so) because are disconnected, being disconnected is being dead in life occurs when you shut down, when you stop living directly and create a bubble of self-image that is the inevitable garment of life in today's society. No one is spared, and the most paradoxical thing is that the best adapted and successful are the most alienated and hopeless, but are the example that everyone would like to be 

[Breakingthewall]

In the past, there were also closed structures, but they were more explicit, archetypal, and embodied: family, religion, tribe, duty. These were external structures that shaped the individual, but did not require a sophisticated psychological self-image. Suffering was direct, vital, evident: hunger, punishment, humiliation, slavery. But the subject was not divided into self-observing psychological layers; there was no alienated internal structure pretending to be free while living according to social reflection.

Today, however, the closure is internal, invisible, and voluntary. The subject believes itself free, self-defines, self-corrects, and ceaselessly constructs itself. It lives for its image, for its validation. It is a profound subjective alienation, harder to detect than the whip. It suffers in silence, without knowing why, and without the possibility of rebellion, because it does not see the oppressor: the oppressor is its entire structure.

 

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Be sure you aren't repressing thoughts.

Repressing =/= cessation

Repression = force

Which isn't good

Edited Friday at 09:12 AM by Natasha Tori Maru
Editing to add it is ending 'unnecessary' suffering, we seem to be forgetting this bit

[gettoefl]

13 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

In the past, there were also closed structures, but they were more explicit, archetypal, and embodied: family, religion, tribe, duty. These were external structures that shaped the individual, but did not require a sophisticated psychological self-image. Suffering was direct, vital, evident: hunger, punishment, humiliation, slavery. But the subject was not divided into self-observing psychological layers; there was no alienated internal structure pretending to be free while living according to social reflection.

Today, however, the closure is internal, invisible, and voluntary. The subject believes itself free, self-defines, self-corrects, and ceaselessly constructs itself. It lives for its image, for its validation. It is a profound subjective alienation, harder to detect than the whip. It suffers in silence, without knowing why, and without the possibility of rebellion, because it does not see the oppressor: the oppressor is its entire structure.

 

Previously the world tortured me. Now I torture me. More devilishly, I blame them as being the cause of my self-inflicted torture.

[Breakingthewall]

This doesn't mean that a current individual is "worse" than a tribal individual, but rather that they are in a phase of development that seems to be the goal, but they are still in embryo.

The problem is that the next step is very difficult to understand; it lies on terrain that almost no one will understand because it seems like a regression to religion, when in fact it is the final step of human development. First the tribe, direct life, then civilization with the external authority of religion as structural support, now technological civilization with the other as its ontological basis. But this is not the end; the level of suffering becomes increasingly evident. It is not the terrible suffering of war, but rather a dull, constant, and widespread suffering that pushes us to the final step: the opening to reality.

[Breakingthewall]

Just now, gettoefl said:

Previously the world tortured me. Now I torture me. More devilishly, I blame them as being the cause of my self-inflicted torture.

It's a phase, impossible to avoid. The only solution is to follow the flow, which now means moving toward true openness. We are part of the flow and the flow itself. Life can be seen as suffering if you see it as a static point, but if you perceive it as flow, it is an exciting movement, full of life