Suffering from the attachment to desires is no more than a mind game. Being deceived by avidya is likewise a mind game. When I suggest the causes of suffering – desire and ignorance – are ‘mind games’ I mean that in the sense that the whole issue is in the mind.
The problem is in the mind. If the mind can be tricked into revealing that it is it’s own worst problem it can solve itself. Solve as in: dispatch with the problem as well as the mind. For the issue of suffering, either from the transiency of desires fulfilled or from being unable to discriminate between what is real and what is not, has its root in the mind.
The problem of suffering and consequently how to end suffering is a non-problem if there is no mind to pose it. There would have been no suffering from desiring more and more sense gratification. There would have been no taking the unreal to be really real. The suffering only arises when the mind “thinks it is a thinker” (thanks Miriam L.) and objectifies an object it, the subject, wants or does not want. Suffering from ignorance only becomes an issue for a mind who takes itself to be a separate, autonomous entity, who beliefs the manifest world is real, lasting and concrete.
So I suggest playing the mind as if it were a game. A mind game that is. Within this game is the cosmos, the body, the senses, and of course the mind itself! If you can investigate and discover who the “I” is in the mind, who’s the actor, and the knower, or the doer, you can effectually undo the mind and solve the riddle of ‘you’ as a separate suffering individual. Solving this riddle means the mind falls away along with its body and the entire cosmos. The house made of cards comes crashing down.
All that is left is Being, the Awareness that nurtured and cared for the mind that took itself to be a person. So end suffering by shedding the light of jnana upon the dark places in the mind and break the attachment to the desires that create mind and clinging to the satisfaction of those desires. Without desire there is no personal entity you. Without ignorance there is no delusion. There is only Aware-Beingness.
“Desire is a trap, desirelessness is Moksha, desire is the creator, desire is the destroyer.”
