Suffer No More
Edited from the Gold Coast Talk 9 April 1995
What is enlightenment? Enlightenment is to be enlightened, thank God, from the dreadful feelings that sometimes are up and sometimes are down. Thinking feeds off feeling. Get rid of your feelings and the mind stops. So stop being true to your feelings.
When I get rid of my feelings my thoughts go and I’m natural again. Then I don’t need to know anything. In the state of enlightenment - the state of being free of feelings and thoughts - what do I need to know? Everything is. In the absence of my self - my thoughts and feelings - is the fullness of life, now.
It is such a beautiful place to be - still and silent in me. It’s sensational. Beauty and love are in this place, even behind the sensation. They become knowledge, which has no feeling in it whatever, and which disappears into a void of absence of anything and is so fulfilling that it cannot be described. It’s nothing. You don’t get anything in this place for yourself. It comes when you give up your self, which is your feelings and your thoughts. Nothing is happening in this place except the stillness and silence of being me, now.
But in the presence of your self - your thoughts and feelings - nothing is ever good enough, is it? No matter how happy you get, it’s going to be spoiled - by your self. Happiness always leads to unhappiness because the see-saw has to go up and has to go down. Each feeling has to have its day.
We teach our children to be true to their feelings instead of being true. If I’m not true to my thinking and my feelings, what am I true to? My own experience.
Does your experience teach you that you want to suffer? If you don’t want to suffer, then hold this with you every moment: ‘Do I want to suffer? Or not suffer, now?’ Then, as soon as you go with your feelings, as soon as you start to think, you’ll say, ‘No!’ - because thinking and feeling are the cause of suffering. If you haven’t learnt this, you will have to go on suffering. Isn’t that justice? Isn’t that what we’re here for? To learn what makes us suffer?
How to Change Your Life