Jonas’s Reviews > Secular Buddhism: Eastern Thought for Western Minds > Status Update

There are three important reasons we fall victim to self-inflicted suffering: ignorance, desire, and aversion. In Buddhist teachings these are known as the three poisons.

If we want to be happy. we need to become free from our habitual reactivity and stop trying to change reality into anything other than what it is.

“Who knows what is good and what is bad?

I love this story because it teaches us a valuable lesson about the dangers of assigning meaning. This story isn't about emotions. I have no doubt that the old man was excited when the horse showed up and probably sad when it left and definitely sad when his son broke his leg, what's important here is that he was careful to not assign inherent meaning to these events.”

Life as a game of Tetris. "Wisdom is nothing more than the attitude of adaptability."

1: “Faith is trusting the unknown and unknowable aspects of our reality while at the same time questioning the story we've created. I don't know if this guy is a jerk or if he's having a medical emergency, but that's okay. I can choose to just be with this event and let it be what it is. (…)”

31: Ref. Plato’s cave: We must strive to experience reality as it is for ourselves so that we can have an experiential understanding of this reality, rather than just a conceptual understanding of it.

35: Freedom from habitual reactivity. Ref Viktor Frankl.