http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/intro_bud.htm
The problem is that the “world out there” is constantly changing, everything is impermanent and it is impossible to make a permanent relationship with anything, at all.
http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/5minbud.htm
Buddhism teaches that the solutions to our problems are within ourselves not outside.
http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/intro_bud.htm
It is only when we completely abandon clinging that we feel any relief from our queasiness.
We suffer because we are constantly struggling to survive. We are constantly trying to prove our existence.
The harder we struggle to establish ourselves and our relationships, the more painful our experience becomes.
Our struggle to survive, our effort to prove ourselves and solidify our relationships is unnecessary.
We could just be a simple, direct and straight-forward person. We could form a simple relationship with our world, our coffee, spouse and friend. We do this by abandoning our expectations about how we think things should be.
We practice being mindful of all the things that we use to torture ourselves with. We become mindful by abandoning our expectations about the way we think things should be and, out of our mindfulness, we begin to develop awareness about the way things really are. We begin to develop the insight that things are really quite simple, that we can handle ourselves, and our relationships, very well as soon as we stop being so manipulative and complex.
“in the beginning” things were going along quite well. At some point, however, there was a loss of confidence in the way things were going. There was a kind of primordial panic which produced confusion about what was happening. Rather than acknowledging this loss of confidence, there was an identification with the panic and confusion. Ego began to form.
The first point is called right view — the right way to view the world. Wrong view occurs when we impose our expectations onto things; expectations about how we hope things will be, or about how we are afraid things might be. Right view occurs when we see things simply, as they are. It is an open and accommodating attitude. We abandon hope and fear and take joy in a simple straight-forward approach to life.
Right livelihood is the fifth step on the path. The truth is, that we should be glad of our job, whatever it is. We should form a simple relationship with it. We need to perform it properly, with attention to detail.
Actually, nirvana simply means cessation. It is the cessation of passion, aggression and ignorance; the cessation of the struggle to prove our existence to the world, to survive. We don’t have to struggle to survive after all. We have already survived. We survive now; the struggle was just an extra complication that we added to our lives because we had lost our confidence in the way things are. We no longer need to manipulate things as they are into things as we would like them to be.