“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein

So day after day, lifetime after lifetime, and birth after birth, we repeat the cycles of birth, sickness, old age, and death. The four sufferings haunt us, and we try every strategy to eliminate them from our lives. If not our own sufferings we suffer the sickness and death of friends and loved ones. We suffer the attachment to things that are impermanent. We suffer the illusions that we are independent of the things that exist outside ourselves.

I like the phrase, “They are trying to stop suffering by suffering” from Chapter 2 in the Lotus Sutra. How easy it is to keep doing the easy thing, the thing that has not worked well for us in the past?

Buddhism requires us to change, to challenge, to delve deep into our innermost being to try to understand both what is good and beneficial for us and what keeps us from doing that very thing. As long as we keep ignoring the obvious, our suffering, our thinking that there is no other way, we will continue to suffer. Ignorance is one of the three poisons; ignorance traps us in a cycle of ignorance and suffering.