“The first step on our way to transcending dukkha is to recognize the fact that we’ve got it. Not everybody is willing to do that, not everybody is willing to admit that there is Dukkha in their lives.
One of our most popular pass times is to blame somebody else for it. It’s due to the partner, the children, the weather, the government, the Americans, the job, the boss, you name it, anything will do, and the mind justifies that.
If we get stuck in that, blaming someone or something else outside of ourselves for our dukkha, we haven’t got a spiritual path. In fact, we can just as well forget about meditation. Meditation has to be embedded in spiritual living.This means one gives up one’s thinking about external matters and finds the truth within oneself.
If we are still concerned with blaming something else outside of ourselves for our Dukkha, that needs to be a contemplation.That contemplation can be extremely enlightening, because the question is, why am I blaming this or that for my Dukkha? because the answer will be, “because I don’t like it the way it is, and that’s exactly what Dukkha is, I don’t like things the way they are, I want them different, that is how our dukkha arises. This is the first and second Noble Truths.
Now accepting things the way they are, doesn’t mean that we can’t discriminate. It doesn’t mean that we are bereft of discrimination between good and evil, it would be dreadful, we wouldn’t be able to keep our precepts, but we refrain from blaming anything that happens for our own unhappiness. We see that our unhappiness is caused by ourselves, because of dissatisfaction with the way things are.”