Focusing on the core

"The whole buddhist teaching is based on a natural juxtaposition. We all want to be happy and we don't want to suffer. The inconvenience that we are trying to avoid results mostly from the mind, of the attitudes. Because the source of mental sufferings are feelings that turns against oneself either directly or indirectly, one have to think how to find opposite powers to them.

If for example hatred causes suffering, one should find a counterbalance. Even though hatred and love/compassion are both awarenesses, they are the opposite ways to react to the same human being or a thing. They are the the contrary of each other when they come true.

In the same way you cannot lower the temperate of a hot room by diminishing the hotness but to bring coolness in there instead. Exactly as heat and coldness invalidate each other, so do the opposite states of mind, pure and impure. When one cultivates one of them, the other withdraws. That is why it is possible to change the wrong states of mind. There is an antidote."

by Dalai Lama from the book "How To Practice"

This is my own translation from Finnish, so I apologize if the language is not very smooth. But I hope you get the point. Rising above.

In this shot there is a macro of a purple poppy. I took this photo in Maija's and Paavo's allotment garden.

My Internet exhbition "Moments in Helsinki" has been published.