It would be a mistake to attempt to block out suffering or create mental distance from suffering. In fact this is the opposite of what I have experienced and come to understand. Trying to do so will most likely simply cause more suffering. What I’ve come to understand quite simply amounts to an embracing of the totality of existence. Opening up to all things.
As individual human beings in a sense we tend to be highly centralized on ourselves, fixated and almost entirely caught up by whatever is going on at the moment. By being caught up all the time we lose valuable perspective in regards to what is important, what we should expend our energy on and lose a sense of joy and wonder in regards to life. That said, self-centralization is understandable since whenever something happened in the experience of our lives there we were. Our sense of ‘I’ feels as if it has always been with each of us, for as long as we can remember.
