The Confusion Around Suffering in Buddhism

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There's a common misunderstanding around the term suffering that I hope I clear up someplace in my app. The Pali term Duka is often translated as suffering, but the real meaning or the closer meaning is unsatisfactoryness. So sensory experience is unsatisfactory if for no other reason, then it's impermanent. And you're discovering more and more that consciousness has a an intrinsic character of freedom. As we'll talk about selflessness, that is, on some level, unperturbed by its contents and by changes.

Sam Harris returns to the podcast to talk about meditation and his new Waking Up meditation app. What are the goals of mindfulness practice - stress reduction and greater focus, or something much deeper? Can it cure David's existential dread? Tamler's fear of his daughter going away to college? Can sustained practice erode the illusion of self? Is that even something we'd want to do? What if it diminishes our attachment to people we love? And what is the self anyway? Is Sam a defender of panpsychism? So many questions... Plus, the ethics of creating talking elephants by curing them of their autism through bonding and possibly mounting. (Seriously.)

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