A Skillful Morality

Hi.
Thanks for new thread and welcome. My time here has been so much fun, that I have been spending a little too much time on the forum! Context of moralityAlmost anything beings ever do, is run away from suffering and chase after whatever they THINK leads to happiness. Our real goal is eliminating suffering. We are not really interested in ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘the truth’. These are just things that we think will bring us happiness. The following rant explains the logic behind this.Suffering must be understood in all its forms and extension, if we really want to end it. I mentioned it in the other thread and I will copy/paste it here. Suffering extends into:-Physical: things like hunger, thirst, aging, death, disease, stress, our environment(cold, heat, sun, rain, snow), and the obvious ones like getting hit due to violence, or a car accident, work accident or a sport injury, etc.-Mental: like fear, hate, anger, distress, depression, grief, despair, sorrow, disappointment, anxiety, and many others.-Deep mental level basic unsatisfaction: the fact psychologists have come to, that we are always unsatisfied, we always want more. It is never enough love, friends, comfort, luxury, sex, anything we like. We are satisfied for a brief while, but after a little time, we want more, and if we can’t get it and haven’t developed patience, we start feeling the previously described mental and physical suffering.This is all we do in life. We spend our time in jobs to fight of hunger with food, the environment with a society and a house, disease (and sometimes stress!) with medicine/drugs. As for the mental ones, the typical human response is to ‘release it’ into the world around you. We use all types of activities to ‘let out’ our mental pain, our stress. In a party, listen to the voices that say fun on the surface but fear underneath. Feel the tension and the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. We fake all the time. Watch in the stadiums the irrational fits of anger and frustration surging from people, camouflaged under team spirit or enthusiam. Drunks and fights. Look closely, we let out our insatisfaction in many ways. I am presently in this forum releasing the tension of curiosity. It gets worse from here, because we think we feel unsatisfied because we don’t have enough things. We think that if we had more money we would be happy. Or if we had someone that really loves us. Or if I were 5% body fat I would be happy. Or a fancier car, or a yatch, or a castle, and so on. This is what has led us to materialism/consumerism. Buy yourself something, apply a coat of superficial optimism (maybe in the form of a god?) and go on repeating the cycle. Then we mistakenly believe we solved the problem, or a god will take care of the details.In this forum we are curious as to where our universe began. Why do we want to know that? Beats me! We just know we will get a pleseant feeling if we ever figure it out! Why do we want a pleseant feeling in the first place? Because we are uncomfortable with the tension caused by curiosity. We are suffering. If we were not suffering, we would stand pat with peace, not looking to get a plesesant feeling from satisfying our curiosity.
We don’t know if satisfying this specific curiosity will be everlasting or not either. MoralitySo, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ don’t exist. The things that our minds associate with giving us pleseant feelings are labeled ‘good’, and the things our minds associate with suffering are labeled ‘evil’. But nothing is inherently ‘good’ or ‘evil’, our minds just conceptualize things that way. What we are really after, is a pleasant feeling, one that is superior to all others, and that lasts forever. We don’t know if such a thing exists, but it is what we are all after. Anyone will agree if they care to look hard enough. We are not interested in the truth, or in right and wrong. Our minds just give us a pleseant feeling when we satisfy our desires. Our minds endlessly create new desires, we endlessly try to satisfy them. Over and over again. If we don’t satisfy them, we suffer. Our mind tricks us, just to get its pleseant feeling, it lasts for a little while and then goes for another. It does the same thing over and over, with food, sleep, comfort, shoes, clothes, sex, anything.In order to get the most pleseant feelings possible, and make them last as long as possible, it is necessary to understand two things:
1. That pleseant feelings depend much more on our mind and much less on things outside of us, and
2. The mind’s relation with the law of morality.1.
That most of the pleasure from comes within is easy to see. Take any experience. I will use sex for this example, but you can use any sensual pleasure (sensual pleasure= pleasure of the 6 senses: body, eyes, ears, nose, tongue or through the mind in the form of feelings, complex emotions, ideas, thoughts, opinions, etc.). Supose you could repeat a sexual experiment and keep all external variables exactly the same. The partner, the setting, the time, the duration, the position and variations, evertything but the state of your mind. Every time you repeat it, the experience of pleasure will differ. Sometimes it will be more pleasurable than others, sometimes it may even be bad sex. This is because your mental state affects the way you feel and percieve the experience. For example, if you are not good at sex or are very worried about something (will I please her?, how do I look?, etc), your experience won’t be as good as if you are good at sex, or are completely confident that you will please her, because worry does not feel good.
This extends to any aspect of experience. Two people can look at the same tree, and one can feel and percieve beauty, the other might feel hate instead, because he thinks about the time he fell from a tree because someone pushed him.2.
The mind’s relation with morality might be a little harder to see. The ‘law’ of morality is:Skillfull actions lead to ‘happiness’, unskillfull actions lead to suffering.Actions are skillfull based on the underlying motive or intention behind every action. If there is no volition, motive or intention, then you would not commit the action. There are also neutral actions that are neither moral or inmoral.
For simplicity, these underlying motives or roots can be classified into six, three of them I call unskillful - greed, aversion, and delusion/ignorance. Any action originating from these three is called unskillful, because they lead to suffering. The counterpart to these unskillful roots are the skillful ones. Instead of greed we are capable of non-greed (generosity, detachment, etc), instead of aversion we are capable of non-aversion (compassion, sympathy, gentleness, etc) and instead of deluded/ignorant we can be wise.
I say that delusion/ignorance lead to suffering, because the origin of suffering can be traced to our ignorance of what we are, the self-concept. From previous posts with a little editing:Every evil deed, every example of heartlessness in the world stems from this false sense of ‘me’ as being distinct from all else that is out there. We have separated ourselves from the universe, even though we are inherently connected to it in many ways. We need its air, water and food, we are tied emotionaly, mentally and we are connected to it through its law of morality. But we insist on ignoring this and decide ‘I’ have to get more for ‘me’. Just examine your own actions. Anything you have ever done, do or will do in the future, examine your feelings, perception, thought process and intention. You will find that every act that could be clasified into ‘evil’ or ‘wrong’ stems from either: greed, you desire something for you (it could be a mental or physical thing); or aversion, you wanting to keep away something you don’t like (again mental or physical). This may be hard to see for some and may require certain practice. But if there is no self that desires something or keep something away, there is no ‘evil’. It is actually simple.All the other types of suffering we experience (possibly excluding some of the physical ones like hunger, thirst, aging, environment) spawn from this.SO ANY ACTION THAT LEADS AWAY FROM DELUSION/IGNORANCE IS SKILLFULL.I hope that explains the context and the meaning of skillful and unskillful. If you wish I can further clarify how our skillful actions can lead away from this delusion/ignorance. I will write it another post. Opening the door for a blind man will be skillful or unskillful depending on the underlying motive. For example, if you do it because you are thinking it must be hard beeing blind, I want to help him it is skillful. If you do it because he is in your way and want him to hurry up so you can get on with doing what you have to do, it is unskillful. Or if you do it because you want people to see how good a person you are, that is unskillful (because you are reinforcing your ego-image, thus reinforcing the self-delusion/ignorance).
It may be unclear how opening the door for a blind man with the intention of greed leads to suffering. I can further clarify this also. Just tell me and I’ll write about it. No it does not. It depends entirely on your intention. Nothing exterior to you determines if it is skillful or not. You can do it with the best intentions, with great skill, and still get cursed by the blind man. But the blind man curses you because he is upset due to his own delusion, not because you did something wrong. Morality has an impersonal standard, it does not depend on the opinion of people. You are completely responsible for YOUR actions, happiness and suffering, and so is the blind man. You are not responsible for the blind man’s happiness or suffering. You have can have an effect on it obviously. But not the sole responsibility. You can only affect his suffering(positively or negatively), you cannot cause it. He causes his own suffering with his own delusion/ignorance, you only have a limited effect on this, and not the root cause. Remember that the self-concept is a tool we use to interact with our world. There is no ‘my’ suffering or ‘your’ suffering, there is only suffering. One is not more important than the other. To act you must choose priorities though. I guess this is what you refer to as weighing more; that is, which one do you prioritize?
It depends on the situation. There are too many variables. Let us imagine a situation. Someone is terribly suffering because of sickness and requires medicine. You are able to get the medicine for that person, but that requires an effort from your part. It requires your suffering. This may be as little as 5 minutes to carry your body to and from the pharmacy, and $5 for the medicine. In this case I think the other person’s suffering ‘outweighs’ mine. But if the medicine is worth $900 000, can only be obtained in a faraway land, and you are not a millionare, I think you can forget about helping that person with medicine, and focus your efforts on something else.

I think this particular way of viewing morality does not require 'faith' the way we normally interpret the word, which is blind faith. It only requires proper investigation and this 'faith' turns into knowledge. What I mean is that you can prove if this way of viewing morality is true or not in this life. You don't have to believe me, a holy book or a prophet, you don't have to die to find out if this is true. You just have to realize the investigation and confirm the results.

Hi RAZD, glad to be here. It differs very little. I have tried to mention things that I have proven with my own experience and therefore feel it is my opinion. And there are probably certain things I have written that buddhists might disagree with. Also Buddhism mentions some things that I have not proven or I don't yet believe (like Nibbana), so I have not mentioned them.Your quote mentions that buddhism leaves many things unexplained. That is true. Buddhism teaches only the end of suffering in all its forms, nothing more, nothing less. It does not claim to hold the answer to everything. But I think the only thing that really interests us is the end of suffering. Trying to figure the answer to everything is a really fun game that I love playing, has had a great impact on my life and also is precisely what led me to buddhism; but it is a game based on suffering if you look closely. Knowing about suffering and its end only makes everything else more fun, like looking for the answer to where our universe started.You could consider my point of view as my personal interpretation of buddhism, and hope discussing it here in the forum will help me find other things about buddhism that I don't believe or disagree with! Referring to the Eightfold Path factors, I say Right 'Intention' instead of Right 'Thought'. That way it is easier to see that skillful/unskillful is discussed under that path factor.
The 'Right' word here is used as an adjective to imply that a specific type of View, Intention, Speech, Concentration, Mindfulness, etc is needed, in contrast to ordinary concentration, mindfulness, action, effort, livelihood, etc. So the word 'Right' here is not used in a moral sense. First I want to clarify that neither we nor morality 'judge' behavior. There is only a corresponding 'response' to a certain 'stimuli', la action-reaction in Newtons' physics or cause-effect.Secondly, this is obviously my speculation, because I have no experience as an animal (or maybe I just don't remeber it?). But I believe they are judged on the little cognitive ability that they do have. They have volition, will, intention in some of their actions, it is what gives dogs their 'personality' for example. They have certain intelligence that they use to make decisions for some actions. Not all of them because many of them are instictive, but some. They are 'judged' on those. Like I said, in morality there is no 'judging', it is more like cause-effect. So yes, we could use 'effective' instead of 'skillful'. 'Skillful' referrs to having skill to get the desired 'effect'.

No problem.
I hope I'll still be here when you are back, if not morality certainly will!

I'm trying to give my interpretation of morality. I tried to give the context and explanation in message 3, in the parts with bold letters that says 'Context of Morality' and 'Morality'.Morality is defined in the dictionary as the distinction of right and wrong. My view is that this definition is flawed because there is no absolute right and wrong, it all depends on the situation at hand. Situations have so many variables that to know what action is 'right' requieres a lot of skill.

I agree with Dr Adequate here.
Only in my case it is no longer a 'belief'. After 3 years of practice I'm very close to being convinced this is how things work. I'm actually worried that I'm going crazy here, so I joined this forum to disscus my view and have you guys help me find flaws in my reasoning.

You are very welcome for the explanation, I'm lovin' this. I agree with all of this. I cannot say what other people have for motivation, but I can know my motivation, and I am still human last time I checked.
I have tirelessly looked within my mind, tried to trace the motivation of my actions, all of them, and have been unable to find a flaw in this reasoning, or a case were this reasoning does not apply. Help me find it! Nothing wrong with that. If your real goal is not to eliminate suffering, then you are not interested in morality. No problem here. Then we would be wise to act skillfully going about our investigation, if we want to get the maximum possible pleasure out of it. We can act unskillfully also. It is our choice. For example, unskillfully would be strongly desiring finding out the ‘truth’. Unskillful because if we take too long to find out we get anxious, or if we fail, we endure great suffering (we get dissapointed, for starters). I totally agree with this. This point of view is only a possibility. Like I have said there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. I am not saying this the correct way to view morality or that I know ‘what is happening’. I do think that if you want to get the most out of life, this is the best way to view it. You can choose to view things this way and get really happy, or you cannot not. It is only a choice, a possibility. As I said, it is a choice. I personally find it best to TRY to know all of my motivations, all of the time. I am more than willing to explain how knowing my motivations impacts my happiness. I also agree. Nobody should care what my motivations are, nor should I care about the motivations of other people. It is not my problem, and has a very limited effect on my experience of happiness/suffering. Because if he were not using his mind to think in terms of ‘me’ being different from the rest of the universe, he would not get upset. He is still thinking in terms of ‘me’ as being different from the rest of the universe, thus he is ‘deluded’.
If the blind man has only one joy in life, he is not using his mind skillfully (there are many enjoyable things in life, you just need to skillfully use your mind as a tool to experience them).
If the blind man’s favourite thing is figuring things out for himself, there might be nothing wrong with that. This does not imply that he will get upset if I open the door for him.If he does get upset, it is because he has failed to understand that he is part of the physical universe. The physical universe is what it is. His mind would like the power to control me and make me not open the door for him, but our minds don’t have the power to influence physical objects by sheer will yet, so he gets upset.As long as he has a body, he will have to deal with aging, cold, heat, insects, annoying people such as me, etc. because his body cannot exist apart from the universe, because it needs air, water, food, energy. At the same time the things needed by the body depend on many other factors. Air and water would not be here without atmosphere and gravity. The food needed by the body is a great example, because, maybe I am the farmer that grows the food on which the blind man lives. He would not be at the door if not for me, in this case.
He got upset because he was not skillfull enough to understand that he cannot take me, the annoying person that opened the door for him and separate me from the universe, and keep the rest of the universe for himself. We are all part of the same thing, the universe. We are merely dependent on the physical universe, and cannot control it with the will of the mind. Recently in human history we have aquired a lot of skill and greatly influence the physical world around us, but we need technology and other things. We don’t influence it by just the will of the mind. He in his mind wanted to separate me from his experience of the universe. But we have no power over that. The universe is what it is. He fails to understand this, thus gets upset. Not because I opened a door.
Furthermore, even if I don’t open the door for him, and then he fails at opening it, he still suffers because of his delusion. He may in this case feel low self-colfidence instead of upset, but the reason for his suffering stays the same. He is under the delusion that he needs to open a door to feel self-confident. I never said that opening the door for him is always skillful, I said it depends on your intention behind the act. I said:
if you do it because you are thinking it must be hard beeing blind, I want to help him it is skillful.If you then see the blind man all the time like you say, and you have the same intention everytime you see him - that is, the intention of helping him out because you try to relate to his pain and feel generosity in response to this — then it would be wise of you to ask him how you can help him. Then he might tell you how he feels about the whole thing, and maybe ask you to hold his cane while he tries to open the door by himself. See the previous two paragraphs. Yeah, it cannot be determined by the actions, but it can be determined by the intentions behind the actions. The specific results of actions depend on a multitude of factors, even when you reduce it to a specific individual. In this case, the individual is only one of the factors that affected the result of the action, thus it would be impossible to determine an individual as totally responsible for the result of any action. Yes this is clearly true, but I think that not only humans, but all beings that suffer have this same common factor of chasing after what we think leads us to happiness and run away from suffering without truly facing it. And I think the same solution applies to all beings. It is like the correct medicine for a specific disease. We all have different thoughts, feelings and thought processes about it, but it holds common that we will feel better by following morality. It is like Newtons’ action-reaction. We hit a wall with our fist. The wall hits us back with the same force, opposite direction. Different people will have different experiences of pain in the fist, different feelings, thoughts, etc., but we all get the same force we gave to the wall, opposite direction.

I think that first we have to believe out of faith in this moral system and then figure out with our investigation if what we believed was true or not. But that faith is based on reasoning and not blind faith, so it is more like confidence than faith.

Not an absolute moral standard. This standard only applies if you are looking for a way out of suffering and want more happiness. I agree, there are no simple set of rules. But there is an intelligible system, a system we can interpret and understand how it works. We can then use this knowledge to make ourselves happy or miserable. It is up to us.

Yeah! That's exactly it, call assholes novices! First, I bet that when you are in the midst of the act of stealing, you are not happy. You are probably anxious, worried, or at least tense looking out for not being caught. Right there you are suffering, thus, inmoral.
Let us assume that you are happy before, during and after the steal.This stealing is still inmoral, because it leads to your suffering in a subtle way. You are acting in a way that reinforces the self-image or self-concept. Put simply you are thinking in terms of 'me' and the rest of the universe.I will copy/paste an explanation from a previous post: Whatever you make your mind pursue with your thinking and pondering, with your actions, that becomes the inclination of your heart.
For example, if we keep pursuing thinking imbued with lust, our mind is bent by that thinking imbued with lust. This in turn has an effect on our body and our awareness. If you spend all day watching porn you, later that day you will have more probability (various factors go into your view of things) to look at things in a sexual way, to get a boner easier and when its time to see your wife, you will have a better probability of having a really good time. The same with other things. If I’m depressed its because my mind is inclined to constantly thinking about things that make me feel remorse, sad, sorrow, etc. This could be due to many things. A chemical imbalance in the brain is what psychiatrists check for. Or it could be due to a traumatizing event (the death of a son), pessimism, or a wrong point of view of the world. These are unskillfull uses of thought, because you are hurting yourself and others.
The same can be done in the other ‘direction’. You can incline the awareness of your mind skillfully toward generosity, compassion, etc. THIS IS NOT DONE BY SHEER WILL THOUGH. What is necessary is wisdom.If you constantly steal, you will be prone to steal, to get greedy, to stop considering other beings, to think in terms of me!, me!, me! This type of thinking leads to your suffering in many ways. When you are in an egotistical state of mind like this, your mind thinks only in your interests. It will have a harder time considering situations from different points of view. You get upset and angry when you don't get what you expected, you believe you deserve more, have less patience, etc. This anger and impatience then cause even greater suffering for you and others.If you only stole from Wal-Mart once, and it was a dire situation that lead you to it, the moral consequences of your steal will probably be small. Your mind has gotten little conditioning, or little practice in being greedy.
If you constantly steal (constantly keep your mind in egotistical mind set) the moral consequences of stealing from Wal-Mart, even if hurting nobody, may be great. You will cause yourself great suffering, and in the future, a lot of other people.
The more you steal, the more your mind practices greed. If you pratice greed a lot, you will have an easier time in becoming a greedy person (more suffering for everybody, yay!)
Besides, stealing repeatedly gives more opportunity to being caught, something going wrong, somebody getting hurt.

I disagree. I can steal something and not feel cheap and nasty. I can also steal something and not become a bigger thief.I tried to explain in message 21 how you generate future suffering from this particular action. It is a matter of conditioning your mind. If you steal once, you probably won't notice the suffering you are causing for yourself. Because its effect is really small, negligible almost, happens at a later time in your life, and many other factors go into it.
The suffering involved here is difficult to see. It requires you to have a certain understanding of how your mind works. I have tried my best to explain how the mind works in this particular scenario, as I said, in Message 21. I would like your opinion on it.

The only relation between the skillful/unskillful thing and the dictionary definition of morality stems from the fact that the actions I call skillful are generally percieved as 'good' and the 'unskillful' generally perceived as 'evil'. So I could agree with this.

It is possible to not feel bad about the stealing. In fact some people don't even feel bad about killing. We call them psycopaths.But psycopath or not, the action is still inmoral. Reinforcing your self-image might not make you unhappy directly. It is too subtle for you to notice, because you have not developed mental awareness. But if you notice it or not, it still has a negative effect on your mind ('negative' if you are aiming for happiness). This effect is hard to see and requieres a certain understanding of how your mind works. It requires you to develop mental awareness.Using your mind to think in terms of a self-image is the cause of all your suffering. This is hard to see, but not impossible. If you look closely, develop skill in using the right tools to investigate your own mind, you can see it for yourself. No blind belief necessary.The self-concept is a tool we use to interact with the world. It is a frame of reference. You define 'me' and 'the world', and based on these concepts fabricate the rest of your mental experience. This means all emotions (pleasure and suffering and all complex human emotions), ideas, opinions, almost everything in the mental part of experience, is fabricated by your mind. This fabrication is based on the self-concept. We have little control over the fabrication process. The self-concept is a really useful way of using our mind. It has led us to all the human knowledge we have aquired. But is has the drawback of involving certain types of suffering. This way of using our mind is based on conceptual thought.
This is not the only way we can use our mind. The mind functions in many other ways. One of them happens always before the conceptual thought process. It happens so fast, we are not able to see it with our normal everyday awareness. Our thinking is a process. There is mental activity before conceptual thought. There are techniques that allow you develop certain skill in using or prolonging this part of our thought process. We can then use this ability to interpret experience without the concept of 'me' and 'the rest of the world'. We then use both (conceptual and pre-conceptual thought) to function in our lives. We 'choose' which type of thinking to use, depending on the situation at hand. We can then choose to experience the suffering involved with self-concept, or not. Integrating this non-conceptual thought into your everyday life is really hard, because throughout our entire lives our mind has been conditioned to function only in 'concept mode'. It takes a lot of practice to integrate this pre-conceptual mental function into your everyday life, and is what advanced monks dedicate themselves to, and we have stereotyped these people as living in caves and moving at a snails pace, etc.
By the way, I live a 'normal' life, probably much like yours, and still practice these techniques. Abandoning all your possesions and becoming a monk are not necessary to this practice, those are just training conditions to speed up progress.
In terms of buddhism and the Eightfold Path, this function of the mind is the 'Right Mindfulness' path factor.Before you counter with: 'all minds are different and you can't know how mine works', consider this analogy:
Your muscles are different from mine. They are a different size, shape, color, texture, taste, they probably smell different and make different sounds if you strike them. But I can tell you that if you exercise with the right technique, rest plenty, and feed yourself appropriately your muscles will get stronger.
And so it is with the mind. You can train it this way, and obtain greater happiness for yourself. The problem is people are lazy and don't like to train. They prefer to make up excuses, or get distracted with things that will not make them nearly as happy as training the mind...Edited by Sombra, : Changed 'funtion' to 'funtion'Edited by Sombra, : No reason given.

I finally understood where our confusion comes from! Your question is not how the suffering is created by the theft, or why you can't feel it, or how to solve it. Your question is:
If I can't feel the suffering I create with this specific steal, why should I care?
The answer is:
As said previously, this moral system is not an absolute standard, it only applies if you want to eliminate suffering from your life. If that is not your goal, then you are right, you shouldn't care about the suffering created with the pilfer.
I use morality in this sense because it is fruitless to define it in terms of right and wrong. The reason for this is given in the explanation of how we create our suffering I had already written before I realized where our confusion came from. And I think it will be useful for future arguments to keep it part of this message so here it is anyways: Ok, I'll try to make it clearer.Definition: Any action that leads to suffering is inmoral.In order to steal, you must create a 'me'. If you create a 'me', you necessarily create suffering.
=> Stealing is inmoral.Why does stealing imply the creation of a 'me'? When I steal, I necessarily use the 'me' concept. 'I' am going to take something from 'the world' {Wal-Mart} and make it a part of 'me'. Without these concepts you can't steal.Why does creating a 'me' imply the creation of suffering? I will try to explain in a different manner than last time:Almost everything we experience in this life is a fabrication of our mind. Our mind simultaneously creates and perceives our experience in this life. This fabrication occurs in an instant, and our mind does it constantly, thousands of times per second. Not everything in the world is mind created obviously. For example, we did not create the physical objects (stars, planets, other beings and their actions, etc.). But almost everything else is fabricated by the mind. This means all your emotions are fabricated. All your suffering is fabricated by you. I will try to explain how everything is fabricated, including suffering. It goes something like this:
Your mind receives a stimulus from one of the five sensory organs. Let's say the eye perceives a form. Lets say this form in question is what we, using conceptual thought, call a dog. Parting from this your mind then uses conceptual thought, it defines 'me', 'the world', 'the dog' and determines if the percieved 'dog' is part of 'me' or 'the world'. If it classifies it as 'my dog,' then the mind creates specific set of feelings, thoughts, and many other things (creates an experience) around this percieved form. If the mind classifies the 'dog' as not mine, it creates a different set of feelings, thoughts, etc.
The eye not only the perceives the 'dog' obviously, it perceives many other things, like what the dog is standing on and everything around. The mind goes into this process of defining me, mine and the world with every form that you percieve and proceed to conceptualize. And it does it simultaneously.
The mind, also simultaneously, is receiving numerous stimuli from the ear, the nose, the body, the tongue. Not only that, it is also simultaneously perceiving things with the mind, like all the concepts and thoughts it has fabricated, memories and future plans, any mental item you make the object of your attention with conscious, willed thought, and any other thing. And it goes into this 'me, mine, world' process with each and everyone of those things. And on goes the cycle. All of these fabrication processes are conditioned. They depend and are affected by the factors that go into it. That is why everything in our mental realm is very unstable and constantly changing. This is analogous to our experience of the physical world around us, which is also composed of processes that are affected by many factors, and is constantly changing.
This is what makes up your experience of life. Suffering is just created as a byproduct of this. All types of mental suffering depend on you creating a 'me' and 'the world'. For example, if somebody hurts the dog we were talking about, and the mind had classified it as my dog, I probably feel certain suffering, and if it didn't perceive it as my dog, there may be no suffering, or there is less of it. If you do not create the concepts of 'me', 'mine' & 'the world' then it is impossible for mental suffering to arise.In summary, in order to steal, you must create a 'me'. If you create a 'me', you necessarily create suffering.
=>Stealing is inmoralP.S. The concepts of "right" and "wrong" we are accustomed to are also fabricated based on the 'me' concept. This implies that morality is conditioned by the 'me' concept. Like I said the 'me' process occurs many times each second. We are constantly doing it and is itself dependent on many factors, and therefore constantly changing. Since morality is dependent on the 'me' process, and this is always changing, our vision of morality is also always changing. Because of this same reason, every person has a different vision of morality, unless we use the proposed objective standard.P.P.S.You are already suffering before you steal, because desire is a form of suffering.Edited by Sombra, : See first paragraph!

Hi Prototypical Yes I understand this. I described a way to end mental suffering, not the physical pain of hunger, thirst, etc.
I obviously have not proven the following, but sort of understand how it could be possible:
Buddhism claims to know how we can end all suffering, including the physical one. It says that we are human and have a human body because of our actions. This means that we are responsible for putting ourselves in a position to receive physical pain, so it did begin with you, and you can end it.
I can maybe agree with this claim if I view it like this:
Like I said before what we call a 'me' is a process we are constantly doing, and it requires a body (a physical part) and mind (a 'mental' part).
If I die, the mind loses its body. The mind is capable of perceiving many things, some we don't even know yet. Even without a body the mind still exists and perceives, etc. (just as the body still exists without the mind, while we are unconscious). And as I have said, our mind is conditioned. If all my life I have used my mind to think in terms of 'me', then the mind will have lost its frame of reference with which it interprets everything it perceives, and is therefore now lost. It is in a 'limbo', because it no longer has a body, and to solve this problem will desperately look for a way to interpret the world. Since my mind only knows how to interpret the world using a 'me' concept, it will desperately look for a new body. Once it finds one, a new life experience begins for me. So I have effectively created more physical suffering for myself.
On the other hand, if I have trained my mind to function in this life and world without the 'me' concept, when my mind loses its body, it will know how to interpret the things it percieves without a body, and will not be lost. It will not have to desperately look for a body to find its way. If your mind knows how to interpret all the stimuli it receives without a body, then it has no need for a body. Therefore 'you' will no longer have a body, and experiencing physical pain becomes impossible. Yes I agree. The 'me' concept is a really useful tool. It has led us to incredible material progress. It has also led us to many nice things like all the nice human emotions created from it like love, etc.
I have not said in any moment that we should completely abandon this way of thinking, I just said we have overemphasized it.Edited by Sombra, : Added the analogy of the body existing without the mind while unconscious