SELF-CREATED SUFFERING

Favorite quotes:

1.From Invisible Cinema's blog:
http://invisiblecinema.typepad.com/invisible_cinema/2009/07/the-mindful-blogger.html

" "There's an old, old story drawn from the sutras, in which the Buddha compared the futility of looking for the causes and conditions that give rise to certain thoughts to a soldier who'd been shot by a poisoned arrow on the battlefield. The doctor comes to remove the arrow, but the soldier says, 'Wait, before you pull out the arrow, I need to know the name of the person who shot me, the village he came from, and the names of his parents and grandparents. I also need to know what kind of wood the arrow is made from, the nature of the material the point is made of, and the type of bird that the feathers attached to the arrow were taken from . . . ' on and on . . . By the time the doctor had investigated all these questions and returned with answers, the soldier would be dead. This is an example of self-created suffering, the kind of intellectual overlay that inhibits us from dealing with painful situations simply and directly."
-- Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Joyful Wisdom"


2.From Lucrecia Martel's interview by Amy Taubin in Film Comment's website:
http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/ja09/martel.htm

" Actually, I believe that this mechanism is constantly at work. It’s a mechanism whereby even in the most basic social interactions people tend to deny responsibility. Instead they attribute whatever happens to an entire social class or to the nature of things, so that they can ignore the suffering of others. They tend to say that’s the way things are, that’s the way history has made it, that’s the way the laws of nature have made it. That way of avoiding social responsibility makes us less interesting as human beings. Why is it that in our day and age, we have this belief that there’s nothing we can do at an individual level to change things? Why is there so much fear of taking individual responsibility for larger-scale problems? I don’t understand that. I believe that’s really the evil of our times, it’s the main problem of our times."

Thanks to Merveillesxx for telling me about this.


3.From an article on Raya Martin by Alexis A. Tioseco in Cinema Scope's website:
http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs39/spot_tioseco_alexis.html

" Faced with a population inundated daily with the misery of reality—from television, newspapers and neighbours, to what one sees on the streets on one’s daily commute—the challenge of a socially committed artist is to make their viewer feel, with a renewed intensity, what surrounds them. Two valid propositions for today’s filmmaker: to encourage a greater understanding of what is by examining in detail its context (as in the work of Lav Diaz) or to encourage thoughts of what can be by appealing to the imagination (as in the work Raya Martin)"