Suffering motivates us to seek spiritual answers?

hermitwin

In my personal experience,it was definitely the case. The greater yhe suffering, the greater the search for alternatives. What do you guys think?

taiyaki

Yup. Suffering in all aspects. For instance the Buddha had everything, he had all the money, all the girls, all the fame, everything material you can possibly have he had. Yet he was dissatisfied. He had all this but he learned about death. About how things don't last forever. Thus the Buddha began his search for the truth to all this.

I have a theory that it takes a lot of external seeking (consumer materialism) to really realize how unsatisfying it is. A poor person may want riches in his/her life because they've never had riches. But a rich person may see that his/her life is still dissatisfying even with the riches. So in an affluent society, you may see more people seeking spirituality.

This isn't always the case and there a lot of people who have no money and seek spirituality.
But from my experience, being born in an affluent consumer capitalist society, seeking the external brought me back to the internal.

Cloud

IMHO, this is exactly the case. Not-knowing leads us to places like religion; suffering leads us to ways we might alleviate that suffering, including Buddhism.

federica

In my case I found I was doing my level best to convince myself I'd already found the solution. Then my mother sent me a book on Buddhism - and I discovered I hadn't.