... Rather than seek God, Gotama suggested that you turn your attention to what is most far from God, the anguish and pain of life on this earth. In a contingent world, change and suffering are inevitable... To embrace the contingency of one's life is to embrace one's fate as an ephemeral but sentient being... one can come to love that fate. But to do so one must first embrace it, though one instinctively recoils at such a prospect. To steady one's gaze on the finitude, contingency, and anguish of one's existence is not easy: it requires mindfulness and concentration. One needs to make a conscious shift from delight in a fixed place to awareness of a contingent ground. Places to which I am instinctively attracted are places where I imagine suffering to be absent. 'There,' I think, 'if only I could get there, then I would suffer no more.' The groundless ground of contingency, however, holds out no such hope. For this is the ground where you are born and die, get sick and grow old, are disappointed and frustrated.

To fully know suffering goes against the grain of what I am primed to desire. Yet a contingent, impermanent world does not exist in order to gratify my desires. It cannot provide the non-contingent, permanent well-being I crave...

The aim of mindfulness is to know suffering fully. It entails paying calm, unflinching attention... To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love."

~ Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, Spiegel & Grau, 2010

Photo: Cal Vornberger, Muskrat Feeding, Jamaica Bay, Queens, New York, 2006