The cause of our emotional and spiritual problems, our pains and fears can be attributed to one thing (and it’s not the baby deer:). Now, before you get too excited waiting for the answer, I don’t have a magic cure that will eliminate all of your problems. But I can help you reduce this thing to a manageable level resulting in a much happier, peaceful life, but of course, you’ll need to do the work.
Pride, anger, sadness, grief, hate, jealously, envy, greed, sloth, lust and fear, are some of the emotional and spiritual pains that we experience. I could write pages on each of those negative states but for this topic I can be more general. I would imagine that most, if not all human beings have experienced all such states. We regularly experience varying degrees and frequency of some or all of these character conditions. But why do we experience such pains? What is it about us that causes us, some more than others, to possess these normal human traits?
Self…that’s the answer. Do you feel disappointed, enlightened or indifferent? Stay with me now because that is the answer, whether you want to hear it or not doesn’t change that simple fact. What is it that gets angry, sad, jealous, etc. and why? Try this experiment using every negative character trait or feeling listed above and any other one that you can think of, asking yourself this question: Why was I …(example: angry)? Plug in any negative feeling or trait that you have possessed and recall a time when you had the experience or maybe you’re experiencing one of them right now 
If you look honestly and keep this simple, you’ll see that all of these negative conditions can be attributed to our self-centeredness. It’s this self, our own personal interests, that causes us to experience such conditions, to be unhappy.
Simply put, when we do not get our way we upset. Whether it’s losing something or someone or not getting something that we want, we react with any number of negative character traits. Buddhism teaches Anata, or the absence of self, suggesting that this self is actually a manifestation of the mind, that it’s not real and that a root cause of our suffering is ignorance of this fact. This gets deep and could take years to comprehend so I will not go into it here but feel free to visit buddhanet.net as a source for unanswered questions and information about Buddhism.
I have yet to meet anyone without a sense of self. As a society, we actually have come to believe that having a strong sense of self is good. Although I understand what is implied by this and its benefits, having a strong sense of self can be detrimental to our well-being. So just how then do we feel good about ourselves while simultaneously letting go of this self that is the root of our internal troubles?
I will continue to specifically explore this topic in other posts. However, all of the posts on this site are dedicated to helping you achieve happy and contented lives and are thus all interconnected. I wrote a post called Letting Go that I would recommend reading. It deals with self-centered fear, perhaps the most significant of all character flaws in the sense that many of our other negative traits can be attributed to self-centered fear.
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