This book begins with a simple observation: many of the ways we use to reduce suffering reproduce that very suffering along another path.
Suffering appears, a response suppresses it, and that same response—through repetition—becomes a stable pattern. What is called relief at one point returns elsewhere in a new form of suffering. This movement does not occur only at the level of the individual. It repeats itself in the body, in relationships, in systems of meaning, in politics, and even at the scale of the shared living world.
This book follows the movement of that pattern. Not to offer a prescription for liberation from suffering, but to see the mechanism that often remains hidden within immediate reactions.