Reddit reviews The Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha (Oxford World's Classics)

You have overlooked the only person who can help you; it's you. You are intelligent and perceptive and most assuredly sentient. You are a piece of the universe that can see itself. Through you, the universe can become self aware. This incredible experience is your birthright. Self-loathing is a very narrow-minded stance to take for a being in such a position. You are able to escape from your box and claim all that is yours, and it is spectacular beyond reckoning. Nothing can stop you except yourself.

Your state of mind is not something you should entrust to other people because you have no power over them and how they behave. You do, however, have power over your own mind, so clearly, this is the place to start.

I suggest you save yourself by allowing your mind to travel in a direction that is so fantastic and overwhelming that your attention will automatically change its focus from your family and all of their demoralizing troubles to something much greater and interesting: the search for the Big Picture.

By the Big Picture, I mean having some understanding of the true nature of the self and of reality. What exactly is this thing you call "I" that is not an object? What is going on in this space/time? What is being experienced and what is experiencing and how does it take place? What is real and what is illusory? How does all this fit together?

There are many ways to study reality. The academic or intellectual path is useful up to a certain point, but is inadequate in this case, because it necessarily objectifies and conceptualizes experience and experience is, by definition, completely subjective. Thus, the Big Picture must be sought from within. The goal is to see things clearly, just as they are, prior to conceptualization.

There are ways to train the mind for this journey. One of the best road maps I've come across for exploring the Big Picture is Zen Buddhism. The practice is very simple. You are not asked to believe in anything that deviates from your own experience. You are discouraged from relying on dogma or on the words and teachings of others because they won't help much. Zen is the see-for-yourself guide to insight. Meditation is the most important part of Zen. I'll give you the briefest peek into how it works.

You sit in a position that allows you to be relaxed yet alert and to be still without muscular exertion. Most sit cross-legged but it's of no consequence. Sit with your back straight and your muscles all relaxed and, instead of thinking, simply watch your breath. Watch your body breathing as if it were the most important thing in the world. Without going into further detail, as you watch your breath you discover that something you are able to observe cannot contain you. You, the observer, is not the body. After a while, you learn to observe the thinking mind instead of your breathing. You will find that you are able to observe your thinking mind without becoming involved in its context. Eventually, you will see that the thinking mind also doesn't contain the observer.

You go onwards from there; searching to discover where the observer is located and what is its nature. This path takes years but there are mind-blowing insights and experiences all along the way.

This, I think, is the most important pursuit a sentient being can undertake and the most fantastic. I won't go into further detail because I've already produced an embarrassing wall of text. Suffice it to say that Zen is a way to train the mind in such a way that it ceases to torment itself. This kind of practice is not only helpful for dealing with life's problems, but is also the source of a great deal of wonder and deep insight into how things are. Best of luck saving yourself from yourself. [Book suggestions: The Dhammapada, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book. I haven't read the 2nd book but I like its table of contents and, from a quick glance, it seems legit.]