This is a known risk that comes up in the discussions of many Buddhist communities; “spiritual bypassing” is the standard term.
I think that suffering is a signal of internal conflict and that something is subtly (or not-so-subtly) going wrong in the mind’s internal processing; your soul being damaged, as you put it. Done well, Buddhist practices eliminate suffering not by interfering with that signal but paying attention to it such that the mind comes to see what exactly it’s doing to hurt itself and stops doing so.
So it’s less about “you stop suffering because you stop noticing when your soul is getting damaged” and more “you stop suffering because your soul stops damaging itself”.
But the mind is messy and refactoring fundamental parts of its operation can go wrong, and even if things go right there are phases where you may go backwards before you go forward again, and sometimes a person can get stuck in such a phase. So bad outcomes are certainly possible.
There will always be damage to your soul from living in the world (for at least as long as we are ordinary humans, and probably much beyond then). This is the primary purpose of suffering. The frame that suffering is always due to self-caused damage is part of the toxicity.
This is a known risk that comes up in the discussions of many Buddhist communities; “spiritual bypassing” is the standard term.
I think that suffering is a signal of internal conflict and that something is subtly (or not-so-subtly) going wrong in the mind’s internal processing; your soul being damaged, as you put it. Done well, Buddhist practices eliminate suffering not by interfering with that signal but paying attention to it such that the mind comes to see what exactly it’s doing to hurt itself and stops doing so.
So it’s less about “you stop suffering because you stop noticing when your soul is getting damaged” and more “you stop suffering because your soul stops damaging itself”.
But the mind is messy and refactoring fundamental parts of its operation can go wrong, and even if things go right there are phases where you may go backwards before you go forward again, and sometimes a person can get stuck in such a phase. So bad outcomes are certainly possible.
There will always be damage to your soul from living in the world (for at least as long as we are ordinary humans, and probably much beyond then). This is the primary purpose of suffering. The frame that suffering is always due to self-caused damage is part of the toxicity.
Can you define “damage to the soul” more specifically?