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Posted by josef on 5/17/2011, 12:15 pm, in reply to "Re: Between Worth and Worthless"
24.32.223.x
--Previous Message--
: josef,
:
: My point was that we can be attached to
: something without knowing it. Attached to
: some bit of habitual reactive conditioning
: that we are unaware of. Thus it behooves us
: to be ever humble. To have compassion on
: ourselves, as well as others.
:
: The Buddha said that our problem is
: suffering. Not pain, suffering. That is,
: pain is a natural part of life. But our
: tendency is to run from anything that causes
: us pain thus separating us from our
: experience. Or at least trying to. And in
: this attempt to separate ourselves from our
: experience we set ourselves up for
: suffering. Suffering is not a natural part
: of life. Suffering is man made. Dogs do not
: suffer. They experience pain. They
: experience emotions. But they do not suffer
: for suffering is a conceptual experience.
:
: Suffering is all in the mind. If we fail to
: let go of our pain, pain comes and goes, we
: suffer needlessly. We are going to
: experience pain. We are going to die. When
: we accept this fact we are able to live
: freer lives. Liberated from the angst of
: imagined separation.
:
: The need to find meaning in or from our
: suffering only exacerbates the issue. Such a
: notion amounts to wanting to make sense out
: of something that is real by making it
: unreal. Our pain becomes a phantom that
: stalks us. And so in defense we become numb,
: cut off from our experience we are alienated
: even further from ourselves. We start
: looking around for something to bring us
: relief. Boos, sex, drugs, philosophy,
: rituals, dogmas, whatever. We apply our
: imagination to our imagination. And so we
: become lost in a labyrinth or our own
: making. Such is the state of man.
:
: Lost. Separated from our experience of pain
: by thinking it so we start to become
: separated from all of our experience. Now
: separate and alone we turn to all sorts of
: artificial means of connection. We have
: separation anxiety. Fear rules our lives.
: Fear of pain, fear of being alone, fear of a
: lack of meaning, fear of death, fear, fear,
: fear. So we load our guns. Our actual as
: well as our metaphorical guns. No one is
: going to hurt me, I won't let them in. I
: will isolate myself, encapsulate myself in a
: hard shell, I will become a very strong ego
: to stem the tides of my experiences. Though
: I walk through the valley of the shadow of
: death my ego will protect me. I will run
: from pain and pursue pleasure. In the middle
: of the world I will become a castaway. I
: will cut myself off from all pain and
: suffering. I will become an existentialist.
: A stoic. An iron-man. Cutoff from our pain
: and suffering, we are cutoff from being
: human as well. Cutoff from ourselves.
:
: I don't think many of us do these things to
: ourselves intentionally. Some people may
: simply be insane. Most of us are simply
: unaware of what we are doing to ourselves,
: and each other. Most of us are asleep as it
: were. Lost in a dream of for the most part
: self-imposed tribulations. But we don't have
: to be.
:
: We can choose to take the red pill of
: meditation. But most don't. Most choose to
: continue the dream, the nightmare of
: separation, perhaps simply because we don't
: know any better. But deep down, I think we
: all know. But we are afraid. Afraid that
: reality will be even more painful than we
: can imagine. Sorry state indeed. Suffering
: by default.
:
: ButchO
Beautiful, beautiful post, ButchO. Yes.
josef
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"The Tao is basically utterly open. Utter openeness has no substance. It ends in endlessness, begins in beginninglessnes".
-Li Daoqun
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