An idea that needs to die.
I was reading an article on here about kids affected by poverty and drug addiction in the american south. The man featured in the article was a teacher combating poverty and it's effects in his students lives. The stories he shared were gut wrenching and alarming. The closing line of the article really touched a nerve with me " I don't know what these kids did in a past life to deserve these experiences but it must have been terrible.
Dismissing suffering as somehow deserved because of some (likely) imaginary crimes of the soul. This just makes it easier for people to turn a blind eye to suffering and justify it to themselves. We,as humans, have a desperate need to believe the world is fair(news flash; it isn't). We love things that create a feeling of justice for us and can accept and ignore others suffering as long as we can find a way to feel good about it.This also normalizes and negates the suffering and struggle these families and their children face.
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.That is why I have always found reincarnation (and its Buddhist cousin, rebirth) to be horrifying concepts. I simply do not get where in such notions many people find actual comfort. All it does is eliminate the Christian hell and turn this life into its own hell, where we pay endlessly for past "sins". In virtually all of the officially advanced reincarnation narratives, this isn't just a matter of needing, say, 5 or 6 attempts to get life "right"; it is thousands upon thousands of lifetimes of suffering (which is all your fault and self-inflicted or not fully paid for from previous lives) and even then many do not achieve "enlightenment" or "nirvana". That is only slightly more hopeful than being cast into hell for eternity. One might say, it's more hopeful in a "twice nothing is still nothing" sort of way.
So the whole concept drips with the notion that you're unworthy to simply enjoy life or be comfortable in it; you might, with incredible amounts of self-denial, manage to flog yourself into being worthy of it, but probably not. This is on balance no better than fundamentalist Christian hellthreat, and in a way it's worse, because hell isn't just displaced into the afterlife, you're already in it.
It's also worth noting that in some versions of reincarnation and particularly rebirth, there's not even a real prize at the end, just what amounts to oblivion. Your consciousness, instead of cycling back onto the wheel of existence, will plop into an ocean, losing its identity as a drop, the only identity you've ever known, not for a new or better identity but to simply contribute to the vast ocean of cosmic consciousness, giving rise to other individuated droplets who can repeat the cycle you finally completed.
If that's not the very picture of a Sisyphian task, I don't know what is. That way lies madness.
mordant
Level 8
Nov 6, 2018
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Perhaps the only identity you actually ever knew was the ocean itself—the idea that you were a droplet was never anything but an illusion.
@WilliamFleming Maybe the oceanic identity is the real one but then why the droplet at all?
Religions always try to explain suffering (almost invariably by blaming the sufferer in some fashion) but any system that allowed / permitted / created suffering potentials to begin with is inherently fucked up and inexcusably so.
Reincarnation / rebirth says essentially that we aren't worthy to be at peace and must suffer until we are. The Abrahamic faiths say the same thing from a different angle, less regrettable necessity for suffering and more righteous schadenfreude but both justify hierarchies of sentience, the elect vs the reprobate, the aware vs the unaware, label it how you wish.
@mordant Somehow I feel left out. I’m not having any suffering. I had a kidney stone that caused some pain, but big deal, it was only a sensation to let me know something was wrong and I needed to lie down. If my body had died, what of it?
In any event, I doubt if I could have done it better, creation that is. How about you?
@WilliamFleming There's no one to fault for creation, as there's no creator. Obviously an intelligently planned and directed creation designed specifically for us would have been superior from our point of view, but it's pointless to talk about, because that train left the station long ago.
I'm glad you're not suffering and hope that you will enlighten the Buddhists about how life need not involve it. Also maybe you can visit the concentration camps on our southern border and inform those detained children how not to suffer.
@mordant Hmm... I was expecting you to point to some poor, pitiful suffering humans but you have done a poor job of it. Why do you assume that those children are suffering? If it were me I’d be having the time of my life, away from quarrelsome parents and enjoying good food and lots of comrades. I thought you would speak of the homeless or those with diseases or those malnourished. Judging the world in a negative way is basically just ego.
That basic premise of Buddhism that life is suffering—that is something with which I disagree. While we have all had anguish of some sort, that anguish was merely a message. It is entirely up to us whether we wish to turn that message into long-term suffering through the thinking of untrue, judgmental thoughts.
Whether a person claims there was a creator or says that the universe created itself, it amounts to the same thing—we are here and experiencing a reality that is, at heart, profoundly mysterious. I personally don’t think that we humans are equipped to understand the word “exist”, nor do I think the word “create” as we use it has much meaning from a cosmic perspective.
@WilliamFleming You might want to try some lovingkindness meditation there, dude. You take a three year old from its mother, prevent them from even communicating with their parents, hold them against their (or their parent's) wills, forbid children to comfort or touch each other and that traumatizes them, most likely fucking up their minds for life. Your level of denial concerning such things is, frankly, appalling.
@mordant Again, you are making assumptions. I agree though that three year olds are vulnerable. Of course only a fraction of the kids were so young.
Because of politics people are screaming bloody murder, yet children all across this country are taken from their parents continuously by local authorities for various reasons without a peep from political factions. Besides that, the policies in question have been used by previous administrations also.
It is possible to live your life with a sense of horror, anguish, fear and sorrow, or we can put life events into proper perspective and see life as a beautiful miracle. Every single human body will die someday, and that is okay—it’s just part of nature.
In my experience, meditation allows one to experience the true self as conscious awareness, and to realize that we are not our bodies, our memories, or our thoughts.
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