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  • hardie karges 6:10 am on September 15, 2019 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Noble Truth,   

    The Simplest Pleasures are Better than the Wildest Bliss… 

    Sometimes the worst of circumstances can yield the best results and the phoenix can rise from the ashes I hope. But this is the relativity of circumstance, again, and the inability to see far when the usual rewards are for immediate consumption. So it’s hard to articulate long-term goals when we can’t even see them. And this is the curse of our fate, I suppose, to be under the social and psychological pressure to ‘go for it’ when we don’t even know what ‘it’ is, much less the route to ‘it’s fulfillment. Thus we are perpetually stuck in the middle, between our desires and reality, by dint of our lack of our view to the future, and the lack of ego-fulfillment for something whose results will only be seen in a far distant world. And the self-proclaimed cognoscenti double down on this dumb-down, logic for the luckless, reduced to ‘this present moment’ for the lack of anything better. But there is something better, whether it’s known or it’s not, and this is the beauty of emptiness and simple foreplay, enjoying the ride when we know not where it goes, only that the ride itself is sublime but not indifferent, and the slower we go the more fulfilling it is. And this is the secret, of course, that contrary to the crush of speed and the big gulp of quick-fix contentment, long-fix containment is really a better option, without even knowing where it all leads, only knowing that the path itself is more proper and fitting. Thus we are handsomely rewarded for our control, more than our wild and crazy lack of it. Self-control is the best of all human qualities, more than passion, more than precision, and the Fifth Noble Truth of Buddhism…

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  • hardie karges 7:19 am on September 24, 2017 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , Noble Truth, , , ,   

    First Noble Truth of Buddhism: It’s a Heartache… 

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    …and that’s about as accurate as any translation of the Pali word dukkha as any other, certainly better than the ‘stress’ or ‘discomfort’ or whatever currently making the rounds in Buddhist blurbs online and elsewhere, anything but ‘suffering’, the traditional and still most accurate definition. We’re talking about a metaphysical level of suffering here, after all, or at least existential, the kind that envelops you in its inimitable embrace, and lets you know exactly where you stand, or fall, which is usually somewhere nearby and knowable, so treatable…

    The newer ‘stress’-full definition of dukkha suggests a modern post-capitalist phase that the Buddha himself could hardly have imagined back in the classic Upanishadic era of pre-colonial India, actually post-colonial if you count Aryans as intruders, and not the high-class homeboy Brahmins that they usually like to see themselves as. They brought as many chariots, horses, cows and racism as they ever brought religion, more like high plains cowboys than the meditative masters that we now see them as (though they did have good drugs—I hear)… (More …)

     
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