life as pain
[this was a comment I made to digitalusrex that I deemed worth re-posting]
When he was asked the meaning of life the Buddha answered by saying "Life is pain."
"Life is all the pain we endeavor"
- Paradise Lost (the band), "Yearn for Change"
Happiness may be pursued, but never attained in a permanent sense. I attribute this primarily to the 2nd Law of ( Read more... )
I cannot remember enough Nietzcshe for it to apply, but the comment about "lust for life" seems to apply. I am VERY guilty of a sort of Nietzcshian Sin of wasting portions of my life. While I was with my ex-wife I wasted that entire decade (or half-decade, but I consider the three years after she left/died to be just as big a waste due to my disability being at its worst and most debilitating), and in the last few years I have wasted many an opportnity just due to being depressed to such an extent that I would be unable to rouse myself to even go to the bathroom when I needed (It got reall bad). Since Suicide is an outright impossibility if I do not believe in an afterlife it put me into a kind of awful position: Not deserving of life, but life being too valuable to throw away...
Life is suffering is the correct quote. I do not have the exact translation with me, but the words that the used that is translated into english as either "pain" or "Suffering" in the original languages are meant to mean "experiencing an intense emotion". If you look up Suffering; even it implies that suffering need not be a negative experience. Often you may have to suffer love, or extreme pleasure. Suffering in these cases just means that the emotional content is beond the experencer's ability to change it. They must "Suffer through" the experience until their emotional state subsides or levels out... Learning how to "Suffer through" often means to learn to embrace that suffering as if it ma be the last thing that you have... The last sorrow, the last happiness, the last pain, the last pleasure, the last jealousy, the last love... and so on... even going as far as seeing if there is a way to enhance the experience even further.
The epicurians of Rome/Greece also believed that this was the case. They were not the gluttons that they are often made out to be, but rather people who believed that life's experiences should be experienced to their fullest no matter whether they be "good" or "bad" experiences (The had not yet realized that the experences themselves were neither good nor bad, but merely a state of existence)
So, I will take the advice (Make a point of living life to its fullest) and sit and home tonight unable to get out, and revel in the frustration of that fact (and maybe paint something while I am at it)...
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