Fresh out of my weekly mental mind-fucking

[skamp21]

While everyone else was discussing Puritan capitalistic principles, I was thinking about crap like this all night:

Comments

[quixotic]

i don't think that a religion that teaches transcendence of suffering neccesarily is saying the world itself is bad. i'm a buddhist for the most part in terms of my religious practice, and sure, buddhism is probably the religion that is best known for saying that all life is suffering, so people assume that it's not a life-affirming religion. in reality, what buddhism teaches is that all of this suffering in your life is not real. what is real is joy, and buddhism teaches that we should work to truly realize that suffering is an illusion. i think a lot of other religions teach the same thing, but i only have experience with one religion that teaches that. judaism has a more neutral view on the nature of existance.

-a

[skamp21]

Buddhism was one of the ones I was thinking of. I think it's one of those things that seems pessimistic when you first look at it and then turns out to be a lot more complex and optimistic when you carry the premises all the way to their conclusion. I'm reading Thich Nhat Hanh right now and he's a pretty happy fella. I need to do more reading on Buddhism, because I can tell a lot of places that I get hung up are semantics more than real fundamental issues. Maybe I'm unconsciously combining Christianity's definition of the world and suffering with Buddhism's ("The world is BAD and people are fundamentally EVIL and you're going to HELL unless you accept Christ as your savior" etc).

[quixotic]

i can see that. if you just take a look at the four noble truths, it sounds pretty bleak. keep in mind, though, that buddhism never says that there is anything wrong with people, or that people are bad. after all, we're all buddhas. we just don't know it yet.

also, it can seem dogmatic at first (the only way to enlightenment is the buddhist way). indeed, there are some buddhist traditions that are more dogmatic than others -- the ones that the only way to help the world is to lead everyone toward buddhist enlightenment. however, there's also a lot of more action oriented buddhism -- that instead of working to bring everyone to the buddhist way, we should work to relieve their suffering in other ways, which leads to great stuff like this.

-a

Hello

[shivaslastdance]

I appreciate the coherence and lucidity of your expression.

Unconditional love is a great thing that I don't want anyone to do to me. That is, I want to be loved for who I am and the things I have to offer. Depending on how liberal or restrictive we want to be with the definitions of "who I am" and "what I have to offer" one may break down to the other. I take them both to be different things but not altogether separate. Regardless--if there were someone who was very much like me, I would want them to be loved very much differently than I am. I want to be told one day, very sweetly,"I love you 'cause you're you, so don't go turning into Bob on me." So, I guess, I would want to speak of the greatest conditional love, instead of unconditional love, where those things one might do, good or bad, are already understood as being part of ,"this stellar person, and damn, I wouldn't have them do it any other way."

Re: Hello

[skamp21]

That's more or less what I want too; I think we might just be calling the same thing by different names.

[mandopout]

"It's hard to feel love for someone in spite of their silence, or in spite of distance, or in spite of actions that I have a hard time respecting, and be okay with not expecting anything in return but what people are willing to give me. It's hard to give my own actions value when other people dismiss them out of hand. But at its deepest, isn't that what friendship is? Trust is not knowing that someone will give you everything you need. It's somehow expecting the best and expecting nothing, all at the same time."

i think this is why my dad likes the saying 'birds of a feather flock together'
when i look at all my long term friendships, we all kinda expect the same things of each other...
of course time will always change that.

i dont think there is unconditional love. everyone has their limits.