The Bhuddists believe that to reach Nirvana one must break the chain of suffering

[Misery]

I believe that misery is the proof that we are alive. Do we feel pain? Do we feel anger? Do we feel depression? Do we feel angst? Do we feel laughter? Do we feel rage? Do we feel?

Misery of emotions is the feelings of life. Rejoice in your misery it defines your joy. Despair in your joy it defines your misery.

Can we not have one without the other?

Would we know true happiness if we did not know misery?

Would I know that I am Misery if my heart did not also feel Joy?

Would we know life if we did not also know death?

How is our existence defined? By the joy or by the tears?

When was the last time anyone made a critically acclaimed movie that did not involve suffering of some kind?

I am Misery and I am happy.

 

[Misery]

I had forgotten.

Sparky Kronkite, I call myself Misery because I am happy. Why do you call yourself Sparky Kronkite?

 

[insideShiraz]

Miserly Virgin...

The Movie Baraka! Take 2 tabs and Call me in the Morning...

 

[Slut_boy]

Misery, I agree with you

There is something about suffering that always captivated me. Much of what I do (in real life) involves exposure to sadness and misery. I love your name and I can't begin to tell you how much I can relate to the feelings that you have.

I, too, believe that suffering is absolutely necessary for life to progress. The world is not a Utopian paradise. There would be little point to life if it were. I wrote a letter to an ex-girlfriend of mine along the same lines, Misery. It was a while back. Although its personal I'll post it if you want to read it. I know that I once sent an extract of it to Laurel (a few months back - I can't remember now why I did that). Anyway, I'll find it and post it here.

Perhaps you and I think about the world in a similar way.

 

[Slut_boy]

Here is an extract from that letter

.......I want you to know that I am extremely grateful to you for this gesture – there really isn’t anything more frustrating than being misunderstood. I always seem to be misunderstood, and as Kim will tell you, this is part of the reason that I so often feel misplaced – almost like a person who has been hurled blindly into this world.


Sometimes that is in itself a very painful experience. I sometimes think that this ‘pain’ is more than incidental to life. I think that it is more than co-incidental too. Whether or not one feels the pain of living is also, in my view, less about the person’s subjective life circumstances and more about that person’s response to the objective world around them. Some people are lucky enough to be immune to world’s pain and other’s are for some reason more in touch
with it.

I know that it is not normal to feel this way about the world – to be infected this way by the pain. It is like having a disease. But all that I want is for the people that I love to try and understand the disease, before simply diagnosing me with some stereotyped label – like ‘misfit’ or whatever else. Part of the reason that I love Kim so very
much is that she has this beautiful ability to understand, and feel some of the pain that haunts my world. And I suppose that I really take for granted that other people, who obviously don’t know me nearly as well, also share Kim’s incredible insight. But not everybody does, and the same type of shameful paradox again becomes evident in a similar
way as it did before. Only this time it is that I assume that other people insult me because they don’t have the capacity to understand what I feel. Of course, it is me who is clearly misunderstood - people’s capacity to understand something is limited to their own existential experiences, and that we have all had such different lives will, by implication, mean that we will all have a different understanding of the world.

I am not really too sure if I am making sense out of all of this. I suppose that in a way I am really just saying that I am sorry – sorry for (i) inflicting my unsuspecting ‘black philosophy’ of life onto you, and then being offended when you didn’t buy into it; and (ii) not being more sensitive to the differences inherent in our differing perspectives of life and politics. Life is a learning process, and I am still learning***** is also hard and often I need to learn how to deal with my disillusionment more appropriately – perhaps not take it out on the world.

I know that there is very little more frustrating than people who are disillusioned and then rot in the filth of their own foul thoughts. But that’s not what I am all about. I am disillusioned, and I have tried to react to it positively. Sometimes I have tried to imagine that it is all
going to be okay. I have dreamed about it. But the funny thing is, Kath, that now I know that I am only dreaming – and then I get that guilty feeling, as though I have caught myself out not seeing the reality. The world is reality. It’s a cruel and unfair reality. And the modern world seems to make allowance for this. To give people a way out of having to face reality. And so some can escape to the internet, as though it were some kind of shelter - almost like 'virtual or cyber- refugees' *laughs*

But I know that there is a seperate reality - a reality where the horrible world is exactly as it seems. Almost without place for the utopian dream? And that is sad, Kath because I see very little beauty in the world – but I do see a stack of pain and suffering. As I had mentioned to you, I have been having horrible dreams in which I wake up at night because I think that I can hear people crying - and I
know that its in my head - but it seems so real. Maybe this war crimes stuff is getting to me. But I feel like I am going mad. I sometimes think that Kim thinks that too.

I once read an essay by a great modern time English philosopher, Isiah Berlin on utopia. It was so interesting. But the relevant question here is ‘where has the utopian dream disappeared to?’ It makes me so sad. The world doesn't respect dreamers and it doesn't respect dreams. Perhaps that’s the problem. This is a shit place and without dreams to cloud the reality, we are kind of left to see all of the real pain for what it truly is. How can that be beautiful? We need a utopia, we need to believe in a utopian dream.

And the idea of a perfect society is a very old dream. Most Utopia's are cast back to a remote past: when once upon a time there was a golden age. So Homer talks about the happy Phaeacians, or about the blameless Ethiopians amongst whom Zeus used to dwell. Hesiod talks about the 'new' age succeeded by progressively worse eras. Plato speaks in the Symposium about people once being whole and complete in a happy but remote past (when they were still spherical in nature, but since breaking in half and into two separate
hemispheres they have been unhappy ever since - trying to find that other half to once gain make them rounded and complete).

But the strange thing is that in all olden civilizations, there was a belief that things were once perfect in the beginning. But it all ends in a disaster and from that moment onward life is in turmoil and man spends the rest of it trying to once again find this Utopian state. The common thread, Kathy, is this constant theme (in Roman, or Greek, or Christian and Pagan Utopian thought) is that an enormous disaster upset things: in the bible it is the sin of disobedience - the fatal eating of the forbidden fruit - or else it is the flood. In some fabled mythology it is wicked giants who came and disturbed the world. So too in Greek
mythology the perfect state was broken by disaster, as in the story of Prometheus or else Pandora's Box.

The point that I am trying to make (although I know that I am struggling a little) is that since the disaster, we, as human kind, have been trying to mend the pieces. We need to believe that we can mend it because that is what gives us hope - the belief in a utopia. No person would ever spend an entire weekend working on his car unless he truly believed that it could be fixed. Belief is important – it’s essential. But now that the belief has gone, there is nothing left. That is what I find so sad.

Sometimes I blame the Christian Church for shattering the dream. They have for centuries been ramming their flavour of paradise down our throats. And the irony is that this Utopian 'paradise' of theirs can't ever be attained here on Earth anyway. There is no more belief that utopia is attainable in this life and no more reason for men to work on their cars.

I know that this is a rather gloomy perspective, but there are so few dreamers left. Real dreamers are almost extinct. Capitalism seperates the dreamers from the doers - the dreamers are turfed out and labeled 'useless'. But I dream, without wanting to sound like a black African
American political revolutionary ("Slut_boy X") *laughs*. Am I then stupid to dream a dream that I know will never come true. How can it? People are too screwed up to ever be beautiful. As one of my favourite thinkers, Emmanuel Kant, once said "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made". When people are involved then the product is likely to be (history is on my side here)
disillusionment, failure, misery and suffering.

The good part of it all is my sound understanding that suffering is good, and as many eastern philosophies teach us, we should be grateful for our sufferings because that is how we work off our karma. Even Jesus Christ said something similar "suffer little children that come unto me" but of course the Christians don't seem to understand the significance of this because their philosophy holds no place for karma and multiple lives. They continue, it seems, to misunderstand the teachings of their own master.
The saddest thing of all, Kath, is my absolute inability to reconcile this philosophy with the reality. The inevitable is always pain.

I sometimes think of my life as nothing more than simply a re-run of an old cheap, classically cliched, well-worn movie script. Hollywood movies always have a happy ending, but I can’t see that here. And so part of life, for me, is to deal with the pain in the world and not shy away from it or
cloak the devil in some shroud of sanctimonious mystery. It is real, and I get frustrated when people refuse to leave their cacoons and acknowledge the reality.

Well, that is more than I wanted to say. But now you know some of how I feel. Thank you for trying for all those years to understand me, and thank you for not making me feel as misplaced as I sometimes am. I love you for that.........


[Edited by Slut_boy on 11-02-2000 at 02:36 AM]

 

[insideShiraz]

I'll Bet You Think John Huhges...

Iz a Genius...

 

[Cheyenne]

Re: Misery, I agree with you

There is something about suffering that always captivated me. Much of what I do (in real life) involves exposure to sadness and misery. ...
I, too, believe that suffering is absolutely necessary for life to progress.

You must be a Democrat.

 

[Misery]

Who is John Huhges?

That was beautiful slut_boy, absolutely beautiful. I am going to read it a little more for the depth in the words not the surface beauty of them.

 

[Sparky Kronkite]

Sparky is thusly named....

purely to hide my true identity.....

Dean Koontz.

 

[Expertise]

Wow!

Sparky you're in reality Dean Koontz!?


Your books blow.