Matt: Do you think I'm one of these "impatient intellects"? gav: i think we all are...
Andre: Hi Matt, gav, Steve, John, All I went through a rather frustrating adolescence because (naively of course) couldn't understand why there was so much evil in the world and why it wasn't any better. Many moons later, many deaths later, many conflicts later, many promisess later I realised 'the world' wasn't going to get any better. The world simply is the way it is regardless. Now, I do my own thing, through the heart, head and hands in trying to make 'my' world a little better, i.e my world of direct contact with others (family, friends, colleagues, starngers etc). A quote which I believe relates to what this post is about and may assist clarification...hopefully: 'We think we have to deal with our problems in a way that exterminates them, that distorts or denies their reality. But in doing so, we try to make Reality into something other than what it is. We try to rearrange and manipulate the world so that dogs will never bite, accidents will never happen, and the people we care about will never die. Even on the surface, the futility of such efforts should be obvious....' 'This is human life. We cannot lose sight of it. Weeds will flourish, though we hate them and wish them gone; flowers will fall, though we love them and long for them to remain. Human life is characterised with dissatisfaction. It's right here with us. This is the buddha-dharma's first truth of human life. How do we deal with this reality? Should we pretend- or hope- that what we love is not going to die?...The buddha-dharma is grounded in Reality. It is not pie in the sky, or wishful thinking, or a denial of what human life is. There's no attempt to cover up, to gloss over , to reinterpret the facts. It's imperative to recognise that our dissatisfaction originates within us. It arises out of our own ignorance, out of our own blindness to what our situation actually is, out of our wanting Reality to be something other than what it is. Our longing, our craving, our thirsting for something other than Reality is what dissatisfies us'. So the second truth is that dissatisfaction arises within us. 'The third truth is that we can realise the origin of our dissatisfaction, and can thus put an end to its most profound and existential forms. 'The fourth truth...offers us a means to experience just such a realisation. This realisation is sometimes called nirvana or enlightenment. A more accurate description, however, might simply be freedom of mind'. (Steve Hagan, Buddhism plain and simple" pp 18-19). The connections with the MoQ are fairly obvious. For what its worth. Andre Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
