Dissatisfaction really is key to life

What makes things problematic? simply dissatisfaction. If we want something and we don't get it, or it is not quite what we wanted, then we are dissatisfied.

A hundred complex ideas have issued surrounding this. Things which try to fix our desires in a material and secure world. Things like justice, law, politics, religion which at root aim to secure a belief that we deserve and can get what we want. They are ideas built only from experiences of dissatisfaction.

I have argued at length recently the vapidity and obvious illusory nature of these ideas. They simply do not exist. We can agree that they exist in the same way that we can agree that a character in a play is who they are. But in reality they are a fiction. There are NO higher elements in existence than the experience of dissatisfaction and the "real" world does not care for our dissatisfaction. It will administer luck and bad luck, injustice and cruelty at random and we can only believe that in the end we will get what we want.

The issues of murder for example are enshrounded in so many complex ideas. Especially that each human being "should" be free from threat to life, they have a "right" to be free from threat. The "real" world does not know about this. Disease, "natural" disaster and death are administered without any knowledge of human "rights". And at root if or whole family is murdered in front of us, as happens in places of war and turmoil, the only problem is our dissatisfaction. Had for example we wanted them dead the apparent problem would vanish.

This sounds harsh but consider like this. We often want people dead. We are fighting wars throughout the world especially in Afganistan and Iraq. With billions being spent on bullets and bombs how can we imagine for a minute that we are not seeking the death of people? We want and are directly spending our money through taxes on the death of people. These people have families who love them as any family would. We are perpetrators of the acts of killing families. But, we do not see a problem because it creates satisfaction rather than dissatisfaction for us. However were it our family being killed then suddenly and miraculously we would see a problem.

This is unclear maybe because of so many "unreal" ideas. We might argue that we have a right to kill out of self defense, or that the terrorists started it. Arguments that are undoubtedly used to create a sense of justice/injustice on the "other" side also. So these ideas have no friends and only seek to justify and create a sense of injustice in whoever holds them. The reason we hold these ideas is to support our acts to escape dissatisfaction... that is the only root.

What causes dissatisfation? It is exactly as Buddha stated. It is the failure to gain satisfaction and that means to, "get what we want". That is the Law.

How do we cure dissatisfaction. The obvious way is to "work" for what we want. In which case our world gets orientated around our desires. But this is as unreal as an actor playing out a role. as the props move around the stage there is no absolute meaning to these movements it only makes sense within the "narrative" or story. As a stage hand we might have to place a gun on a table at the beginning of a scene and then remove it from the floor at the end of the scene. That is our job, that is all we need to know. To the audience of course we can assume that the gun has a whole new "unreal" meaning within the illusion of story that is played out.

Of course maybe the stage hand is part of a bigger play. Maybe there is an audience (as I have created by writing about it) or maybe there is not were it to happen for "real". But the story I tell is an illusion the same in "reality" as in the pages of this blog. What is the difference?

So it is with our lives. An alien anthropologist studying humans could not make any sense of our lives without knowing about our desires. If we were to watch them get depressed because their tentacles didn't meet in a certain way we can only assume (from our own experience) that this was some desire of theirs. There is no absolute meaning behind tentacles meeting in a certain way, any more than the gun playing an obvious role in the world.

Sex for example is the same for us. We understand the hormonal, nerological experiences of sex and love. Within the framework of our desires it makes perfect sense. But in reality to someone without such desires it is simply to moving of a gun around, the touching of arbitrary tentacles.

So it is desire that fashions the whole world and makes its juxtapositions of relevance. And what causes desire? It is how we think about things. Think about her as a desirable female, think about her as your mother. Same person different thoughts, different desires, different actions, different satisfactions, different dissatisfactions.

So this is the root and route and it is the confusions created by our multifaceted broken mirror world of mirages that makes this issue so hard to comprehend.

I champion non-violent, harmonious, respectful truth and "reality" seeking anarchy as a way of breaking the link with these mirages that have us so tightly bound. And what makes it worse is that we are always on a stage performing the multifarious roles and plays that we are born into and people expect of us. If we break with character, let people down, don't perform the play right then we find ourselves pushed off the stage and onto other stages. There is no end of stages: be it the successful business and family man stage, or the penninless homeless tramp stage. Each with their role and each acting out to the audience of other players. People who believe they are in governments and institutions (but who in reality are just reading a certain script) will hand you a script and expect you to read from it. It is wise to do so because reading from your own script is just as bad and these official scripts are "really" dangerous though the perpetrators don't see what they are doing (qv the worst case in History the Nazis - though that is another script).

The aim is no script. No prepared answers, no expectations of oneself or others. Seeing things as they "are". Seeing desire as a product of belief and thought and seeking to free oneself from these... by understanding at least even if another place called "no desire" does not exist.

Now Freedom or Liberation is the next thread to expand because that is the true heart of these enquiries and I'm beginning to see Life itself.