Life is shit! - that is the root fact, but...

OK seems I've been banging on the same door for too long now. Done a bit of reading... the question of this blog "what is life?", with a view to knowing what to do with it, is inspired because I and each one of us knows deep down that it is shit. Uneqivocally shit! and we only try to pretend otherwise because we are too egotistical to admit that we have failed to be happy. And what little happiness we do get is tainted because we are then afraid it will go and we will have to face the base fact again that life is shit!

I've made a double error because I thought that I could solve this issue all by myself as though it was a problem that people haven't been struggling with since the dawn of time. For me I saw the news as a kid and thought these people are idiots let me find the answer. But I see that there is no need for me to find the answer because it really has been found many times over by many people. Most coherently (for me at least) Buddha, but I have been held back because I lacked faith and accurate teachings - the latter my fault again because I didn't look! (or was not ready).

Anyway when you finally realise that "life is shit!" and there is no little escape passage that you've not checked - you've tried money and success, and love and sex, and knowledge and truth and all such things and you realise that each is tainted by its own shit! and the best you can do is pretend that everything is ok because your friends seem to be ok (when really they just pretend also). Well I'm ready to accept that it really is shit!

OK now what? Well here's a start...

http://www.maithri.com/links/articles/tri_lakshana1.htm

I particularly liked the honesty here...

"It is this instability that makes Dukka or the unsatisfactory nature of life bearable. Otherwise human beings would die of boredom with what we call pleasure, and the agony of what constitutes suffering."

So I'm sold finally no more tedious searching for answers in this mode of existence ... come back in a thousand years and everything we build today will be gone anyway, time for something much more fruitful.

I realise prior to this in meditation earlier that a characteristic of us all is that we spend our whole time struggling to gain control over our worlds - little tanks we are pulling levers and pushing buttons to try and negotiate some kind of satisfactory existence. Its never very satisfactory and what builds up is a resentment - I at least realised that were I to me made ruler of the universe there is a very good chance I would be literally terrible because the temptation to pull my extremely powerful levers and push my very powerful buttons to gain that dreamed of complete satisfaction might well destroy me and make me one of the really bad guys. Were I ever to lose sight of the people around me I could be very bad.

So in contrast to this pathetic view of each of us walled up in our own tanks looking through tiny periscopes and limited to pulling levers it seemed completely preferable to get out of the tank (which has the down side of "getting over ourselves") and working to make it a better world for all the other tank drivers. The gain is freedom and not being limited to using bulky levers, the downside is that we aren't stuck in a metal cage (hmmm but that's a good thing!)

Anyway slow realisations that I am shit also and need to do a damn sight better to achieve any of this enlightenment I pretend to seek!