Meno, I’ll get back to you later…
let us approach this from a different viewpoint…
I am a typical person who passes their day in a crappy job…
as I look at my life, I see that my days, my life is about surviving,
not living…
Millions upon millions of people spend their days surviving, not living…
but what does that mean?
surviving means you come home from work to tired to do anything but watch
TV…you get home and you have just enough energy to eat dinner and off to bed you
go… then spend tomorrow with the exact results as today…
you don’t have the time or energy or money to enjoy your life…
you are simply surviving it… not living it…
I live with pain because of my job and that is just surviving…
I get three weeks vacation from work to somehow recover from 11 months
of my high stress job… believe me, three weeks isn’t enough to recover
from the hell I suffer through every day…
my wife says it takes about the first 3 days of my vacation to become
a normal human being… and then one day after starting work, I revert
to survival mode…and I stand with millions of human beings who suffer
from the same fate… just surviving…not living their lives…
in regards to what I have been talking about, the transitory nature
of our lives and what does it mean to suffer life instead of living it…
I have spent 40+ years working… if there has been one thing that
hasn’t been temporary in my life, it has been the fact that I have
been in survival mode all those years…I have worked for 40 plus
years and all I have to show for it, is my constant and ongoing pain
in my hips and back and wrists and knees and…………
I can’t retire but how many more years of just surviving must I do
before I can escape? Must I wait for death to take me before I am
free? and at this pace of being able to retire, I will be an old man,
an truly old man who can barely move and suffers…
perhaps that is the real theme of the Buddha… not the suffering
of birth, old age, sickness and death… but the life long suffering
of working my entire adult life… of working for a system that
grinds it’s workers down into a pulp and discards them when
they can no longer create a profit…for that is the workers
reason for existence… to maintain profits… and for that I
just survive my life and not live it…
but that has been the case since the beginning… people,
human beings have just been surviving their existence,
not living it, but surviving it… nothing more then
animals in that regards……… and I can’t even claim that
our suffering, our surviving has been for the greater good, no,
our existence has been nothing more then to line the bed
of those who own the means of production… be it the state or
the church or the business… workers have always been the
one’s who have suffered the brunt of the work which has built
the modern world and yet the workers certainly don’t benefit from
their centuries long suffering in building the modern world……
no, the workers, we just live in surviving mode, not living,
surviving… think of all of the workers who have lived before you…
the millions of unnamed and unknown workers that have created
the modern world and in which you also slave in…………….
and we cannot call the capitalistic system anything other then
a slave owning system…you cannot do anything other then
work and suffer and survive for 40 years in support of a system
that will discard you once you no longer create profits……
and what of those who we have rightly celebrated like
MLK and Jesus and Mohammed and Gandhi and the Buddha
and Socrates… what of them? what role do they play in
all this suffering because our lives is in simple survival mode
instead of living our lives?
why do we celebrate those famous names? Because by their words
and examples, they have shown us the way out of just survival mode…
those names and others, have shown us how to be more then just
people who only function is to survive, they show us how to live,
they show us the path to living our lives, not just surviving our lives…
that is their value, that is their message…Those hero’s are hero’s because
they pointed the way past just surviving… we can learn to live our lives
if we follow their path…………live our lives not just survive our lives……
and that is the message we must take from those Hero’s…………
how to become something more then someone whose only goal is to
create profit for other’s to benefit from…
you want to live your life instead of just surviving it?
then you must follow their path, MLK and Gandhi and the Buddha
and Jesus and Mohammed and Socrates and……… use their words
to guide you to living your life, not just surviving it…………
what other people do we celebrate that has taught us to live
life, not just suffer it?
and what was their message?
Hero’s are the one’s who don’t take the road well traveled…
and those hero’s were in active opposition to the society they
live in and those hero’s didn’t just fall in line and simply obeyed…
their opposition in several cases cost them their lives…
but they did something you aren’t doing, which is this, they lived
and you, you are suffering and you are just surviving the modern world…
do more by understanding what it takes to become more
then just surviving the world… learn to live life…
Kropotkin