anther look at existence

I have often spoken of the failure of various ism’s including capitalism
and religions like catholicism and Buddhism…
but let us work out one such failure, Buddhism…
but why Buddhism? why not?

these are the eight fold path of Buddhism as listed by Wiki…
I shall discuss them on the other side of the list…

The Eight Divisions
The eight Buddhist practices in the Noble Eightfold Path are:[25][note 2]

Right View: our actions have consequences, death is not the end, and our actions and beliefs have consequences after death. The Buddha followed and taught a successful path out of this world and the other world (heaven and underworld/hell).[26][27][28][29][note 3] Later on, right view came to explicitly include karma and rebirth, and the importance of the Four Noble Truths, when “insight” became central to Buddhist soteriology.[30][31]
Right Resolve or Intention: the giving up of home and adopting the life of a religious mendicant in order to follow the path; this concept aims at peaceful renunciation, into an environment of non-sensuality, non-ill-will (to loving kindness), away from cruelty (to compassion).[32] Such an environment aids contemplation of impermanence, suffering, and non-Self.[32]
Right Speech: no lying, no rude speech, no telling one person what another says about him to cause discord or harm their relationship.[25]
Right Conduct or Action: no killing or injuring, no taking what is not given, no sexual acts, no material desires.[25]
Right Livelihood: beg to feed, only possessing what is essential to sustain life;[25]
Right Effort: preventing the arising of unwholesome states, and generating wholesome states, the bojjhagā (seven factors of awakening). This includes indriya-samvara, “guarding the sense-doors”, restraint of the sense faculties.[33][32]
Right Mindfulness (sati; Satipatthana; Sampajañña): “retention”, being mindful of the dhammas (“teachings”, “elements”) that are beneficial to the Buddhist path.[34][note 4] In the vipassana movement, sati is interpreted as “bare attention”: never be absent minded, being conscious of what one is doing; this encourages the awareness of the impermanence of body, feeling and mind, as well as to experience the five aggregates (skandhas), the five hindrances, the four True Realities and seven factors of awakening.[32]
Right samadhi (Passaddhi; Ekaggata; sampasadana): practicing four stages of dhyāna (“meditation”), which includes samadhi proper in the second stage, and reinforces the development of the bojjhagā, culminating into upekkha (equanimity) and mindfulness.[36] In the Theravada tradition and the Vipassana movement, this is interpreted as ekaggata, concentration or one-pointedness of the mind, and supplemented with Vipassana-meditation, which aims at insight.

K: in reading these “rules” I like them but they leave us a problem…
actually several problems… one, how do we know, have knowledge of,
that these are in fact the right or correct path? We have the Buddha
word, but that is all we have…we have his word that the point of existence
is to become one with the universe and thus ending our ongoing reincarnations
which is a living death…the point of Buddhism is to no longer be reincarnated but
I hold that the Buddha has focused on the wrong thing… the Buddha has stated
that life is full of misery… given that we are spending our live in misery,
being born, getting disease, growing old, dying are considered to be “evil”
and yet, I consider them the price of admittance into this thing we call life…
everything in the universe has a positive side and a negative side…
for example, we love to eat ice cream, as I do, but eating too much ice cream
and we suffer, sometime greatly from that… we grow fat and we suffer
other medical issues if we eat too much ice cream… we see the positive
of eating ice cream and we can see the negative of eating ice cream…

and everything that exists in the universe has that issue, there is a
positive side and a negative side…now some have said that the point
of existence is to engage with the positive side and avoid the negative side…
but we miss much if we were to do that… I would not understand
the positive side of say, drinking beer, which I love, if I didn’t understand
the negative side which is hangovers and getting sick in the parking lot…
been there, done that…that knowledge deepens my understanding of
drinking beer…there is a plus side as well as a negative side…

and all knowledge brings us a plus side, a positive side and a negative side,
a minus side… and that knowledge deepens us into a better understanding
of what that knowledge means… so for example, if we know that part of life
is disease and being ill, after being ill or having a disease, we better
understand and appreciate life… after I hurt my back and had spinal surgery,
I have a better appreciation of how important my back was to my quality of life…
especially since I cannot do a whole lot given how back my back has become…
somedays, I can barely stand up and some days, bending over for more then a couple
of minutes, causes a great deal of pain to me… I cannot run anymore,
I can’t bowl, I can’t ride rides at Amusement parks like the roller coaster…
it hurts my back too much…you don’t really appreciate something until
you can’t do it anymore…but this suffering has filled me with an better
understanding of what it means to be human… suffering and pain and
agony sucks, but it does allow us to better understand what it means
to be human… pain, suffering, agony allow us to deepen our understanding
of what it means to be human… we better understand what it means to be
if we have suffer, be in pain, be in agony… as I have suffer, felt pain and
agony… it has deepened my understanding of what it means to be human…

I hold that being born is a good thing despite the pain, agony and suffering
that we face, every day of our existence…that we shouldn’t avoid
pain or suffering or agony… those are essential parts of being human
and allow us to better understand what it means to be human…
my pain, suffering and agony has allowed me to better appreciate
other human beings, to have sympathy and compassion for
other human beings… by nature, I am not MR. Compassion or
Mr. Sympathy…my wife is but I am not… while pain and suffering
and agony sucks, it has made me a better, more compassionate
person… I am better able to empathize with people after my own
misfortune of pain and suffering…and that is a plus for me
becoming a better human being…
and therein lies the value of pain, suffering, agony… it allows us
to become closer to people and what they suffer through…
I do not pretend to know what goes on in the hearts and minds
of other people but through my own pain and suffering, I can
at least have a sense of what it means to be another…

and that is one thing I believe that holds back the conservative or the right winger…
they lack empathy for others… “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”
is a common conservative saying, but it ignores the reality of life…
sometimes for reasons outside of our abilities, we are trapped into
a situation… we cannot “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps”
alone… we need help… and therein lies the difference between the liberal
and the conservative… liberals have more empathy or compassion for others…
and so we want to help others “pull themselves up” even at costing us something
which the conservative will never do… to help another requires a payment of
some sort… kindness is part of a payment plan to the conservative…
a transactional action… I do for you and you do for me…
IQ45 is a poster child for a transactional person… he will act only if
he expects something in return… every action is transactional for him
as is true for the conservative…

whereas the liberal doesn’t expect payment for acts of kindness…
one of the insults of the right against the left has been,
“a bleeding heart liberal” this insult shows us the transactional nature
of the conservative… they expect payment for every action…
no payment, no kindness or concern or love…
love is just another transactional action…you love because you expect
something in return…

to return to the Buddhists, we see that from their 8 fold reasons,
that in fact, they have no justified reason to hold to those values
as listed… why right reasons? what makes those reasons, right?
to the list of right conduct, why those conducts? why not another?

what makes those "right conducts’’ the ones that allow us to achieve
“nirvana” outside of the word of the Buddha. We have no reason to
believe that one of the key points of existence is to have the
“right conduct” or to hold the “right beliefs” and why that conduct
and those beliefs?

much is assumed in buddhism and that is my problem with Buddhism…
too much, far too much is assumed… the basic fundamental points of
buddhism isn’t examined or reevaluated… why those values and not other values?

and why is escaping rebirth so important? why is escaping pain and suffering and
agony, really the point of existence? I hold those aspects of existence is, in part,
what makes us human… I cannot describe myself to being human without
any reference to the pain, suffering and agony that accompanies my life…
I am, in part, human because of that pain, suffering and agony…why should
we deny an essential aspect of our humanity?

Kropotkin