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al_b
Stone broke...
21 Posts |
 Posted - 25/05/2006 : 18:08:13
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I have recently come to realise that Taoism is fundamentally correct, and it ties in well with Buddhism. Things grow, peak, and fade in order that the opposite may grow, peak, fade and return to the start of the cycle. I cannot see any fault with the following ideas. Can you?
Cycles
People fail to realise the importance of balance. If people are unhappy, it is because they are at a certain point. What they will desire is the opposite of their current circumstances. And the the illusion is that the opposite appears to be the solution.
People who live in cold places hanker for the heat, while if you put them in a hot place then after a while, they'd complain it was too hot.
So, imagine this. You want to work, and so you get a job. You go around the circle, working, working, working, until you get to a point where your enthusiasm falls away. You are at the peak of your want to work. So, you begin to move further around the circle until you get to the change over point which is when you stop working. Then, the same thing happens – you are enjoying not working, not working, not working, until your energies recover. At that point, you desire to work again. So you come back around from the peak until you reach the other change over point. At that point you begin to work again.
Unhappiness occurs when you have reached a peak, yet you are unable to advance to a change-over point. You have to put in a lot of over-time because your boss says so, or you need the extra money. Some outside force is denying you from reaching the change-over point. Unhappiness also occurs when you are forced to move into a change-over point and you didn't want to.
What is important is the balance
Unhappiness occurs when there is a desire to progress towards the opposite, but it is not possible to attain it. For instance lonely people desire friends. But the unhappiness is magnified when they aren't in a position to make friends. Sometimes circumstances are beyond peoples' control, and this exacerbates unhappiness further, leading people to attachments...
Imagine you have been working lots of hours, you have lots of responsibilities and are under a lot of stress. At that time, going to somewhere remote, like a desert island could seem appealing because it represents the opposite of the situation you are in. However, were you to actually go there, you would be happy for perhaps two weeks or so, but after that you would hanker for more action, or perhaps to return home.
The other side of this is when you don't want to progress to the change-over point, but again, external circumstances coerce you into it. This is where depression and attachment come from. And the higher you were, the further you'll fall because you'll remember just how high you were. The mind has a tendency during times of sorrow to dwell on the opposite – something you deem to be a happy time. Yet this dwelling on the past, or on a fantasy future doesn't resolve the problem. It again, enhances your feeling of depression by twisting the knife by showing you what you no longer have, or a situation that you aren't currently in.
I think people become attached to things that represent the situation that they desire to be in. For instance, you could find yourself attached to memories of an ex-girlfriend if you are currently lonely and really want to find a girl. Yet you may know that she isn't the one for you. But your mind keeps replaying the same record because she represents the situation of having a girlfriend and the associated companionship. She represents the opposite to your current situation. But as soon as you find a new girlfriend, your ex will no longer be on your mind because you will be in the situation that she represents – unless of course she were to assume some kind of illusory role of the 'perfect' girl that you should never have split up with.
So it is the lack of balance, or an inability to control the balance, which throws people off, and leads them to believe that the opposite is the important thing – when in actual fact, attaining balance is. Now, of course, it could be that going on holiday would restore balance, which is fine. What is important though is that we have a tendency to over-compensate. We are hungry, so we eat to excess. We feel sexually frustrated, so we desire having as much sex as we can. We always want more of the good, without wishing to experience any of 'the bad'. There is no bad. There is only the transition from one phase to another, yet we label them with terms like “enjoyable” or “unenjoyble”. What is required is an understanding of the cycles involved and an understanding that nothing lasts forever. It can be very frustrating when we are unable to change things, but this knowledge should hopefully enable us to keep a cool head in these situations. I suppose the problem really comes from when our cycles are out of synchronisation with external cycles.
My point is that I think that a lot of people are confused as to how to attain happiness. Buddhism tells us that attachment and desires cause our unhappiness. Well, desires come from being out of balance. If you in a perfectly balanced state then you won't have any desires because you won't desire to be anywhere else, or in any other situation. This can be experienced through meditation. Sometimes when I begin to meditate, I will be feeling out-of-sorts, but when I finish, I feel amazing. At that point, I don't desire anything at all. It is quite amazing.
Al
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Taoism is Flawless
