Perspective #1: "Life is suffering" -First Noble Truth of Buddhsim

Perspective #2: "Life is full of suffering. Yet it is also full of the overcoming of suffering." -Helen Keller

One of my greatest problems as a human being has been a constant flip-flopping back and forth between an inner-directed perspective and an outer-directed one. That is, I often think, "To hell with the world, whatever we do, its always going to be full of pain...better to look within and immerse myself in the divine." At other times, I'll think the opposite: "Action is called for, get up and do something NOW to make the world a better place!!"

My deepest hope is that the two perspectives are not mutually exclusive, and that a balance can be found...

Originally posted by Shamrock87

Don't you understand? We already are. We are already slaves.

The resistance movement is small and isolated.

However, all hope is not dead.

The war is just beginning.

[edit on 19-10-2009 by In nothing we trust]

Originally posted by spellbound

I have always been available, and I have always known my powers, but usually the people who find me are not the resistance.

They are usually the powers that be.

You must be wary as some who make contact with you are actually the enemy. In a time of war it can be difficult to determine friend from foe.


[edit on 19-10-2009 by In nothing we trust]

WHEN I stand before thee at the day's end thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.
-Rabindranath Tagore

If you focus on the suffering of the world, you will be overwhelmed by all the misery. If you try to ignore it, your heart will become hardened. The only way to handle it, in my opinion, is to remain open to the needs of those around you, the people you meet in your life, and do what you can to ease their suffering. There are plenty of people suffering right in your home town, right in your own neighborhood. You don't have to go to Korea of Afghanistan or anywhere else. Suffering is universal.

Don't focus on what you can't do. Focus on what you can do, and then do it. It's not going to end all suffering, but it's a start.

Just remember: Its very easy to know when something is wrong. Its much harder to define what exactly should replace it.

Immediately before or in the midst of any kind of upheaveal, all the "good guys" feel like "brothers and sisters." But once the old order is gone, often infighting begins...not to mention horrors like the Red Terror of the Russian revolution or the Great Terror of the French Revolution, when the madame guillotine swung sickeningly from dawn till dusk.

Not trying to discourage anyone...but its a sobering thought, isn't it?