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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (80286)	1/21/2004 9:37:32 PM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

...the escape from pain route where one eliminates all pain by extinguishing desire and consciousness during life. I don't believe there is any escape except through death. With Tao, the idea is to simplify and eliminate complexity in one's life. Of course that also involves reducing your desires to have enriched experience. That seems to lean toward monasticism, which is a kind of escapism. I have a problem with the idea of being put into the world and trying to escape it at the same time. The concept of patience wouldn't mean much if there were escapes. Patience involves dealing with difficulties not escaping them. All disciplines that have lasted the test of time include fasting, prayer, and repentence. "The other would be to offer up without trying to escape into some other reality all their suffering as a penance to God out of a belief that human existence is somehow stained from inception by original sin." I don't know what you mean by "offer up". To me that means you accept that whatever suffering you are experiencing as a test from God. Whatever it is, is not likely to just vanish because you quote some doctrine about the nature of divinity. So, do you handle it nobly, struggling to deal with your circumstance in an honorable fashion or in the Charles Manson manner (Manson believes "helter skelter" is when everyone takes their sins out on one another). Maybe you can expand on the notion of "offer up."