good-intentioned

Many people are well-meaning, good-intentioned, doing-the-best-they-can, jerks.

"If you can't learn to do something well,
learn to enjoy doing it poorly."

If you get married nowadays, chances are, more likely than not, you'll end up divorced.

We are destined to spend our entire lives under a variety of compulsions: we must eat, sleep, drink, eliminate wastes properly, find an appropriate mate . . . if we fail to respond to these compulsions properly, we are rewarded with more pain.

Even, in its own ways, for the rich, the powerful, the talented, the beautiful . . . . life is still difficult.

All happy feelings, fade away. So do the unhappy ones.

As the saying goes, "the one thing we should learn from experience is that we do not learn from experience." Thus far, it does not seem to be the case the wisdom is cumulative; each generation, in general, makes about the same mistakes as the generations before it.

"Perhaps the only true dignity of man
is his capacity to despise himself."
- George Santayana

Lots of people are real jerks.

"Life is a hospital
in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed.
One would prefer to suffer near the fire,
and another is certain he would get well
if he were by the window."
- Charles Baudelaire

Brady Bunch reruns. And remakes of reruns.

"Life is a constant oscillation
between the sharp horns of a dilemma."
- H. L. Mencken

We look out into nature, and see an incessant churning about of animals and plants trying desperately to keep alive. All of them will fail.

"Life swings like a pendulum
backward and forward
between pain and boredom."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

Old Yeller, and Bambie's mom. 'Nuff said.
"Failure: When your best
just isn't good enough."

"All of life is a struggle.
It's a struggle just to get out of bed in the morning.
You're fighting gravity all day long."
- Richard Rose

We are, for the most part, either conscious of our misery, or unconscious of our misery.

Pollyanna was wrong.

"Life is like an onion:
you peel off layer after layer
and then you find there is nothing in it."
- James Gibbons Huneker

Even Spiritual Giants don't really get along with each other.

"Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game
and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards."
- Theodore Dreiser

Most things we want, we will not get. Most of the time, if we do get them, we will not be satisfied with them.

Most goals and dreams we have, we probably won't realize. But, even if we do realize the goals and dreams we have, we'll probably discover that it were the wrong goal or dream to start with. So, we starting working on another one.

". . . take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur and a woe.
But from the same point, take mankind in the mass,
and for the most part,
they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates . . ."
- Herman Melville

We slave away, working very hard for our entire lives. Why, and good does it do? Normally, we have no idea why, we just do.

Seat belts, sometimes, kill people.

"In the great game of human life
one begins by being a dupe
and ends by being a rogue."
- Voltaire

Nature has constructed things in the following manner: with predictable consistency, nature, by design, makes arguably the most innocent, gentle, and perceptive beings on the planet (little children) completely naive, powerless, inarticulate, and utterly dependent on what are often ignorant, obsessed, half-sane, power-hungry beings who gave birth to them.

"We hear that all of creation is 'for the glory of God,'
and we cannot help but ponder
the quality of glory that must be rendered
from the reduction of millions of beautiful beings
into soul-less, senseless fertilizer."
- Richard Rose

"There are moments
when I teeter on the edge of belief that nature cares.
The occasion may be mundane. I may be raking leaves of a gray fall day,
drinking a glass of wine with my wife, Suzie, on our deck at sunset,
waiting with my son and daughter at the end of the driveway
for the morning school bus to arrive.
Gratitude wells up in me as a kind of yearning, as strong as hunger or sexual desire.
I want to thank someone, something, for all that I have . . .
. . . (Yet) A God who deserves thanks
for my good fortune, I had to remind myself,
also deserves blame for the misery of countless others.
Thanking this God for all I have would be obscene.
I would be saying, in effect, "Thank you, God,
for not screwing me
like you've screwed all those other poor bastards."
- John Horgan

Those individuals who see that life, under normal conditions, is hell, become the target of those who happen not to believe that life is hell. Thus, those individuals are routinely criticized, insulted, mocked, misunderstood, ganged up upon, set up to be humiliated, and called names. This does not successfully change their opinion,

"If a man could understand
all the horror of the lives of ordinary people
who are turning round in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims,
if he could understand what they are losing,
he would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for him -
to escape from the general law, to be free.
What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death?
Only one thing: how to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious."
- G. I. Gurdjieff

Everything in the universe is eating everything else.

"The horror!
The horror! "
- Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
and Marlon Brando, Apocalypse Now

Death is an inevitable certainty.

Lots of people say that death isn't the end. But what do they know?

". . . But the time came when I stopped growing;
I felt that I was not growing but drying up.
My muscles were growing weaker, my teeth were falling out,
and I saw not only that this law explained nothing to me . . . "
- Leo Tolstoy

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Life is definitely

Life is definitely not a bowl of cherries.

You come into the world screaming. You're welcomed with a slap, weighed like a head of cabbage, and stuffed into a box.

"Birth is suffering;
Decay is suffering;
Death is suffering;
Sorrow, Lamentation, Pain, Grief and Despair are suffering;
not to get what one desires is suffering;
in short:
The Five Aggregates of Existence
are suffering."
- The Buddha

Pessimists are often attacked and criticized by optimists for being too pessimistic. Yet the optimists are, for some reason, surprised that this strategy rarely changes the opinions of the pessimists.

"Not all pain is gain."

We spend our lives struggling to survive; our goal is to succeed in our strenuous effort to stay alive. With almost absolute certainty, we are destined to fail.

After we're gone, the fact of the matter is that world will get along just fine without us, and the vast majority of the world won't even notice, much less care, that we're gone.

"Human life
must have been some kind of a mistake."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

"That human life must be some kind of mistake
is sufficiently proved by the simple observation
that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy;
- that their satisfaction achieves nothing
but a painless condition
in which he is only given over to boredom . . ."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

"The Good Guys," definitely, do not always win.

Often, it's actually pretty darn fuzzy figuring out who the good guys even are.

"Painkillers," in the long run, often make things more painful.

"Antidepressants" often make us more depressed.

Kids often scream a lot when they're born. There are reasons why they scream.

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utter hell

Why Life
is
Utter Hell

Indulge in The Cold Hard Truth

So, is life really "good," like everybody says?

. . . or is is it really . . . utter, utter hell?

In our daring pursuit of answers to the fundamental questions of the universe, your valiant LiveReal Agents have found themselves confronted by a few basic questions (is life good, or bad?) on a personal level (is life fun, or is it, shall we say, utter hell?)

In heartily following these questions wherever they lead us, we have no option but to try to examine not only the bright side of life, but . . . well, the less bright side.

Although life may be full of hard, cold, brutal facts . . . well, that will not keep us from doing our job.

(Warning: This little section tends to have a somewhat dampening effect on unrealistically positive moods, and is best when used with precaution and taken in small doses.)

(Editor's Note. The following article was compiled by one of our less-than thrilled LiveReal Agents who had been in somewhat of a bad mood for a few years or so. Still, don't shoot - or even get mad at, really, or complain about - the messengers. We didn't make things this way, we're just dutifully reporting them.)

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THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE

THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE

The one who does not know the struggle of life is either an immature soul, or a soul who has risen above the life of this world. The object of a human being in this world is to attain to the perfection of humanity, and therefore it is necessary that man should go through what we call the struggle of life.

Because life means a continual battle, one’s success, failure, happiness, or unhappiness mostly depends upon one’s knowledge of this battle. Whatever be one’s occupation in life, whatever be one’s knowledge, if one lacks the knowledge of the battle of life one lacks the most important knowledge of all.

As soon as a man loses the courage to go through the struggle of life, the burden of the whole world falls on his head. But he who goes on struggling through life, he alone makes his way.

One must study the nature of life, one must understand the psychology of this struggle. In order to understand this struggle one must see that there are three sides to it: struggle with oneself, struggle with others, and struggle with circumstances. One person may be capable of struggling with himself, but that is not sufficient. Another is able to struggle with others, but even that is not sufficient. A third person may answer the demands of circumstance, but this is not enough either; what is needed is that all three should be studied and learnt, and one must be able to manage the struggle in all three directions.

The one who struggles with himself first is the wisest, for once he has struggled with himself, which is the most difficult struggle, the other struggles will become easy for him.

What is the nature of the struggle with oneself? It has three aspects. The first is to make one’s thought, speech, and action answer the demands of one’s own ideal, while at the same time giving expression to all the impulses and desires which belong to one’s natural being. The next aspect of the struggle with oneself is to fit in with others, with their various ideas and demands. For this a man has to make himself as narrow or as wide as the place that one asks him to fill, which is a delicate matter, difficult for all to comprehend and practise. And the third aspect of the struggle with oneself is to give accommodation to others in one’s own life, in one’s own heart, large or small as the demand may be.

When we consider the struggle with others there are also three things to think about, of which the first is to control and govern people and activities which happen to be our duty, our responsibility. Another aspect is how to allow ourselves to be used by others in various situations in life; to know to what extent one should allow others to make use of our time, our energy, our work, or our patience, and where to draw the line. And the third aspect is to fit in with the standards and conceptions of different personalities who are at various stages of evolution.

How does the Sufi Struggle? He struggles with power, with understanding, with open eyes, and with patience.

The nature of life is illusive. Under a gain a loss is hidden; under a loss a gain is hidden; and living in this life of illusion it is very difficult for man to realize what is really good for him. Even with a wise person, much of his wisdom is demanded by life and by its battle. One cannot be gentle enough, one cannot be sufficiently kind; the more one gives to life, the more life asks of one. There again is a battle.

The worldly struggle is outward struggle. The struggle on the spiritual path is inward struggle. No sooner does one take the spiritual direction than the first enemy one meets is one’s own self. What does the self do? It is most mischievous. When one says one wants to fight it, it says, ‘I am yourself. Do you want to fight me?’ And when it brings failure, it is clever enough to put the blame on someone else.

The balance of life lies in being as fine as a thread and as strong as a steel wire. If one does not show endurance and strength to withstand all the opposing and disturbing influences among which one always has to be in life, one certainly reveals a weakness and lack of development.

Every circumstance, favourable or unfavourable, in which a man finds himself, and every person, agreeable or disagreeable, in whose presence he is, causes him to react. Upon this reaction depends the man’s happiness and his spiritual progress. If he has control over this reaction, it means that he is progressing; if he has no control over it, it shows that he is going backward.

When a person progresses towards spirituality he must bear in mind that together with his spiritual progress he must strengthen himself against disturbing influences. If not, he should know that however much he desires to make progress he will be pulled back against his will by conditions, by circumstances

All such things as passion and anger and irritation one looks upon as very bad, as evil; but if that evil were kept in hand it could be used for a good purpose, because it is a power, it is an energy. In other words evil, properly used, becomes a virtue; and virtue wrongly used becomes an evil. For instance, when a person is in a rage, or when he really feels like being angry, if he controls that thought and does not express it in words, that gives him great power. Otherwise the expression has a bad effect upon his nerves. His control of it has given him an extra strength which will remain with him. A person who has anger and control is to be preferred to the person who has got neither.

The only difference between spiritual attainment and the continual struggle of life is that in worldly life one struggles in another direction. In worldly life, be it in business or politics or industry or whatever be life’s path, if a person proves to be lacking in that power which enables him to struggle along, he meets nothing but failure. He may be a good person, a saintly person, a spiritual person, but that does not count. It is for this reason that many in the world lose faith in goodness and in spirituality when they see that this goodness does not seem to count in life. It is absurd for a spiritual person to say that by spirituality, goodness, and piety one’s worldly struggle will be helped. One should have the inspiration and power to answer life’s demands in life’s struggle. The seeker on the spiritual path should not forget that floating in the air is no good; standing on the earth is the first thing necessary.

The point is to meet one’s condition with understanding and with complete resignation. Thus the first thing is to meet the condition as it is and the second is to better the condition. The more one can avoid conflict the better; at the same time we cannot always avoid a conflict, and we must not turn our back on it if it comes to us. After all, life is a struggle and we must be ready to struggle. Only, struggle must not make us drunk so that we lose the way of peace which is the first thing to consider.

The only way to live in the midst of inharmonious influences is to strengthen the will power and endure all things, yet keeping fineness of character and nobility of manner, together with an everlasting heart full of love.

The end and the sum total of all mysticism, philosophy, and meditation, of everything one learns and develops, is to be a better servant to humanity. Everything from the beginning to the end in the spiritual path is a training to be able to serve mankind better, and if one does not do it with that intention, one will find in the end that one has accomplished nothing.

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The Way of Life - "Tao Te Ching" ...

The Mystic Wisdom of Ancient China

The identity of China's mystics is complicated by the rule that no true mystic would know himself to be such.

"Where there is no author, however, it is necessary to invent one; and by the time the Tao Te Ching had been put in form, legend had supplied Lao Tzu, and Ssu-ma Ch'ien incorporated the legend in his Historical Records (Chap.63). It presents Lao Tzu correctly enough as one who had given up civilised and is impatient with Confucian ideas and who accordingly departs for points unknown, presumably to live out life as a recluse."

"Confucius came to Chou to consult old Lao Tzu about ritual." [and spoke of the heroes of old ...]

"Lao Tzu said, All those men of whom you speak have long since mouldered away with their bones.
Only their words remain.
When a capable man's time comes, he rises; if it does not, then he wanders wearily around.
I have heard that good merchants keep their goods buried deeply to make it look as if they had none,
and that a superior man whose character is perfected will feign stupidity.
Give up, sir, your proud airs, your many wishes, mannersims and extravagant claims.
They won't do you any good, sir!
That's all I have to tell you."

"Confucius went off and said to his students: 'I know that birds can fly and fish can swim and beasts can run. Snares can be set for things that run, nets for those that swim and arrows for whatever flies. But dragons! I shall never know how they ride the wind and cloud up into the sky. Today I saw Lao Tzu. What a dragon!'"

"Lao Tzu practiced the Way and its Virtue. He learned to do his work in self-effacement and anonymity. For a long time he lived in Chou, and when he saw that it was breaking up, he left. At the frontier, the official Yin Hsi said: 'Since, sir, you are retiring, I urge you to write me a book."

"So Lao Tzu wrote a book in two parts, explaining the Way and its Virtue in something over five thousand words.
Then he went away.
No one knows where he died."

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