i would like to share an insight on Suffering and Samsara.. >>Link>>

[sam sarrha]

this is the best explination i have run across..

http://www.esolibris.com/articles/buddhism/samsara.php
"snip...." Many people think of it as the Buddhist name for the place where we currently live -- the place we leave when we go to nibbana. But in the early Buddhist texts, it's the answer, not to the question, "Where are we?" but to the question, "What are we doing?" Instead of a place, it's a process: the tendency to keep creating worlds and then moving into them. As one world falls apart, you create another one and go there. At the same time, you bump into other people who are creating their own worlds, too.

The play and creativity in the process can sometimes be enjoyable. In fact, it would be perfectly innocuous if it didn't entail so much suffering. The worlds we create keep caving in and killing us. Moving into a new world requires effort: not only the pains and risks of taking birth, but also the hard knocks -- mental and physical -- that come from going through childhood into adulthood, over and over again. The Buddha once asked his monks, "Which do you think is greater: the water in the oceans or the tears you've shed while wandering on?" His answer: the tears. Think of that the next time you gaze at the ocean or play in its waves...snip"

[GliderGuider]

1. That rang a bell for me at this moment in my life.

As I read the article I had a flash of insight regarding my lifetime of intimate partnerships and how very much they resemble samsara.

I'm just coming out of my fourth long-term relationship in 40 years. All of them have brought joy and learning but have also entailed significant suffering. All of them were with one particular type of woman, or more exactly with women who all shared one particular significant characteristic. Each relationship started off in hope and expansion, went through a phase of increasing suffering and conflict, and then collapsed. In a sense my relationships "kept caving in and killing me." At that point I went on to create and move into a new relationship that simply recreated the conditions of the previous one. I wandered from relationship to relationship in exactly the way that the Buddha described samsara. The analogy is beautifully precise.

The cure for the secular version of samsara seems to be the same one the Buddha prescribed for the spiritual version: wake up. In the course of the most recent cycle of my personal samsara I have awakened. Fortunately my beloved is on the same path I am (she was instrumental in my awakening), so we've watched the change together. That of course had its own form of suffering. The relationship is now ending, and we are subjecting it to a sort of postmortem, examining the dead relationship to illuminate the qualities of the living participants. I have seen the workings of the mental machine that drove this cycle in my life, and I dearly hope I can now give it the rest it so richly deserves.

Thanks for that pointer, sam sarrha. It really helped.

[ZombieHorde]

2. That is really interesting.

Samsara makes more sense to me as a verb.

Thanks for posting.

[westerebus]

3. I asked the well-digger:

What are you doing?

I'm digging a well, he said, what a foolish question.

Why is the question foolish, I asked?

I am a well digger, it is what I do.

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A monk passing by heard the conversation and paused and inquired, Is there water in your well, well-digger?

What a foolish question monk, he said.

How is it foolish, I asked?

Ask the monk, he said.

Monk why is this foolish, I asked?

For all his presistence and hard work, the well-digger is tied to his task, said the monk, water will find him if it so chooses. Not the other way around.

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