Walking in circles?

[purnell]

Trick question. The answer is:

e) all of the above

[ifoldaces]

That's nice.


Except it has nothing to do with the thread.

[SlowStroke]

You have it on pretty good authority that existence is suffering?

I'd say that you were misinformed.

[Maddog121]

The only position it really takes are those "four noble truths". The way I had it explained to me as far as appearing to speak on all sides of the philosophical questions is that the only goal is enlightenment. If you are giving instruction to multiple individuals you need to give different directions. If an individual is on the right side of the the goal, you tell them to turn left. If they are on the left side of the goal, you tell them to turn right. If they are in front, you tell them to walk forward. If they are behind, you tell them to move backwards. That is why they say you should be careful if you are just reading the texts. You don't know who the target audience is.

[MtDon]

This may be a more practical way out of your quandary.

Think about quantifying your fear of pain and suffering.

There is a wide range of pain and suffering, both in type and degree. There is physical pain and emotional pain. Pain that you hardly notice and which lasts for a second or so, to excruciating pain that lasts for days or weeks or months.

Also, you may want to quantify your fear, or lack of fear of death. What keeps you from doing things which might be fun but have a significant chance in resulting in your death with little chance of pain? Such as jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 ft without a parachute? (This is assuming you think the free fall would be fun and that your death on impact would be too fast to feel any pain.)

There are, of course also degrees of fear. You may fear something so much, there is nothing in the world which would cause you to experience it voluntarily. And there are things you fear to a lesser extent which you will experience for a good reason.

[purnell]

Thanks. While I don't think it would be fun to freefall from 10k feet, I see your point. I don't do things that would be likely to result in my death without pain (heroin overdose, e.g.) because of the pain it would cause to the people who care about me.