No.6211
>>63821
It would be too easy for me to ignore you, so I won’t do it. I’ll have you know I read your response, so rest assured it wasn’t a waste of your time writing it, though I must say it completely failed to vex me. I’m afraid you can’t begin to imagine how much harsher I can be with myself, in fact how much harsher I am with myself, every single day, and how much deeper I know doubt than thinking it something as prosaic as religion is slave mentality. You think calling me gay, normalfag and loser is enough shaming? If only you knew the depths of anguish I made myself crawl through, having myself lower than a smudge of excrement, pushed endlessly through an open sewer the size of an ocean. I made myself so low as to be the vomit of a sick crow after eating the putrefied carcass of vermins. If you think calling someone a loser is enough, you haven’t seen much, and I wish I could show you the experience directly, instead of the simile I offer here. I thank you for taking the time to write to me.
>>63825
Thank you for reading, friend. I won’t have a discussion with you about this, nor I’ll try to convince you of what I said about modernity, it should be self-evident by looking at it. It would take writing a whole book to point to you why I think so. To summarize, modernity is the improved means to disimproved ends. Our current system depends on the assumption of perpetual growth, a fairy tale on its own, on one side, and the idolization of self, the almighty Me, on the other; this “wonderful”, modern and improved, secular self, a constructed, involved, vile monster that, for commercial and slavering purposes, needs to have a perpetual, brain-dead, ever-growing and endless want. Look at its core and you’ll find its only ”virtue”, its only purpose: It covets. The nice, secular name for it is Consumer, but suffice a look at it for you to know what it really is. Everyone must be one with it, everyone must incarnate it. So modernity decrees, so modernity demands. Of course, how else are we going to sell all the useless shit around every corner? Machines are too productive, we have to shove all this manufactured shit down everyone’s throat before it piles up. And do it fast, ultra fast, on this very second, forever. It’s not only a matter of physical consumption mind you, it takes all roads, it must crush every other possibility. Everything else must be destroyed. Everything that doesn’t line up. Things like humility, patience, compassion, self-restraint, those must be destroyed, and they have, friend. Completely and utterly crushed and constantly mocked at, in the Holy Name of Trinkets, in the Holy Name of Me. Whatever is left of compassion or any other virtue in modernity is just a mask you put on in order to humiliate others and aggrandize yourself.
Every virtue and spiritual practice must be replaced by brain mushing activities like pornography and video games, so you can pretend to escape while running deeper inside the demon’s gullet, burying yourself evermore, and then feeling stupid and trying to “improve yourself” by studying to get a job it shouldn’t even exist anymore, or it won’t exist soon, and a perpetual sugar high, so you can deform your body and grow disgustingly fat and out of breath in order to be further humiliated to purchase a gym membership. Got to impress the ladies with your farm animal, protein drenched and rotten, chemicals injected body. All achieved through the massive destruction and complete disregard for the welfare of living things, all achieved through the complete degradation and commoditization of all sentient beings. With some “luck” you’ll also get sick and they’ll prescribe some more drugs. You can’t be depressed, you can’t be sad, God forbid, it might cut down on your consumption of garbage, it might cut down on your Self delusion, it might cut down on your trust of the artificial paradise, or worse, you might see through it, God forbid! That’s how all disease is seen in our age, really, reduction of your potential to covet. Thank God you can now have everything delivered to your door. Purchased with one click, defining your mighty self, one click at a time. Can you hear, friend, the mantra people sing? “we’re progressing we’re progressing!” “Try this, try that, try it here and there, there there, always out of reach, you’re not there yet are you?! How lacking! How embarrassing!” “Want this, want that, want everything, want everywhere”.
The nonsense never stops in modernity, it’s one colossal idiocy after another, from the enormous surplus of food that we burn and toss into the ocean, to people dying of hunger 2 hours away from a fully stocked warehouse, to wealth inequality, to apathetic, brainwashed slaves put into service to destroy each other with super tech weapons, to people donating money on streaming services so they can watch a pretty lady talking about her favorite icing colors on birthday cakes. Corner to corner, from top to bottom, inside and out, it’s absolutely and irredeemably evil, disgusting, appalling, deluding, absurd, atrocious, frightening, vain. And we have an army of lost people thinking “Well, whatever, soon I’ll be able to jump on a rocket and escape to some exoplanet! Hopefully all the liquid there will be Sprite.” It’s a tragedy, and what a well built tragedy it is, friend, at making people blind. Improved means to disimproved ends. It had a chance to be marvelous, it had a chance to be beautiful. It failed and it’s giving in under its own weight. It’s insanity and I won’t make one more word here about it. I will block it. I will cast it out.
As for your doubts about sanghas, it's a technical difficulty of the spiritual path for sure, and it’s not of today. Currently, the best I can do is to point you at scripture dealing with this exact problem, which begins, really, with the Enlightened One’s parinirvana. Check the Mahaparinibbana Sutta in the Digha Nikaya, 4.7 on. As for your comment about how Buddha taught and some lost teaching secret, it would be for the great benefit of mankind if we could talk to him and so many others who have passed. That is not, however, how the world works. You know this. Ananda attended the Buddha and personally heard him teach for 25 years. 25! Still, even him, when it was obvious the Enlightened One would not make it through the night, lamented: “I’m still a learner with much to do! And the Teacher is passing away, who was so compassionate to me!” If that was the situation with Ananda, the tathagata Ananda, imagine us. However this is not cause for despair. We’ll have to make due with what we have. We have the canon and we have the sangha and we have Buddha-nature. It has to be enough. it must be enough. The Enlightened One didn’t say, in his last, dying breath: “Give up and go home.” He said: "All conditioned things are of a nature to decay – strive on untiringly.” Strive on untiringly! What a shame, what a waste to have the keys of our liberation and lose it like some 1.99 bibelot from the dollar store.
No.6212
As for your comment about turning away beggars, I remind you, friend, monks beg, but they’re not beggars, they’re monks, and the fact they, in the very least, dared to stand up and go against the grain, against delusion, then and now, is worthy of our respect, admiration and gratitude, even if they fail. As for those who are not honest about the path, they shouldn’t be called monks and shouldn’t be a cause of discussion, or of our concern. As for your idea that the must-monk mentality is poisonous, I disagree utterly, completely. It’s a commitment to liberation and one should be so lucky as to find the necessary trust and martial discipline in his spiritual commitment to become a monk. The way I see it, everybody should strive to be one, to be like one. Every single person should become a monk. I dare believe in this, why should it be different, when I believe in the Noble Eightfold Path? We would be so lucky everyone could master it. As for my own situation, indeed I’ve been lacking, I’ve been indolent, I’ve been foolish, I’ve been found wanting in faith and discipline, I’ve been, most of all, wavering, nor here nor there, too easily exhausted and unwilling, uncommitted, and I confess, friend, many are the hours, days, months and years I wished, like so many of my contemporaries, to let myself go and be crushed gladly by samsara, not giving a shit, taking scraps of fleeting pleasure at some master’s table, not giving a fuck and fuck everything, fuck everyone: escaping blindly, eating blindly, sleeping blindly, walking blindly, masturbating blindly, mocking blindly, laughing blindly, accusing blindly, thinking blindly, and so on, lacking in every virtue, uncompassionate, dulled, uncaring, unwilling, gladly abandoning every good effort and hope, abandoning myself utterly, to the very end of my days. I too sometimes wish, like many others, to be left alone, to be spat on by the demons of the world.
But then, as I’m staring at the ceiling, lying on the floor, in a self-indulgent torpor, waiting to die, year after year, a sliver of Buddha-nature shines through the walls of waste and debris around me, and under its light, I see with most piercing eyes the decay of virtue, of discipline, the growth of delusion, I see myself chewing on excrement, the people around me chewing on excrement, in a hopeless and sad situation, suffering from every malice, adapting to every malice, laughing at a matter that is not at all a laughing matter. Then I bend and cry for hours until my breathing is difficult, and turn once again to the words of the Enlightened One, hoping I can force myself to stay a stream-enterer, to break the fetters and cut this world in one sweep, to dare to be enlightened, to be an arahant.
Well? I know failure all too well. By nothing and no one’s fault but my own. My own fault. And why I come to this cesspit in the back of beyond and spend my day writing this piece of text? Because, friend, there’s a splinter of a splinter of a chance, that someone here will read this, take it seriously, and have the little dust from their eyes removed and will come closer to realize his Buddha-nature. Deciding now to try himself, to instruct himself, to be a stream-enterer. Once trying it, in all likelihood, he will far surpass what little I have accomplished, and my mean attainments will look like dust beneath his feet. If I said nothing I would have done nothing. If I write this and nothing happens, at least I put in the effort, which is more than I can say for myself most days. If people read this and toss it aside, laugh at it, mock, scorn and decide it’s nothing but trash, lies and drivel, I can only tell those people we’re the same, and how are we the same? We’re all men living inside a burning house, and learned to think it funny, to think it charming, to be at the mercy of every accident and tragedy.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, I’ll be finishing the Digha Nikaya >>63804 in a few days, it’s a long work. Once I finish it, I’ll write my impressions here. There’s a lot about those suttas I want to expose for the appreciation of others.