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In Your Life, What Is The Hardest Thing To Accept
AllbuddhaBound
Veteran
We often hear people say things like I can't stand liars, or thieves, or pedophiles, or arrogant people. I was wondering in your lives, which is the hardest thing to accept?
Paradoxically, for me it is judgmental people. LOL I imagine I am not like them but I am actually behaving exactly in the way they are by judging them.
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Comments
hmm, well, arrogance is a tough one. Arrogance and judgmentalism can have consequences, you know. In a work context, they can prevent people from getting jobs, from networking career-wise and advancing in their careers, for one thing.
That's a really good question. I guess the quick n easy answer for me would be liars, because there are so many creative ways to lie! The pain and trouble it causes people is heartbreaking.
Mine is liers too. Its still hard for me accept people can look you right in the eye and
tell a bold face lie. Also....injustice. In the online retreat that @Chaz set us up on...one
of the subjects was how hard it can be to accept and sit with the social issues going
on in the world. When your socially active working for the better of the group..it can
be hard to accept some things wont change or may get worse or too slow to change.
It's been hardest for me to accept that there is no solution, no happy Hollywood ending, that everything either dies or crumbles and is forgotten. That there is no 'force' looking out for me personally.
It's been even harder to accept my personal responsibility in all this -- to even begin to understand my responsibility, much less accept it wholeheartedly.
In Your Life, What Is The Hardest Thing To Accept?
Stupid people being able to breed. Not much I can do about it, so I try to focus on making sure I'm not one of them and that I can try to leave the world a better place than when I entered it. shrugs
Good question!
Not much really. People mistreating kids is one I can't fathom but often they've been mistreated themselves so it's just a vicious cycle.
Man's cruelty to man in general (and wo-man). Whether it's lying, swindling, harming, abusing, whatever. What gets me is the fact that humans have the capacity to create heaven on Earth, truly. But look at what they do instead.
The hardest thing for me to accept is whatever I am unwilling to face in this particular moment.
You didnt answer the question. Are u unwilling to? @how
Ignorance.
Everyone knows it. We all live with it. Everyone has it.
Trite?
Must be ignorance.
Ignorance does sum it all up, doesn't it?. I'm detail orientated....hahahaha.....
Trite? Nope. Spot on....but investigations into the causes/roots sure can help wash those nasty defilements away.
The devil is in the details. Was that trite?
Must be too much rum cake today.
@Vastmind
To elaborate on what you found wanting within my answer..
The hardest things to accept are not really the occasional emotional kickers that we can all self righteously get behind but are instead the more continuous moment to moment obfuscations that maintain my own dream production.
I have been alone for a long time (in terms of not having a partner). I have a hard time accepting that I may live the rest of my life alone, too.
Come again?
@Vastmind
Put another way...
Look at the ebb and flow of the phenomena unfolding before you now in each evolving nano second. Our manipulation of that info is the real evidence of what we are actually finding hardest to accept. We do not need to search for the things that give us the largest emotional charges to label as the hardest when the most minute of phenomena that are happening right now is what is really dictating our habituated responses.
An answer can be perfect and complete. Through ignorance we try to make it less than complete. We ignore its possibilities and insist it fulfill our imagined needs.
Our needs are never complete, until we let the ignorance go.
"All Five Skandhas Are Empty"
That's pretty difficult to accept!
Ok....gotcha that time. Thats a tall order, though. I think it takes looking at the kickers and then working in from there. Thats where Zen can get a bad rep, IMO.
Thanks for explaining again. I do appreciate it
@how
suffering in my subtle body from medicines
Lojong a technique in restructuring egoistic thought says to work on the coursest defilements first.
In Your Life, What Is The Hardest Thing To Accept ?
The Ignorance of not knowing...I don't think I'll ever 'accept' it....
As Buddha predicted, getting old, with all the baggage that comes with that.
gifts. Especially edible gifts. Funny it is, too, that in German "das Gift" means poison.
Ignorance is the hardest thing to accept.
The most heinous acts are stemmed in Ignorance.
And Ignorance also limits man's scope of possibilities, breeds hostility and resentment among people, puts blinkers on man's outlook on life.
This covers it quite well for me:
"Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, & despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha."
— SN 56.11
Bodhidharma said:
"When you meet with adversity don't be upset, because it makes sense."
How so?
Ask Bodhidharma
My time machine is in for repairs.
Don't want to sound mean here, Spiny, but the meaning is obvious.
Have done enough explanation for you today...
Not obvious to me - what do you think it is?
I'll give you a clue: it is related with your comment before mine, Socrates.
Otherwise, you can start a thread with that quote, and we'll see who hits the jackpot.
Don't think it is a good idea to derail the thread anymore.
Could it be said that suffering caused by adversity is a good interpretation of dukkha?
I'd like to say dukkha itself is the hardest thing for me to accept but looking back, even dukkha has its use if only in the learning to extinguish.
Found this, which may add light:
FROM: TODAY BOOK, ( emotionsanonymous.org ) "(C)Copyright Emotions Anonymous
Perhaps understand joy as enlightenment?
You see, Spiny? People understood the drift of the quote without much elaboration...
Dukkha is inherent in life, so what would be the point to rail against?
Why insist on wanting it to be otherwise?
Cash in the blow, learn a lesson, grow, go with the flow, accept...
I still don't get the bit about diversity "making sense". Maybe somebody who knows about Zen could clarify?
Not DI-versity, AD-versity.
The most heinous acts are stemmed in Ignorance.
And Ignorance also limits man's scope of possibilities, breeds hostility and resentment among people, puts blinkers on man's outlook on life.
Yes. In the clear of the morning, it's crystal-clear that ignorance is 'it'. Because 'it' makes me want to just sit right down and cry, cry, cry. Things that we read about in the news - things that haven't even happened to 'us' - or did it? So much sad stuff around us.
Thanks to the Buddha-man for helping us out of it, huh?
I have given it more thought for myself and I realize, the hardest thing for me to accept is my own shortcomings that I am not even aware of. Or those that I nonchalantly dismiss as unimportant.
My ignorance of my own foibles is easily the strongest reason that I cannot accept that I have them.
The hardest thing for me to accept is that there is a degree of difficulty in accepting something, and to not accept that is to overlook that difficulty.
Indeed. It is the 'nonchalant dismissal' of the 'unimportant' that ignores that relevant to changing our condition.
You can cry and try yourself silly but where will change come from . . .
It will come from change. Nowhere else, no one else. Foibles exist. Situation is here and present. Nowhere to go, nothing to change our ignorance . . . except . . . us.
Did you want it spelled out? No need. You always knew that.
Here is a picture of a cushion:
Hardest to accept from others? For me it's a toss-up between intransigence and people who always have to make a point.
The hardest thing I've had to accept, or am trying to accept, is that no matter how reasonable I think I'm being... I can't change someone's beliefs. There's a possibility, but I have to take in stride that people aren't machines that can process new information all the same and come to the same conclusions. I've put myself though plenty of frustration in the past, but it's neither my fault that the world is so divided nor my responsibility to patch it up. I'll try, some, but I have to learn to walk away.
For me, the hardest thing to accept in my life is even though fortunately I got very good parents, who provided me good education, which gave me a good job, which lead me to being married to a nice woman and then me having a cute daughter and then me strucking spirituality by studying Bhagwad Geeta, then Buddha's teachings, then Dogen's teachings, so even though I got such a good human life, yet unfortunately it seems to me that I might loose this precious gift without ending the defilements of lust, anger, greed, attachment, hatred and ego inside me. What an idiot I am to understand a little bit about ignorance theoretically, but practically the way it is going currently not even in a thousand lifetimes I might be able to reduce a little bit of ignorance. May be this is why I like Dogen's teachings as everything comes down to just a moment in here and now, which is so small in which nothing can practically be done and yet as the teachings say - a moment is complete in itself.
a moment is complete in itself.
Yep. How about that! Perfectly flawed.
That will suffice me . . .
I sometimes get stuck in difficult emotions so deeply that I feel that I am going crazy and all is lost. Efforts to untangle myself from that net only seem to entangle me more.
It is that which I find most difficult to accept.