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wake them up? why?
Lets say you wake up from some bad dreams, and are awake in your room.. next to you is a person, having a nightmare.a horrible nightmare, like a super vivid, painful, torture, sadness, sorrow, suffering...
but it's only a dream, their suffering is not real, only imagined to be real,
the thing is the person can't be woken up by normal means, you will have to suffer a super headache that lasts for 1 year. to wake them up.
why suffer to wake them? when there is no actual harm being done to them, except for their own imagined anguish..
(e.g Bodhisattva/Buddhas etc etc) ???
but it's only a dream, their suffering is not real, only imagined to be real,
the thing is the person can't be woken up by normal means, you will have to suffer a super headache that lasts for 1 year. to wake them up.
why suffer to wake them? when there is no actual harm being done to them, except for their own imagined anguish..
(e.g Bodhisattva/Buddhas etc etc) ???
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It all begins in your head, with what you tell yourself.
Everything that you perceive, triggers off a thought.
That thought, is what will lead you towards generating Positive Kamma or negative kamma.
you decide, at the point that thought arises, which way you're going to go.
We're all asleep, until we wake up.
Shalt thou be saved and hear the whole world cry?"
The deepest, most difficult point to understand in Buddhist philosophy is that causality and emptiness are one and the same. This means that even though samsara is unreal, it still functions as if it were. An unreal suffering hurts not one whit less than a real one.
But in fairness to TF, if we generalize his question, it's not that easy to answer. How much are we willing to suffer in order to prevent suffering for others?
The easy answers are "I would endure any amount of suffering in order to prevent even the slightest amount of suffering for anyone", and "I wouldn't endure any suffering, however slight, to prevent the suffering of others, however great." The reason those two answers are easy is because they don't require you to measure suffering. You're willing to endure all suffering or none.
Any other answer that involves measuring suffering is going to be very difficult to answer. If you say that you are willing to endure X amount of suffering in order to prevent Y amount of suffering, you have the problem of measuring suffering. We can't measure pain in any reliable way, so how are we going to measure suffering, which is even more subjective than pain? (Pain at least has a physical basis, which is electrical impulses passed along nerves. Suffering is purely subjective.)
Not only do you have to measure suffering, but you have to measure suffering that won't occur along with suffering that hasn't occurred yet. If I suffer to prevent your suffering, I have to measure both the suffering suffering that will occur only after I make the decision, and the suffering that you *didn't* experience as a result of my decision. And I have to measure suffering at all of the places where it will occur and where it is prevented and doesn't occur. For example, if I prevent you from getting a disease by becoming infected myself, I have to know how much you would have suffered, plus how much the people who got the disease from you would have suffered, plus how much the people who got the disease from them would have suffered, and so on to some unknown degree.
And I have to measure suffering that I have not yet experienced, plus the suffering of people who will get the disease from me but have not yet done so, and so on.
Honestly, I don't believe that there's enough time in the life of this universe to do all the measuring and calculating necessary to answer that question.
In reality, we deal with these types of problems by using rules of thumb that are specific to the situation, and usually don't involve trying to estimate suffering. For example, in response to TF's question, I used a rule of thumb that required me to estimate the probability that I was dealing with a medical problem that was beyond my knowledge and skill. I didn't have to take the person's suffering into account.
The problem with trying to predict how I will react in general is that my reaction depends on what rules of thumb I'm using, and that in turn depends on the specific situation. And there are many situations with which I don't have enough experience to have developed a consistent set of rules of thumb, so there's no way of predicting which rule I'll pull out of the air if I have to respond on the spur of the moment, without time to think the matter through.
So the answer to TF's specific question depends on who you are and what rules of thumb you use in medical emergencies, and the answer to the general question is either one of the two easy answers, or "Nobody knows."
your compassion is leaking outwards rather than focusing inwards
your compassion is distracted
when each of us places our hand in a fire, each of us pulls it out quickly because each of us shares this level of awareness
but the spiritual realm is not like that
for some, one mistake or one perception of suffering is enough to change their life forever
for others, they keep returning to the fire until it consumes them
:buck:
I feel I should be helping people, like a bodhisattva, but I'm too lazy.
I'm afraid, I still have an ego,
My Dad is a good example of what I feel I should be like. This guy is like 72, still works every single day at his own business..
This guy will meet a stranger somewhere, and some how end up doing like a million favors for them.... if you say to him like "oh I didn't sleep well last night" he will ask why, and if you say "oh because it was cold"
he will straight up, stop what he's doing, come over to your house and fix your windows, buy you some wool socks, bring you to the doctor to make sure it's not a health problem,... LOL you know, and he doesn't give a shit about if he's embarrassed, or looks like an idiot- which he OFTEN does, but he always gets the job done..never asks for anything back.
I gotta live in this guys shadow, I just realized he's pretty great..
anyway, I am seeing a lot of asleep people (sufferers)..I think I could really make a difference,surpass my dad, but I'm being held back by, fear, laziness, ego, I'm afraid my ego will suffer terribly on that bodhisattva road... lol I know my laziness is bad, wrong and stupid, useless.. but I do it anyway..
I realize in my life, there is no other direction left to go, no other way to live except to follow in Buddhas footsteps, like the santa claus of liberation...