Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Sign In Register
Examples: Monday, today, last week, Mar 26, 3/26/04
Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.

Watching Soccer and Suffering - Answers?

HookahCaterpillarHookahCaterpillar
edited April 2012 in Buddhism Basics
SO my friend says to me today:

and what's wrong with denying suffering? Especially when living in a first world country. Even kids and grown men laugh about and play football to escape the suffering of many an African country. Why not deny so-called suffering here just so you can dream away to a place even more beautiful than the one we live in?

and I bet that by calling life here 'suffering' would offend an extremely vast amount of people on this planet!
It's good to stand still and think of your problem, but sometimes we really have to put things into perspective!
however hard that may be sometimes

so escaping reality is perfectly normal and perfectly harmless and for many a person even necessary! That's why drugs, alcohol, religion were invented

that's why so many support a football team! Being away from reality! Enjoying a game, and thinking it to be extremely important, whilst actually it is not important at all! We think it important because we want it to be important so we forget, for a short moment, our real problems!
people need to release!

Comments

  • federicafederica Seeker of the clear blue sky... Its better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt Moderator
    yes, but release is temporary, suffering is still there.
    release is distraction, meditation is resolving.
  • ZeroZero Veteran
    so many people support football teams because its a tribal thing - its an ancient tradition for tribes to meet up peacefully (almost) and compete - shame that we have to practice forgetting for any length of time - we hardly have enough time to deal with it while we remember! Engage in me vs you to forget the me vs you?
  • ThailandTomThailandTom Veteran
    I never did like football, yes an young English guy does not like soccer! Still, I know a bit about it obviously. It is a tribal thing as Zero said, I mentioned something similar in a different thread a few days ago that if you can get the human species on 2 different sides for whatever reason, they easily become passionate and tribal.

    But the OP is a brief break of dukkha, the way to actually acheive true happiness IMO is when you reach a state of consciousness where you are liberated from all suffering.
  • patbbpatbb Veteran
    your friend since to have it figured out.

    if his temporary solutions were the only available ones, this is what i'd be doing.

    distracting myself by watching sports and getting drunk.


    thankfully there are better solutions.


    getting to the root of suffering and unrooting it.
    which frees us.
    and as a cool side effect, allow us to understand ourselves and the world better.




    ps: ask your friend, what happen if the distractions doesn't work anymore?
    if something happen and the pain is just too great to be overcome by distractions, or simply somehow the distractions ceases to work.
    Would you have any more tools to deal with this "mal de vivre" or is this it?
  • ToshTosh Veteran
    Dukkha is a much better word than simply 'suffering'. Suffering in the West seems to be understood more in a gross way, cancer, broken legs, starving, AIDs - that kinda thing, whereas the word it's translated from - dukkha is far more meaningful.

    But if we must use English, I think 'inherently unsatisfactory' is a better phrase to use than suffering; or 'pervasive suffering' (because it pervades everything) rather than simply suffering, which is misunderstood.

    I mean there are different lists of suffering, but I like the following list:

    1. Gross suffering (even animals understand this).
    2. The suffering of change - that's simple enough to understand.
    3. Pervasive suffering - this is the one the Buddha really taught that should be understood fully.
  • HookahCaterpillarHookahCaterpillar
    I like this further refining of suffering.
    This is important because he interprets my statements that life is suffering as depression and feels it will lead me to more a depressive state.
  • twobitbobtwobitbob
    Football contains suffering too. People cry when their team loses.
  • zombiegirlzombiegirl beating the drum of the lifeless in a dry wasteland Veteran
    edited April 2012
    I think it's okay to distract so long as you know that's what you're doing. I agree with many of his points, but, at the end of the day... the suffering is still there. If we become too engaged in our dream world of escape, we wish to live there. We cannot... this is a major suffering. I think this is the root of much alcoholism and drug addiction.
    I like this further refining of suffering.
    This is important because he interprets my statements that life is suffering as depression and feels it will lead me to more a depressive state.
    On the contrary, by accepting that life will not always be perfect, you have no delusional hopes to fall from. There is great wisdom in knowing that everything is transitory. It doesn't mean that you have to be depressed all of the time, it just means that you don't take anything for granted. Instead of being up and down all of the time, you can recognize when perception is tainting your experience due to comparison.
  • twobitbobtwobitbob
    Does that mean you can use football to explore dharma?

    For instance my team is threatened by relegation this season, a few seasons ago we were pushing for Europe and glory. It's like a microcosm of life.
  • maartenmaarten Veteran
    My opinion is that people that care more also have a greater potential for happiness. Since we are evolving towards happiness (however slowly), caring for all sentient beings is a natural development. At some point, we'll be convinced that for our own happiness we should attend to the suffering of others (which doesn't mean we need to stop enjoying football games), and trying to escape reality will become silly.
  • Kwantum_KevKwantum_Kev

    so escaping reality is perfectly normal and perfectly harmless and for many a person even necessary! That's why drugs, alcohol, religion were invented
    Perhaps so. And that is exactly why the Buddha dave us the Dharma - so we could know a better way than all of that which, inevitably leads to even more suffering (especially the drugs and alcohol, and I speak from experience).

    There is nothing wrong with watching football. But trying to make a leap in logic that Buddhism doesn't allow one to enjoy football, or that we are better off trying to escape reality altogether than come to the realization that in the ultimate analysis, all material is ultimately dissatisfying - well, that seems like quite a stretch to me.

    That would be like people in England and other allied nations in WWII saying, "why should we worry about the extermination and suffering of the Jews in Germany? Don't we have enough suffering already? Let's just get drunk and watch football!"

    Yyyyeaahhhhh... Perhaps you can relate that to your friends and see if maybe they can understand why "escaping reality" is not where's it at.

    Many Blessings,

    KwanKev
Sign In or Register to comment.