--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_re...@...> wrote: <snip> > I think that a lot of my inability to conceive of > such a belief system is the same thing that gives > me pause with Buddha's supposed First Noble Truth, > that "Life is suffering." Life is *not* suffering > for me. Never has been. Hope that it never will be. > Unlike many, I was *never* drawn to meditation and > the spiritual path because I felt that my current > life was "suffering" or didn't work. I felt that > my life was pretty cool; I was merely looking for > ways to make it cooler.
And yet Buddha would have identified the pursuit of ways to make one's life cooler as the very essence of what he called "suffering." In other words, in terms of Buddha's central premise about life being suffering, there's no essential difference between the person who seeks enlightenment to escape perceived suffering and the person who seeks it to make his life cooler. The difference is only in the relative misery of the life situations of these two people. In both cases, they are experiencing suffering in that neither is fully satisfied with life *as it is* and feel there must be something *better* to be attained.
