my buddhist blog number 167

Hi Everybody,
New day. New chapter in UK's history, article 50 and all that. New Chapter in the book...Buddhism and the Problem Paradox.!! OK here we go.
' Man was born to troubles as the sparks fly upwards, Job tells us eternally in the Old Testament, but few of us if any are prepared to accept that as an accurate description of the reality of our lives. No way. We're simply not having it. No one wants pains or problems, or the anxiety and the tension and the stress that arise as they threaten to emerge in our lives. So the natural human response is to argue that since we can't stand them, we have to get rid of them! And that in fact is pretty much what we try to do. In our modern societies we spend huge amounts of time and money and energy and ingenuity in trying to create a defensive network to keep the challenging and the anxiety-creating side of life at bay. And where we aren't completely successful in the barrier-building business, as we can't be of course, we have evolved a whole series of secondary strategies to fill the gaps.

So we ignore them for example, or run away from them, in the hope that they will just go away or evaporate. The reality is of course that problems ignored have a very nasty habit of becoming problems magnified, so that what was once readily solvable, if only we'd had the courage to face up to it when it first emerged, can become something so big that it can overwhelm us and knock us over.

Or we very commonly dump the problem onto someone else. That is to say we mentally shift the blame or the responsibility onto someone or something outside ourselves, pointing to anything so long as it's not us, as the source of the current difficulty. If there are problems within a relationship for example, it's not our problem, it's clearly because the other half of the relationship has to change something about themselves in order to put things right. If there's trouble with the boss or colleagues at work it's bound to be because they are being totally obstinate or unreasonable or unfair. Everyone can see that. So we end up in a sort of impasse.Nothing changes, and the frustration or the friction keep on recurring, to the extent that it can lead to the break up of an otherwise fine relationship, or people being stuck in a state of tension or dissatisfaction at work.

We have all been there at some stage in our lives, and many times more than once.

So what can we do about it?
Watch this space.
See you next time hopefully,
Best wishes,
William
The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon in English and Spanish.
And as a download on Kindle.