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Eduardo Valentin's avatar

I find that the denial of suffering is a denial of reality itself. Of the four noble truths "Life is suffering" has always seemed like the most salient, the most incisive, and frankly most obvious of the truths to meditate on. It seems perfectly clear, as Seneca put it "Life in its entirety is lamentable." This doesn't require some act of faith or ascent to certain doctrinal views, it's merely a brute fact of life as we experience it. And yet, we see the modern project's goal is quite literally the denial of reality itself. And of course this suits the machine because it's what helps sell you more stuff. We see among all the noble spiritual traditions of the world an effort to confront these brute realities, but when existing within the anesthetizing opium of modern middle-class life we are able to push this suffering elsewhere until we start seriously believing that suffering isn't part of the deal of existence.

So sure, it's not our children losing limbs in sweatshops anymore, but it's the Vietnamese and Chinese who are working 15 hour shifts in overcrowded unventilated factories that pay the price for our $15 t-shirt. The modern West's great lie of progress is predicated on the fact that it is no longer we who suffer, but rather, the rest of the world. Global capitalism has successfully enabled us to export our suffering and ecological waste overseas! We tremble at Christ's words "In this life you will face trials" because we have lost the faith in his promise to "Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world."

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Peco's avatar

I am unable to practice the Arsenios Option for various reasons, but the search for stillness anywhere is helpful and instructive. I just came back from a walk in the woods with my son. It was beautiful and still, with blue winter shadows and water trickling under frozen streams. But my son chuckled at me a few times as we made our way back, as it was evident to him I had not been paying attention and was quite lost about what path we were on—this, despite having been on those paths many times, and with the sun high in the sky as my compass. What was I thinking about? Some distraction or other. Meanwhile he, with his little brain, navigated like a nimble squirrel.

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