The Buddha's Path has proven fruitful for me so far; his progressive spiritual exercises provide progressively greater relief from dukkha (and greater sukkha and bliss that goes far beyond anything that ordinary life offers), the further I advance.
What is this proof? and the methodology acceptable to everyone?
That was an intro. It takes a few posts to lay things out in perspective. Especially when the subject is complex. You focus on suffering, your single main concern is atomistic. Mine is holistic, deals with an host of interlinked, related issues.
I outlined the common trap men fall into when faced with obstacles. Mistaking the obvious for the ultimate. Seeing only the head ache, not the tumor.
The analogy would be seeing a mountain and realizing that blessings, answers, solutions were to be had by reading the top. On the way up, directly, a small path is noticed on the side, with an easy gradient. It's too often that men will take this path, thinking that the solutions will be found there. The deviation will take away the steepness of the gradient, but that is not the problem. The problem is obscurity, lack of direction , and the solution is reached by attaining to the commanding view at the mountain top. Which you cannot achieve if you only think of avoiding struggle.
Other individuals have attacked the problem, and come out with similar experiences, inability to overcome the problem of lack of direction.
Epicureanism is often mistaken to be love of pleasure, worldly, materialistic pursuit. That description correctly belongs to hedonism.
Epicurus was addressing the problem of suffering involved in life and the payback, the compensation for enduring that suffering. His answer was again that life was not worth that suffering. His solution was to reduce the suffering through planned, premeditated, conscious engagibg in specific activities. Remember, he wasn't solving the problem of futility. He was only alleviating the symptoms, just as the person who took aspirin to alleviate the SYMPTOMS of the brain tumor was doing. A stop gap.
What are those activities?
He realized that desire, craving, materialistic pleasure-seeking created it own suffering, so he taught against them. He taught that sustainable happiness was derived from living healthy lifestyle, spending time with pleasant people and enjoying aesthetic presentations. He believed that these experiences would 'cure' the effects of suffering
Interestingly, he fell fatally ill from kidney stones. He stated that memories of his good experiences carried him through the sickness, even whilst dying painfully from the inability to urinate.
Another world view which actively worked to avoid unpleasantness is logotherapy.
Invented by Viktor Frankl.
Frankl claimed people get depressed because they face hard tasks every day. He proposes they set themselves up some easy and enjoyable and ACHIEVABLE task so that they had a sense of achievement.
Also, he taught them to look at positive aspects of situations, as in the anecdote of the grieving husband.
A patient suffering the loss of his wife was told his situation was good. Would he have preferred it if his wife had lived and he was dead? By being widowed, he had saved his wife the suffering he was experiencing. The outcome was a better outcome.
Some criticised his methods as authoritarian. The therapist takes control of the patient's life, deciding on what he should focus on and how he should view it.
Bottom line, even this doesn't solve the problem. Ultimate meaninglessness.
Quote
Here we see one of Epicurus’ techniques for obtaining happiness even in the most miserable situation: instead of dwelling on the pain, recollect one of those moments in the past when you were most happy. Through enough training of the mind, you will be able to achieve such vividness of imagination that you can relive these experiences and that happiness. This idea is well illustrated by Victor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who suffered four years in various concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Frankl writes that one of the few things that was able to give him a feeling of happiness was conjuring up an image of his beloved wife, and engaging in imaginary conversation with her. As he writes: "My mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise." (Frankl 1984, p. 57).
Epicurus
This must all seem like deja vu.
