What is the human condition?
To put it bluntly, the human condition according to Buddhism is simply a mass of chemicals, both physical and mental, that are both ever changing, and constantly flawed. Beneath all of these false notions that we deem to be ourselves, we don’t have what can be viewed as our Self (big “self”), but are instead focused on the small self of the here and now. We live our lives laboring over things that ultimately don’t matter, which just creates more and more confusion and negativities, both in ourselves and those around us.
What is the solution to this condition? How do we move from problem to solution?
The solution to this is to reject ourselves as a whole. Because life is suffering, and we, who are a part of life and suffer because of it, we need to reject ourselves, which essentially rejects all that is negative about us. We are to avoid cravings, wants, desires, and anything that causes us to create more negative chemicals in ourselves. Trying to focus on the greater Self, instead of the commonly attuned self, is the key to attaining nirvana, which is the state of total rejection resulting in complete happiness. We are to try and focus on the fact that one day we will be free from this temporary five-component shell (body, emotions, thoughts, actions, and awareness), and prepare ourselves to get to our non-person...person.
How best to live the solution in our own lives?
I think that the best way to live this solution in our own lives is to realize that we are essentially born with everything that we could ever need; everything else is just flawed behavior that is inherently passed down from one person to another, creating desires for unnecessary things, actions, and states of mind that any third party would view as crazy. Do we really need these new phones that have a .01 larger width on the screen? No, but our inherently flawed selves tell us that it’s “the best out there,” so in our worlds that makes us part of “the best,” which is utterly ridiculous (even if my phone is better than yours... >.> [I kid {no, really} ] ). We should instead focus on what is needed, such as food and shelter, rather than what style of shoes we’d like to wear today. We should also try to realize that we can’t fix the fact that we can’t, well, fix anything within ourselves, and instead ought to reject the negativities instead of trying to convert them.
The idea that we have to reject ourselves is perhaps a bit too strong. Buddhists accept themselves as they really are--a collection of skandas--and not as we imagine ourselves to be--a permanent self.
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