Dalai Lama - What surprises me most about humanity

[amused]

This image was taped to the desk in the room I'm renting:



I know several people working at the state agency I just left who fit that description.

[FBM]

Word.

[hadespussercats]

I like the Dalai Lama. I've gone to your neck of the woods to hear him speak. I think he has a lot of worthwhile insights, that I've found valuable.

Go ahead, guys- make fun of me.

[SteveB]

Insightful comment, but guy is still a douche that for some reason mesmerizes liberal idiots.

[FBM]

Tibetan Buddhism is arguably the most woo-filled version extant, but one doesn't have to buy into all that to respect the guy's other insights. The one in the OP isn't even an uncommon view. Read Walden or On Economy by...what's-his-name, the one who lived in the woods for a while...famous...ah...H.D. Thoreau.

[Bella Fortuna]

It's a worthwhile observation.

[amused]

I've seen it in real people working right next to me. Tragic.

[rasetsu]

This from the jerkoff who keeps the vainglorious hope of a return to his feudal estate alive in the hearts of many, and squeezes the emotional pulp from them to fund him and his aristocracies' privilege and arrogance.

What a cunt. Why must I die while he yet lives?

Buddha and the Dalai Llama, Bieber and Lady Gaga, and so many records, posters and t-shirts sold.

There's more wisdom in a pop song than in all his warmed over rationalizations justifying the continued genesis of a corrupt metaphysics,
an unevidenced and barren ontology, and a level of orwellian double-speak that would make orwell tremble.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Meh, he still puts his robe on one leg at a time.

[FBM]

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh...

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl- ... wald-1.htm

[Audley Strange]

I like it, rationalised apathy.

[amused]

I like it, rationalised apathy.

What? The OP or what FBM posted above yours?

[hadespussercats]

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh...

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl- ... wald-1.htm

Thing is, you have to already have a certain level of economic wherewithal, education, and time to pull off the stunt Thoreau did. It takes money to live that poor.

Still, I love Walden Pond. Used to be one of my favorite swimming holes, before we moved out of Massachusetts. Nice place to set up a cabin and think.

[FBM]

It's easier than you might think, hades. I've done it several times, but not for 2 years. Several months each. A tent, fishing rod, hunting gun and a few bucks for gas to get there and back, the occasional can of beans, etc.

[hadespussercats]

It's easier than you might think, hades. I've done it several times, but not for 2 years. Several months each. A tent, fishing rod, hunting gun and a few bucks for gas to get there and back, the occasional can of beans, etc.

My point is that he could live that way because there was a local town economy where he could buy supplies. He's pretty specific, to the point of being rather dull, what he buys and how much it costs-- so he needed money and a place to buy things.

He wouldn't be living like that if everyone decided to head off into the woods and sit on a chair, thinking.

Hippie mooch!