> CB: Why would making hay just be wasting a human life ?
Besides Brian's answer, which I agree with, that "making hay" entails creating suffering for others, I would add that it is ultimately not so hot for the hay-maker her/himself. Yes, one can feel satisfied for a while by satisfying one's desires, especially very strong ones that blot out everything else in one's awareness (perhaps this is one reason for the attractiveness of addictions of all kinds, from drugs to sex). But eventually that satisfaction passes (one of the principal assertions of Buddhist teaching is that everything, pleasurable or painful or neither, ultimately passes), and one has to start over again. The question is, is there anything that does not betray one the way pleasures do (that was basically the question Goethe's Faust asked, too). Looking directly and without preconceptions at one's actual fleeting experiences of pleasure, pain, and neither-pleasure-nor-pain is the first step to answering the question.
And Dennis Perrin wrote:
>> Since the idea of rebirth doesn't cut much ice with most Westerners .
>> . .
>
>> Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
>
> And it's not particularly desired by Buddhists either, right? Isn't
> the idea
> to stop the chain of rebirth, since life in this samsara world is
> primarily
> suffering?
Yes, but by "not cutting much ice with most Westerners" I meant that most Westerners' world views are such that rebirth doesn't mean anything to them -- it's even more ridiculous in the eyes of a lot of secular Westerners than the Christian heaven/hell idea, which they are at least more familiar with.
The late Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa, in _Spiritual Materialism,_ outlines an understanding of the 6 traditional "realms of rebirth" (hell, hungry ghosts, humans, etc.) as 6 states of consciousness in this life, which makes the concept more understandable to secular Westerners, perhaps.
(He was also a notorious drinker and womanizer -- so much for the idea that Buddhism enforces renunciation of pleasure. But those Tibetan teachers often tend to get rather wild :-) .)
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax