Judy Stein wrote in message
<19b3c03e.0310211816.52054628@posting.google.com>...

Tang Huyen <tang_huyen@yahoo.com> wrote in message

news:<3F95AFA5.4697551@yahoo.com>...

<snip>

In alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, some stooges of
mine were aware of your (Judy's) Gnostic
position

Tang, I want to respond to your post at greater length
in a day or so when I have more time, but I just wanted
to clarify something in the meantime.

I'm much more in sympathy with Buddhism than I am with
Gnosticism. But sometimes life confronts me with
situations that make me lean temporarily toward the
Gnostic view.

I'll briefly describe to you the same situation I
described to Barry that led him to say I was "whining":
A friend of mine, a vibrant, loving, warm, intelligent,
creative, compassionate person, became seriously ill with
bipolar disorder (manic depression) in her mid-40s.
Medication did not help; talk therapy did not help; the
support of her friends did not help; her deep faith in
God did not help.

She struggled for several years, in and out of mental
hospitals, veering between utter despair and hysterical
mania. Every once in a while she'd have a lucid moment
and would remember what she had been like before
she became ill, but then the clouds would close in again.
Those lucid moments became less and less frequent, her
depressions became deeper, her manias more wild and
destructive.

Finally she committed suicide.

Adopting the attitudes and practices of Buddhism was
not an option that was open to her; her disordered
brain chemistry would not permit it.

Now, thank heavens, I don't suffer like that, and while
I mourn her death, I'm not absorbed in that mourning.

But when I think about her, Buddhism as you've described
it sounds like a collection of the worst kind of happy-
talk platitudes; and the characterization "whining"
strikes me as unspeakably vile.

Krag: And that's the thing. It's all very well to say you can be happy no
matter what, but the people who say these things aren't the ones who are
usually sufferring. Or if they are, it is monor compared to some people's
sufferring. They can say, "If I was that person, I wouldn't have their
attitude" but that is absurd. If they were that person, they'd have and be
everything that person is down to the last and smallest detail of mind and
body, attitude and all. This, "make the best of it" is aborrhent to me.
It's
compromise. You're making a concession to nature and an unacceptable
reality. I refuse to chase after worldly happiness or sensual pleasures,
because something in me makes me nature's superior. The point is to
overcome
the world, as Christ said. If you chase after nature and the world, they
flee from you. If you stand firm and desire nothing, nature becomes your
slave.