How often, if at all, do you wish you weren't born?

More often . Seems like I have no purpose, can't find my thing, never-ending supply of problems.

What's the point of life?

What's the point of being here?

To work everyday to pay for a box to live in and a maintenance for a car to drive to work?
To pay for insurance?
To deal with flakey people and never Garner any real connections?
To never be included?
To never experience love?
To work til you die?
To help other,? What for? What are we all here for?
An experiment?

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SW-User

Never have I thought that, or wished that. I have known terrible loneliness, anxiety and depression. I am by no means out of the wood. But I genuinely give thanks that I was born and have never ever considered suicide as any sort of option.

Maybe this will not be understood, but like all things, Reality can be paradoxical. It is because our reality is "meaningless" - i.e. that there is no predetermined, fixed meaning to be discovered or found - that meaning can be realised in spontaneous creativity, in tandem with Reality itself as a constant advance into novelty.

In this sense, to experience a total "pointlessness" can prove to the catalyst of genuine transformation. Though it does - certainly for me - require faith/trust. Sadly, many identify/equate faith with "belief", demand "evidence", and therefore can condemn themselves to continued pointlessness of a perverse kind.

JimboSaturn · 56-60, M

@SW-User I think just let go of the idea of a point. Why must there be a point to experience life? I don't need a point to love my daughter or admire a sunrise or be moved by music.

SW-User

@JimboSaturn Yes, just as the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart has said:-

"Love has no why"

SW-User

@SW-User Just to add, the thought of the Japanese zen master Dogen (13th century) is now becoming well known in the West. At one time he was seeking his own answers to the questions life will always pose, seeking his very own path, time and place. Other masters that he himself sought answers from would speak of the "dropping of body and mind", and during one meditation session the monk next to him slumped forward. The master struck him with his stick and cried out "how dare you sleep when you are seeking to drop body and mind!" This "awakened" Dogen.

One excellent commentator on Dogen's thought ( Hee-
Jin Kim ) has explained:-

To cast off the body-mind did not nullify historical and social existence so much as to put it into action so that it could be the self-creative and self-expressive embodiment of Buddha-nature. In being “cast off,” however, concrete human existence was fashioned in the mode of radical freedom—purposeless, goalless, objectless, and meaningless. Buddha-nature was not to be enfolded in, but was to unfold through, human activities and expressions. The meaning of existence was finally freed from and authenticated by its all-too-human conditions only if, and when, it lived co-eternally with ultimate meaninglessness.

Which may all seem a bit "deep" and over the top, and even make others ask....so what is the point...😀

Which is the point. It is not sentimentality to see a mother's love of her child as being an expression of true Reality. I think that in seeking our own path, time and place we can perhaps extend the essence of such love in ever deeper intimacy towards our world and to all others, and all things, in it.

That's all.

JimboSaturn · 56-60, M

@SW-User Have you ever read the book Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins?

SW-User

@JimboSaturn No, I'll look it up. Is it good?