SarathW wrote: ↑Tue Jun 23, 2020 3:46 am
I see your point, but there is a problem.
I have addiction for sugar and I enjoy it. I wish I can eat one Kgs sugar every day but it is not going to help my health.
The same way, smokers know that smoking is bad for their health and it also a social problem.
This also similar to craving for food and obesity.
So we have to help with the people with addiction.
I had an uncle who had diabetes and loved sugar. He lived almost 80 years. The last few years of his life were difficult as he lost one of his legs to diabetes.
My father was a heavy smoker most of his life. He had high blood pressure and smoking made it worse. He had kidney failure because of high blood pressure and passed away aged 62,
In the case of my father, i remember he blamed smoking for his illness, and advised me to quit, but he never did himself. My uncle never bothered to blame sugar for his illness and death, at least not infront of me.
The problem is not in sugar nor in smoking, but in having an imperfect knowledge in beings that experience pleasure and pain moving towards an unknown future. When this unknown future becomes known, we try to figure out to what extent our actions and life style have been justified through what we like and dislike (which were the main drivers of action all along). In this state of affairs, had my father passed away through a car accident, cigarettes would be somehow blameless and some sort of generalization.
This is the state of affairs that everyone is trying to maintain either by quiting smoking, eating or not eating sugar or anything else. The struggle to continue or to quit is our relentless attempt to find significance and meaning in all of this, which is a part of our misery.
And the Blessed One addressed the bhikkhus, saying: "Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!"
This was the last word of the Tathagata.
