Buddhism - Every Moment We Live is an Opportunity (for understanding) :: Buddhism

Every Moment We Live is an Opportunity (for understanding)     Something that interests us all is ourselves - because we are the subject and main focus ofour lives. No matter what you think of yourself, there is a natural interest because you turn over tolive with yourself for a lifetime. The self view is therefore something that can give us a lot ofmisery if we see ourselves in the wrong way. Even under the best of circumstances, if we dontsee ourselves in the right way we still conclusion up creating suffering in our minds. The Buddha wastrying to point out that the way to solve the problem isnt through with(predicate) trying to make everything rightand pleasant on the external dimension, simply to develop the right understanding, the right attitudetowards ourselves, and to overall proficient do what we can.     Living in the US at this time, we expect harbor and all kinds of privileges and materialcomforts. This makes life more pleasan t in many ways, but when our every need is provided forand life is too comfortable, something in us still doesnt develop. Sometimes it is the strugglethrough hardship that develops and matures us as human beings.      But when we give up or surrender to restriction and to restraint through wisdom, we findliberation. Life is the experience of restriction and restraint, being born in our own skin andhaving to live under the laws of nature. Mentally we can fly to the sky, but physically we arebound to limitations that get more and more restrictive the older we get. This isnt seen assuffering by us because thats just the way things are.      The sense of oneself is something that we are aware of when we are children whenwere born there is no sense of a self as being anything. As we grow up we learn what we aresupposed to be, if we are good or bad, if we are pretty or ugly, if we are smart or stupid. So wedevelop a sense of ourselves. Even when we get older, sometimes we still have very adolescentattitudes or childish emotional reactions to life that we have been unable to resolve except bysuppressing or ignoring them.      There is one way of talking about the self that makes it sound very doctrinal. It seemed tome that Buddhists can sometimes say that there is no self, as if it was a proclamation that theyhave to believe in as if there were some higher being dictum "THERE IS NO SELF BOYS AND