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tthom580 said: Ok, hypothetical situation for you to tell me how they should move on and accept it. A girl lives in an african village with her family, one day, rebels come kill her whole family, destroy her village, and take her along so that they can rape her every day. Now how exactly would she go about accepting the fact that anything in her life that's ever made her happy is either dead or burned to the ground, and her current situation is physically and mentally scarring? I realize that people can accept that their girlfriend dumped them or that their dog died, but there are certain kinds of pain that I don't understand how you can say someone could just accept it.
Acceptance does not necessarily imply resignation. I'm sure you realize this is an extreme example, but even in such a scenario, you can accept the circumstances just as they are, instead of causing even more suffering for yourself by fantasizing or wishing they would be different.
A few decades ago, the Chinese were violently persecuting Tibetan monks and torturing them. However, after these practices ended, the monks were fairly psychologically sound. After such events, it would be no surprise to find out they had PTSD or a whole host of other traumatized reactions. However, they didn't really. When they were asked about it, the monks talked about how they accepted their circumstances and offered as much compassion as they could to their torturers. What remarkable human beings.
If you say acceptance of some situation or circumstance is not possible, then that most likely reflects some belief or attachment of your own, to the idea that life should be as you want it to; that you can't be happy if you're experiencing pain or discomfort; etc.
We all have these sorts of obstructions to unconditional acceptance (love), and practice is about becoming aware and letting go of them.
-------------------- "What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering?" "Belief is a beautiful armor But makes for the heaviest sword" - John Mayer Making the noise "penicillin" is no substitute for actually taking penicillin. "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -Abraham Lincoln
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