Some Buddhism then...

Had a break and got a different mind on now. According to the tapes yesterday and also this great recording from Ven Ajahn Brahm

http://www.bswa.org/modules/mydownloads/singlefile.php?cid=4&lid=483

Death of course is one of the things which had Buddha so unset too. And we know that he gained realisation of why it was so upsetting - so with Buddha there is hope and joy and happiness - so I ain't despairing, its just my continued ignorance, proof being the pages on this blog.

the thing which struck me yesterday was how completely wrong we have got the world. I've always rallied again the "world order" from a philosophical angle because it seems to completely get it wrong and worse fills our heads with ideas whose only purpose is to play us into the hands of the power-mongers.

Ironically lots of people follow Nietzsche into thinking that religions are ideas that play into the hands of the power-mongers. Kings love most religions because they ask people to be odedient, hard working and non-violent. Great for a King cos it means no rebellion. Irony tho because it is the religions which teach us liberation, and the other ideas work with the very poison that the Kings have given us.

Imagine I'm sitting around a nice middle-class dinner table (viz Bremner, Bird and Fortune if u watch TV in UK) and through the haze of talk about interest rates, holidays and how the kids are doing I suddenly announce that I was created from a cell that budded off my mother and grew within her.

Its almost like a bit of Kafka. We startle at the terrifying reality that Gregor finds himself in - a huge beetle lying on its back. Well its a similar experience to find that actually I was born from a tiny blob that budded like a wildlife documentary on corals from my mother and then grew within her belly. All that water and biological humours, microscopic cell stuff going on. But actually that is the underlying truth behind this man-of-pretence who pretends to be a mature adult sitting at a keyboard with a job and a bank balance and who can do stuff. I'm just a blob, and the rest is as real as the fashion garments that they hang on models.

So in the same way as I began as a microscopic blob pinching off my mother, so its no more bizarre to suppose that I will die also.

These are things that all the tapes I listened to point out - that we are completely hidden from the truth about reality. Hospitals, old peoples homes, mortuaries, funerals, cremations all sanitised - we never have to deal with what is really going on, all the time all over the world.

The vast power of the demon Death has been made clear to me. There is no way to keep him away. We can dodge him, we can even murder people ourselves to spite Him, but in the end he is the one who always catches up with us and takes what belongs to Him. Whole galaxies must succumb to his power, whole universes - he is truely an unmatched force.

Every petty thing we dress our lives in, every pointless belief, dream, hope will be ripped from us brutally and destroyed when the time comes. There is no escaping, and no where to hide from this barbaric force. What little we think we have - we believe so with utter childish vanity because we have failed to see the tide creeping up behind us, which will dash every single sand castle and leave no remain. Such is the power of Death that even Buddha could not escape it. He died like everyone else.

So they way forward and what I have been keeping in the back of my mind today is this.

If every single thing in the whole world is just a weak piece of paper through which Death will burst his head any minute and eradicate completely and unrecoverably then that leaves us only one place to be...

it is right here and now. Death cannot take that from us!

Why can't he take it from us? because it is actually here in actual existence right now. Take it and he takes what was yesterday! Threaten to take it and he takes tomorrows dream. What he can't touch is today.

I have learned through all this that life is too short to spend on dreams and hopes. It must be taken today. I have also learned that each and ever person lives in fear of the Great Demon Death and in that we all share an enormous comradeship. We are to be there for everyone always right here and right now because that is all we have.

The stuff before on believing in yourself before you can help others is relevant. We must believe in ourselves because otherwise we rob others of a good friend.

Ex is on MSN...laterz