Back to Buddhism 4real

Finally got around to picking up Walpola Rahula's "What the Buddha Taught"... it had answers to most of my remaining questions on Buddhism and set me back on track...

A whole load of things coming together at the moment ... a "life" coming into perspective and I wonder if the difficulties (part expressed in this blog) but going back all my life are just random or have a direction and a fit together into a big jigsaw puzzle... it started to look that way last week.

I'm researching a book as a vehicle for all these issues and finally they're coming together.... its called officially "Human Ecology". It encompasses the whole range of difficulties I face accepting the Western lifestyle of what for me is pointless "labour and production". It becomes even more absurd when you hear politicians saying that we must "shop" to save the economy! What if we don't need anything? The economy drives our lives, its a machine that we have come to serve and it no longer serves us.

But people are too afraid to challenge the dogma of the last 250 years, and the dogmas of growth and progress.

The reading I have been doing is actually pointing to the unbelieveable conclusion that there really has been no progress ever in human existence. But to get this conclusion you need to step outside the box which measures everything in techonology and profit.

Western society fits into what you might call a "slave society" but the slaves have been replaced with machines running on fossil fuel. In theory then like all slave societies we should be getting a large educated leisure class. This is what I have been championing myself. Oddly despite the economy becoming 4% more efficient year on year there are not 4% more people not needing a job. Why is this? On the surface it is growth - the belief in endless progress. In the machine it is because there is no accepted distribution system to people without a job (unless they have capital and can sponge off the economy through interest charges and dividends). This is why the capitalists hate "the work shy" because that is what characterises capitalists - the ability to get an income without doing any work. Not a criticism just a fact of the system. Someone somewhere has to stop working because there are not enough jobs to go around! And the dogma has it that the rich can stop working, but the poor "should" work.

This feeds into the ancient social heirachy view of mankind. That people form "classes". Not necessarily economic, there are blood-line classes (the Kennedy's, Bush's etc) and social classes like the Indian Vedic system. But however you look at people they form into groups and but distance between one another. Good to be in a gang because you get that feeling of society, but it labels you and puts you against other gangs: humans sadly look to form society not realising that at the same time they are excluding other people and creating division and anti-society.

What has been totally missed out of the view so far is the actual corner stone of human "life" and also the root question of this blog: what is all this really about and trying to achieve. Well thanks to Buddhism I've a way into that question once and for all!

The straight answer is that the meaning of life is "nothing".

That sounds like b**ls**t but it conceals a very profound truth. The problem with the human mind is that it tends to give far too much importace to itself - to its faculties of thought, imagination, dreaming, emotion, memory etc. Well we can dream all day, and think all day, and feel fantastic or rubbish all day but actually it makes not a blindest bit of difference to the "world". All this is just one side of human experience.

The other side is "reality". Now that is a truely hard thing to grasp because we "think" how can I grasp reality without my "mind". See the mind really hates the thought that maybe it is not really all that important. It will fight this point forever so I won't take it up here... (I'm in a hurry).

Buddha decalres on enlightenment that "there is now no longer survival". Noone seems to make a big deal out of that... but its the key. Human life (like it or not) is characterised by survival - be that finding food, medicine, a job, education, family, being "cool", carrying a gun or credit card: its all about surviving or maintaining ourselves.

Buddha points out that there is nothing which lasts forever. If it did it would always be here, and it would never go. In such a world we wouldn't need to work for starters. There is no thought, emotion, thing that we have always had and losing it makes us want it back - this is the root of survival.

We have some imagination of things that live forever - God, the soul, myself (maybe if we believe in life after death). But these are exactly that: imaginations. They are fine and just as good as the thoughts and imaginations of people who don't believe these. But we must be clear there is nothing in reality that leads us to this belief. That's just plain and simple.

But the point is not to fill our imagination with lots of things that we "think" do inhabit reality. That makes us the same as the people who fill their imaginations with things that are not in reality. That doesn't escape the mind. The point is to be sensitive to reality as an ongoing process. It is in that sensitivity that we find "life" - not the thoughts, theories, books and science that issues in vast array from experiences of reality.

When we accept reality as a thing separate of our "thoughts of reality" then we are on the way. I spent years of my life confused on this point because I argued (and can argue still here) that surely all knowledge is in the mind and so we can't experience reality directly - see Descartes and many, many dualists since. Whatever we conclude however we must ask: is that a knowledge or is that reality? How for example can we gain "knowledge" that knowledge is separate from reality? What is truth if we can't experience "reality". Its a mine field of twisted mirror imagies: don;t get bogged down in it that is my advice. Basic point: if you "experience" then just do it and do it properly and with commitment and worry about what you call your experience some other time.

So when we see reality we find that it isn't really "this way" or "that way" it is just its way. It is the mind which steps in and compares and measures things - this way, that way, right way, wrong way, good way, bad way. Actually silly mind - there is only ever "the way". When we see that it is, then we see that what was "survival" and the tight rope over the pit of sadness, loss, death and all the bad things we fear if we stop surviving: is actually just reality and not so fearful after all. There is no pit, all things that can happen are quite natural, none are good and none are bad in reality: only good/bad against our imaginations and our minds and our wishes and wants.

A life without wishes and wants than? Is it possible? I'm still trying at the moment but now I'm making some progress. Its odd that we fear not having the things we want because we imagine that "nothing" is depressing. The economists think that being poor and having no job are depressing. Actually its the "economy" that makes us think that. When asked on Radio 4 last week what made us happy, the woman who had been explaining the new research that showed that happiness does increase with wealth, said that "going on holiday with friends" would be a good way to spend your money rather than on all the new gadgets. In other words the new research has found nothing: that the things that are free - friends and a good time are what we should seek and not the things that are expensive and "new". My argument here has always been if its new and you've been happy before, then it means you don't need it. If you've never been happy before then maybe you are looking in the wrong place. "New = ignore" in my book. (I wondered who was paying her to do the research: just the usual "new" American rubbish.)

So "nothing" is the answer because the mind wasn't the right person to answer it! It is Reality that must answer the question of "life", and what is in our minds is just the dogmas of morality, religion, science, economics, politics ... that are vainly trying to compete with reality.