Buddhism & my terrible mistake

I should have known not to become Buddhist!

I walked into the temple wondering how on Earth can anyone become Buddhist? It is like saying how can anyone become a Human! You just are, you don't decide to become one.

Buddhists spend a lot of time telling you that deep down you are a Buddha you just need to clear away the pollution that makes you angry, greedy and selfish to uncover it. They tell you it is all about practice and hard work, and often that it requires no understanding because thoughts do not make us a Buddha.

They tell you many things about what a Buddha is like. They have a very strong "idea" about what a Buddha is like infact! And they often criticise those traits which are not like a Buddha.

As Buddhists we are expected to be "like" something.

If "Buddha" is what we truly are, then how can we be unlike a Buddha? One incorrect thought is that I need to change, or if I cleanse myself I will change to be like a Buddha. You can't change to be "like" a Buddha, because deep inside you "are" a Buddha.

Indeed the problem that Buddha solved was exactly this that our minds spend their whole lives wanting to be like something. We are obsessed about being like something, and also not being like something. People give us a name we don't like, or they give us a name we do like, or they believe things about us, or they don't see things about us which we do.

We might even philosophise about what we are. Try to answer questions about life and death, wonder what will I become when i die. What am I while I am alive. What am I made from, am I a spirit, or am I matter.

The images that we surround ourselves with are miriad and all encompassing. To become a Buddhist is to add just another image to the others. People will be my friend because I am a Buddhist like them. Or, they will see me in a particular way. Or I will have a distinct Buddhist way of life. And people will expect me to be a certain way because I am Buddhist.

Its just more labels and images. So really no one can become Buddhist, it just makes no sense. No one can become human either, it just makes no sense. We already are, all of us!

So you might image that is the end of Buddhism. No.

Buddha did enlighten, I have no doubt. We can enlighten, I have no doubt. Through enlightenment we can end life's struggles, difficulties and unhappiness forever - I have no doubt. Not just for me; for everyone.

The problem comes in thinking that we can do it by becoming something new, by thinking that we will expect changes from our practice, that we will be different after our practice. That the anger, greed and selfishness will be gone - as if that was our goal at all!

The goal is not to be a better person, to have a better character, to improve oneself, even to find more happiness or success in life, not even to be good instead of evil. Any goal is just a picture we have of our new self.

The goal is to have no pictures of ourself at all! What is that like? Well such a question is seeking a picture, something to aim for; but that question is exactly the process which causes the problems of anger, greed and selfishness. We should stop aiming to be like anything new at all! We already are!

The emphasis is not on the being like something. The enphasis is on the being. We should not aim to be anything new, because it is the being now which we already have! We need only be ourselves, quite naturally with no stick to goad us into a new form, and no suggestion that we are not succeeding in being ourselves. We are always ourselves, you can't "become" yourself. There is no enlightenment to attain, there is nothing new.

The only task then is not to be tricked into following an image, or rejecting an image that we associate with ourselves. All images are illusions, all thoughts are illusions - we are always present automatically.

What causes stress, anger, greed, anxiety, selfishness? It is the belief that an image that I hold is better than my reality and I must arise and struggle toward the new image. But you have already arrived, where is the struggle?

So we imagine: it must be better to own a huge house overlooking the Pacific coast, with enough money to last forever, with a happy family, friends, good personal character, and no illnesses. That must be better than what I have now.

But we only think that because we have an image of what we are now, and we form a new image of what we want to be. The problem is in these images in the first place. What makes us think we are any image in the first place? If we are no image in the first place, how can any amount of effort make us a new image?

The truth is that we are now, yes. We are existing, yes. But we aren't any of these things, no. So why do we care about these things?

We must be careful - its not the world we are having a go at, its the idea that we belong to anything in that world. That we are associated, or related, or affected, or own anything in that world. And by world it means everything! even emotions, thoughts and memories. Everything - Absolute.

Its not non-involvement with the world - which would occur if we succeeded in rejecting external events but not internal events. For example we still own our thoughts, so we may wsh to seclude ourself from the outside world which interfers with our thoughts. Its not interaction with the world either which is the normal viewpoint of inner world interacting with external events - some personal some not. Its non-association with everything. So there is no place to go because every conceivable place both inside and outside is an image of self which we are not going toward and do not personally associate with.

The strange thing is that with such a view suddenly all the things we previously aimed toward as an external image of what we needed to achieve, happen by themselves! For that reason we don't need to know about them at all - they are just the biggest delusion of all.

So the irony is that trying to become a better person, and trying to be a good Buddhist, or even a Buddhist is the worst mistake anyone can ever make.

We need only go back to being ourself, better and better every day, and steadily divorse all those things which are not ourself. If people hold bad views of us, if people criticise us - what has this really to do with us? And on the other hand is people hold good views, or people praise us - what really has that to do with us either? They are all images.

Reading this you might think, is the authour enlightened? Or if like me you would think, if he is, I wish I was like that. Or I might think, I have failed because I have not written anything like that, or understood like that. Or you may see errors in this, or you may disagree completely. In all these cases we are imagining what we just read, making an image of it, either an image we want to be like, or an image we don't want to be like. Making a picture of the author, and making a picture of ourself for comparison. Of course in so doing that is already missing the point, because no images belong to you or me. You already have even are what the text is talking about! so there is nothing to do or gain. Certainly don't think about becoming a Buddhist!

Tourism & Home 2

I have to comment in the interwoven ironies in the last post.

The Tourist is characterised by the journey to distant lands, but essentially with the return home in mind. Why else do we travel with camera if we are not going to come home and show people our pictures.

It is a dialectical venture then - journey away but with home in mind especially when we pick up the camera to record what we see for home.

I think I battled against this. I always wanted to travel without a camera. I wanted to forget everything I saw because I never wanted it to be experienced in relation to home. If I was travelling then travelling was what i was going to do, and that means not being at home. To experience not being at home we need to forget about recording things for home. That means no pictures and no thought "wait till I tell people at home". Then we can really travel, actually take our minds with us.

Walking now I remember was a final underline to this principal. If you are going away from home you are going to have to work for it. Walk every step. In retrospect my Lands End - John o'Groats walk was very dialectically linked to home because I marvelled a lot on the way about at how far from home I had walked.

However if we forget where home is we equally forget that we are far away from home, and so travel becomes impossible. The experience at the end of this length of Britain walk was more akin to this - that i had forgotten i was away from home, walking had become my home and so there was no achievement in completing the walk, each day was just another day.

This links very much with life, purpose and goals. By setting a goal or destination away from "home" and working toward it we provide a position on the map of life. We can then plot journeys using this "home". Our life can take shape, we can tell stories about it, mark our successes and failures. Of interest is that such mapping is created by ourselves and that we could up all references and walk a day at a time, taking in what life offers us and never being in a position to think - I have progressed, I have fallen back, life was a success and life was a failure.

It is unusual to meet people who went nowhere for holidays, or did nothing with their lives. The ability to say that I went away from this place for Summer, or that I have done something and now am home is a great plus, it makes us interesting. But isn't their a superficiality here that even the person who can't tell amazing stories of life has still lived? That maybe they carried their home with them so that they never could return home to tell such stories.

Are both possibilities available and are they equally valid? Is it really meaningful to travel away from home, when the being "away" is only possible from the perspective of being at "home", that there is no real being away from anywhere. The wandering monks of India question Alexander the Great to this effect saying "how odd it is that you conquer so many lands when the only land every man owns is that on which he stands".

Tourism and Home

Watching a TV program at the weekend a situation was shown which reminded me of a big problem. A conservation area in Africa means that the local people are not allowed to hunt. Instead they need to perform for tourists and use that money to buy food.

On the surface of it, it seems like a good compromise where everyone gets something. But I was deeply aware of a problem I have seen before.

You see African tribes people in body paints, dancing and waving their spears and singing. There are interesting spectacles and make unusual photos and videos - but what does it mean?

To the people doing the dance I cannot begin to imagine what it means, only that this is the dance which they do, their friends do, which their parents did, which their ancestors did. It is the dance maybe they do at a particular time, it is a dance which evokes certain feelings. Most importantly it is a dance which belongs here with these people, with this music, on this land.

The problem is however that if these tribes people are no longer doing it as they would have usually done it, but are doing it for the entertainment of tourists then it ceases to reveal anything about these people other than they want some money and this is how they get it. They may a well put on western clothing and disco dance if it will get money. By contrast the tourist attraction is that this dance is in someway different, represents something unique to this place - especially since the tourist has travelled so far to see it.

The process of breaking into the tribal world, of offering money for what they do, and especially since they are required now to earn a living this way has changed the whole context of the dances. They no longer represent a distinctly different way of life - as they might have done to visitors in the past, but increasingly are the product of tourism itself. The dance has been relocated from the world in which it was evolved into a new world where it is performed to generate cash from viewers - something for which it was never created.

What will happen then is that being divorced from its creative origin, it will be formalised as a memory of the past (even by its own people). It will be paraded as a stuffed version of the original as a piece of archaeology from which viewers may peer into the past and wonder what world it came from. The more formalised it becomes and the better know it becomes, ironically the more it will have been divorced from its original context and meaning.

This is what they call the "crisis of modernity". That the expansion of economics to every part of our lives, and the power of manufacturing and markets has meant that the products of human labour are very quickly removed from the hands and contexts that created them, and are relocated into a market and the world of anyone who will buy them. The consumer has complete mastery over the meaning of an items.

But with great irony because many objects we purchase we wish to associate with the world they seem to come from. We buy a statue "Made in Africa" because we think it carries in some way a memory of its origin. We buy a perfume marketed under a celebrity name because we think it carries some of that celebrity. We buy a Ferrari because of its image likewise.

In a way this illusion works because other people are also fooled by it. But if everyone is fooled by an illusion does that make the fact it is an illusion important still?

That is a big problem with groups approached in previous posts. What is our interest - to be in agreement with people, or to be clear and truthful about things even if it means disagreement. A decision we need to make at some stage in life!

The fact is a statue carved in Africa is the same as a statue carved at the end of the road - if you like the statue keep it - but where it came from is meaningless... unless you happen to be from Africa yourself and still remember something of the art and culture there which may give that statue some added significance - you would know.

However just being from Africa yourself does mean the statue "from Africa" has anything automatically in common with you. Being "from Africa" is entirely lost in an international market. It is entirely lost in people too. It is the languages, memories and customs which make people from Africa - if its not already there you can't make it happen. Like the statue - if its form does not determine its origin to the observer then its origin is lost, and so its "original" meaning and context. A new one will have been created by the presence of this item. Maybe the one which goes "oh so you are well travelled then - you are an adventurous tourist".

Home is the issue for Modernity. Does anything have a home anymore in a world which spends so much time looking at other people, buying their products, trying out their ideas, clothes, food and music. Like mirrors facing each other, humanity is becoming reflected into itself endlessly. Identities which pride themselves in being so distinct are already inwardly folded so many times. Bin Laden is supposed to have an obsession for pop-singer Whitney Houston who has been seeking spiritual refuse in Israel from drugs and sex addiction - how many cultural and ideological contradictions can there be at once!

The question of "Home" was a central issue of interest a few years ago which I strayed from subsequently - it would be good to revisit this. What is "Home"? When are we at "Home"? especially in the mixed up modern world. Is "Home" a physical place, a social place, or a spiritual inward place of self-identity?

War/ Conflict & Purpose/ Meaning

When there is a war there is plenty of work to do and plenty of purpose.

Opportunities abound to define oneself and be a good person. To be valiant, heroic and brave.

Industry and enterprise also have an injection of purpose - be it to develop weapons or medicines.

War is a great thing for humans because it gives us a direction and a purpose. Winning a war is a goal which is unquestionable and provides us with every inspiration for activity and meaning in our lives.

If we are British we can think of all the great achievements of great men during the Second World War from Montgomery to Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bombs. We can get very patriotic and inspired by such heroes. If we are not British we can think of our own home grown heroes.

But before we get too carried away there is an obvious problem. When two countries go to war against each other are not both nations equally motivated toward equally heroic deeds with the vision of victory equally in their sights?

Like two football teams. Both teams are equally striving for victory and both teams have the same opportunities for purpose, meaning and heroism.

Of course the symmetry breaks down eventually because there will be a winner and loser.

That break down of symmetry is critical to the subsequent understanding of the conflict. The moves of the winning team are understood in hindsight as being constructive of that winning, and the moves of the losing team likewise but opposite.

Of course this is a lie! because at the time neither team knew who was going to win and both were struggling into the void of history seeking that same goal, with the same ferver. The actions of the actors in a struggle are never done with the benefit of foresight, they must be understood in the right context as components of a future which is unknown to them.

I say all that because it undermines the complacent after-the-event view we have of events in conflicts - especially wars -, and it more realistically levels the playing field of the antagonists who are far more intimate and related than in the polarised after-the-event analysis where one is the winner and the other cast into the pit as the loser. They are actually quite equal during the event, before the decisive polarisation of the end of conflict.

During a conflict each team represents the obstacle for the other. And, as each team struggles to overwhelm the obstacle posed by its opponent it only increases the obstacle it poses to that opponent. Until some weakness is found both team simply creates meaning and purpose for the other.

Viewed in such a stripped down way however this reveals a certain vacuity to such purpose and meaning.

If my goal is to destroy or overwhelm you, and yours is vice versa and we find purpose and meaning in our lives through this goal aren't we really just creating goals from a mis-understanding?

You are a fearsome opponent, but if I try to see through you I find that the huge challenge you seem to present me is only there because you see me as an opponent. And, if I stand tall to challenge you then I seem like a fearsome opponent, and if you try to see through me you find that I am only such because I see you as such.

The meaning and purpose that seems to arise through conflict is actually only apparent and depends upon how we ourselves behave. An opponent is just like a mirror and the taller we stand the taller our opponent will seem to stand.

All conflicts are based on illusion then, and the try way to diffuse a conflict is actually to stand small in the face of opposition.

Interestingly almost every religious leader teaches exactly this. Jesus most famously stood very small in the face of an horrific opponent - his crucifixion.

If there is real meaning and purpose in life then it must extend beyond the apparent meaning and purpose that we find in having opponents - either in games or in wars. And by extension in winning and being the best in comparison with others.

And in business there is a good deal of competition. If there is real meaning in business that too much extend beyond the competative elements of the market. Afterall if we only define ourselves in terms of our successes over competitors how vapid is that! and what would we do when we are the best!

I feel this discussion turns down either of two paths now... either 1) toward the life which is self defined - i.e. where we live not in relation to others but in the meaning of things as they present themselves directly to us - we are not best in relation to others, but in relation to our own conscience and sense of perfection , or 2) toward the understanding of all goals and purpose as being illusory... to be continued

Tat Tvam Asi

I was reminded of this yesterday . Thou art That.

It's the central Hindu teaching for the attainment of ultimate realisation - when both body, mind and spirit are fully reconciled with all of existence.

In principal its quite simple - and that is very inspiring - while in reality it is profoundly hard to attain.

It states that the world around us and we ourselves are really the 'same'.

That is not to say that I am the universe, or the universe is me. That is ridiculous. I'm clearly a human being and the universe is a vast largely empty space I will never visit, and conversely the universe is not a knowing thing with awareness called Alva.

It does not mean that I am made out of the same stuff as the universe, and self and universe are just different sides of the same coin. Altho this is a very good step in the right direction. A lot of Buddhism is here. The stuff is called "emptiness" which isn't really a stuff at all but more the experience of phenomena as made from air.

It really does mean that two different things are the same at the same time. In other words knowing oneself is knowing the universe and vice-versa altho they are different.

well actually there is no exact answer because it is something we must realise for ourself and I'm trying.

It makes sense for me of the importants of treating other people like oneself - loving thy friend and enemy - treating all people with compassion that extends beyond how they appear. This is the fundamental training toward seeing the universe as oneself.

The blissful experience of oneness is also to be found down this path.

Is there a purpose to life?

Once we make a decision to do something I notice the planning begins and then the "need to-s" start happening.

I decide to go on holiday. I need somewhere to go. I need to get there, I need accomodation etc etc.

Once we have a goal and are in a situation then there is plenty of purpose and plenty of things to do to achieve that goal.

For another example I decide to do todays Sudoku. Once decided then the "need to-s" start coming as logic reveals where the numbers go.

It always begins with a decision. I guess what I want in life is a starting point a fundamental "need to".

Choice seems to be the key as Sartre would have pointed out, and life is something that we create like artists.

But I always thought that if life is just an arbitrary act of creation then it becomes meaningless. Even art occurs in a culture and tradition which determines what will happen broadly and decisions are made within such a framework.

You could argue that life is a socio-biological process of history, culture and genes within which matrix we make our decisions about life.

But again its just arbitrary knowing that we are being drawn along on a quite meaningless river of time and natural processes.

At least at this point of investigation there seems to be no soild foundation on which to base lifes choices. Life has no obvious theoretical basis and day leads to day and problem leads to problem within a framework which I have no decisive knowledge.

Obvious things to enumerate are the basic needs and processes of biological life, and then social and then spiritual at some later date...

Big Change Ahead?

It occurred to me recently looking at various predictions of economic collapse that those of us who have grown up in the West in the last 30 years have never known anything but continued economic success and progress.

We don't need to look back however to see many complete upheavals to peoples lives. The war must have seemed like madness. The economic depression of the 30s. The War before that and then another opulent period of boom for the fortunate before that.

Now there is the spectre of global warming - something that was inevitable with a moments thought anyway. A limited Earth with exponentially growing human population and on top of that each individual with exponentially growing lifestyle demands - very quickly were gonna ransack the Earth. Obvious.

And there is also the prediction so global economic melt down. The faith is that this time Capitalism has got it right and there are no more boom/bust cycles. But we simply don't know about this animal Capitalism - its a new beast less than 100 years old. In UK there are big problems. House prices were taken out of the inflation measure so while they have been rising in price, inflation has been perceived as low and so the banks have been able to argue for low interest rates... which has encouraged borrowing and spending and so has pushed up prices. So real inflation has been high (try and buy a house in UK now on a normal wage) but it has been conveniently ignored. Since house prices are rising so fast people perceive that they are gaining money and this is remortgaged against loans which fuel spending and inflation more.

The problem is that this inflation has become to creep into the central unignorable economy and that is forcing an increase in interest rates to slow the economy down. If we are lucky the balance will be just right. If we are unlucky the economy will not slow down and interests rates will have to be increased more at the expense of people with existing loans. If those loans become unpayable and people liquidate the rising supply of items especially houses on the market will drop the price, which inturn will invalidate the remortgages as they turn out to be supported by thin air and the economy begins to spiral down. Its classic bust mentality - runs on the bank etc and spiralling bad debt in the economy. (Worst case scenario)

So it occurred to me maybe the future is not going to continue rosy forever. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but one day for some reason I might expect to live in a world which is much harder than it is today. That the little bubble of easiness which I call life is just a period of economic success in a world history which we know has always had its ups and downs.

A sobering thought!