Life is full of suffering
Suffering is caused by desire
To eliminate suffering, one must eliminate desire.
These are the first three of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and I have found myself lingering over them in my studies. It's not because I'm a Buddhist, in fact I thought myself to be a fundamentally non-religious person. I never sought a god figure or worshipped anything in my life. But as I thought on the subject of my beliefs, I discovered that I do have some. And so, in the spirit of Buddhism, I meditated on it. This was something I had never before attempted and found it a much more difficult task than I had ever assumed it to be. Not only to sit calmly, but to focus on ones own mind, and maintain that focus for a length of time longer than a few moments. The world is a loud, busy place, even when hidden from it in private quarters, so to simply sit and focus for just ten minutes was quite arduous. But as I emerged, having spent nearly an hour doing nothing, and coming out with only ten minutes of total concentration, I felt a sense of satisfaction. The type I got when I ran and had been able to push through a particularly painful stitch and fall into a rhythm. Ten minutes is nothing, but to me, in that moment, it was something significant. I was able, for those ten minutes, to forget my hunger, forget my school work, and think entirely about the content of my mind. These were my thoughts:
I believed religion to be false. It is a source of pain, war, devastation, and injustice. Religion is the act of believing in a deity and a story which has no evidence to support it, and putting such faith in that imaginary subject that one would kill to defend the mere idea of it. Faith in a god is the last hope for those who cannot think to govern and guide them selves.
I cannot hope for a god to exist. Far be it for me to judge the existence of a magical figure in the sky. The only thing I know is myself. I exist, whether here or in my dreams. I am there and can feel and think and touch those around me.
But I am also a victim of the world. Society presses in on me at every moment of every day and pushes me in the norms. I want a new pair of boots and no matter how I try to justify the purchase, it comes down to a desire to look a certain way. It's cold and snowy, and there are boots here already, but these are not those boots. I have a desire which is completely unjustifiable and yet, I dwell on it, wasting my own thoughts on something material and fleeting.
Religion is not the act of believing in a deity. It is the act of believing. And this is something I cannot possibly condemn. I believe in science and history and philosophy. I believe in the power of human beings. I hope, with desperation that I am capable of more than science and history tell me I am. The complexity of life is too much for science to fully explain. I believe in hope. And I believe in the power of hope to give people a reason to live in a world of pain. I do not presume to change peoples' legitimate belief and hope in a god because without that hope, what reason is there to life? I can only hope that a person can choose that god for them self. Seek the manifestation of their individual hope. What is my manifestation?
At that point, someone slammed a door in the hall outside my room and jolted me back out of my head. In retrospect, my thoughts seem odd. I wondered idly if other people think of these things as well. What goes on in the minds of the people around me? The old man on the bus or the girl across the hall who makes silly noises with her friends to amuse them? I picked up the stuffed Peter Pan that sat on my pillow and looked at him. I looked out the window and admired the sparkling of the snow in the mid afternoon sun.
Meditation is a useful thing, I think.
M.G.
No comments:
Post a Comment