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| Instead, people’s
lives become meaningless and purposeless. Often people take to drink or drugs, just to get
a break from the endless concoctions of negativity: the fear and desire, the doubt and
worry, the anxiety, the selfish obsessions with themselves, the blaming, or the fear of
being blamed -- and all the rest of it. Then there are the wars, persecutions, atrocities,
and endless quarrels that we experience or hear about. In this century there has been just
one war after another, plus all the innumerable conflicts that go on that get called
"police actions" or "coups d'etats" or whatever. Whatever you want to
call them, these are forms of misery! What are the causes of all this? Why do we seek to
solve problems or try to create a better society through such violent means? The Buddha's direct pointing at the problem is to the delusion we have: the ignorance (avijja) of the suffering, of it's causes, of the cessation of suffering, and of the Eightfold Path leading to the cessation of suffering. This is the ignorance of not having investigated, contemplated, and reflected, of not having penetrated with insight the truth of the way it is. When this is the case, then our relationship to the world -- to each other as individuals or to the society as a whole, will always be a source of suffering. |
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| Yet there’s still something
marvellous in this universe -- even in a world in which people are struggling to survive,
and trying to control the disease, the sense of loss, the fear of the future, and the fear
of death. We still have an aspiration towards the ultimate realisation, we still have the
basic religious impulse: the intuitive feeling that somehow there's more to it than just
this individual existence that we're experiencing. So in the religious life we start looking at the war that goes on in the mind in daily life, at the conflicts that arise because we have ideas about how things should be. We would like everything to be harmonious and everybody to be honest and helpful. We would like everybody to be courteous, thoughtful, generous and moral. |
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