This Is It
Many years ago I was sitting in my doctor’s office and we got to chatting about things other than my health. Namely, we got to talking about life. At one point she confessed that she believed in God and an afterlife because, she said, her eyes cast down, “there has to be more than this.” I had a complex reaction to this profound confession. I felt a little bit of anger; on behalf of the universe, I was deeply insulted that this vast and mysterious world was somehow lacking, insufficient. I was already weary of spiritual traditions supporting the idea that this world is a lost cause and we must turn towards God or Atman or some other far-flung pure realm for our salvation. But mostly what I felt was pity for her, and for most human beings, really. She expressed rather bluntly what seems in my experience to be a nearly universal dis-ease and disappointment with life. For all its pleasures and joys, there are bewildering evils, great pain and suffering, uncertainty, and, of course, DEATH.
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We are born with a primal and understandable desire to be happy and safe. Our minds search experience, looking for things that seem good and trying to avoid what we perceive as hurtful or bad. It is the most basic activity of living things, as ancient as life itself. But we humans, complex creatures that we are, yearn for much more than food and water, sex and safety. We yearn to feel valued by our fellow creatures, to feel part of something larger than ourselves. We yearn for money, for lovers who will complete us, for fame, for stuff, for pleasure, for justice and beauty and truth. We struggle to forget or ignore our pain, to protect ourselves from blame or fault. We search for meaning and purpose to life, reasons why we are here, and why it is all so damned difficult. We charge frantically towards our dreams, fueled by the hope that their realization will bring us peace, satisfaction, happiness. Although a good meal sates our hunger, somehow these others things that we desire never seem to satisfy these deeper, vaguer, more abstract yearnings we humans feel. Some of us through the ages have declared the world hopelessly flawed and have turned towards ideas of a Divine Presence dwelling in a more perfect realm where true satisfaction, peace, and salvation can be found. We dream of salvation in some otherwhere, some otherwhen. Heaven. Nirvana. The Elysian Fields. Utopia. Few of us ever come to fully recognize that the answer to our struggle lies much closer to home: it is the yearning itself that is the source of our dis-ease, the one barrier to peace, to the cessation of our struggle with life. We live out our lives in a vicious cycle of desire and dissatisfaction, the yin and yang of Hell. Our ancient animal instincts for discerning what we need and what we must avoid have gone awry, and our misperception leaves us dissatisfied, unsettled, and sometimes even bitter and full of despair. Of course, life can still be pretty good for many of us. We can and do find some happiness and peace here and there, and we can create enough commotion in our lives so that we barely hear that little dark voice from deep within that is desperate, unhappy and afraid. But this happiness is so very fragile, depending on specific circumstances in a capricious world.
Naturally, we want answers. We want an explanation for the horrors of life, a reason why so much suffering should be necessary, and we want a way out.
Some of us have found explanations — God’s Will, the Devil’s mischief — and perhaps this offers us some degree of peace and acceptance. But how well does that belief hold up when tsunamis kill thousands, our child dies of cancer, or we are raped, beaten, and left for dead on a filthy city street? In terms of our own freedom and peace of mind, explanations do not matter. Philosophy is fragile in the face of the stark realities of life. All we really know for sure is that life is what it is, and if we dwell in fear and outrage and despair, we add an existential misery on top of the pain or grief or sorrow or trauma. Life is precious, life is rare, life is so very fleeting. Do we really want to spend it struggling, desperate, afraid, dissatisfied? If there is a way to put down the struggle and the yearning for things to be otherwise, should following that way not be our highest priority?
Long ago there lived a man who was deeply concerned with human dissatisfaction and sought almost unto death its resolution. This man who came to be known as the Buddha did fully recognize the nature of this vicious cycle of desire and disappointment. He came to deeply understand that it is how we perceive and respond to life that defines its quality, and that our view of the world, because it is learned, can be transformed. He stated in the Third Noble Truth that there is a way to let go of our dissatisfaction and cultivate the capacity to be at peace with the Here and Now. This is a subtle thing, for being at peace with the present does not mean being resigned to it, sitting stupidly in the midst of events, doing nothing. It is not about feeling only bliss and happiness. And it is most definitely not about indifference. Unless our hearts turn to stone, we will always feel grief at the loss of a loved one, joy at the happiness of others, sadness about the homeless man shivering against a building on a cold winter’s day. But we can develop the capacity to include and love and accept all of these happenings and feelings as simply a part of human life. We can love our anger, our hatred, our doubt, our fear. We can love our folly and our failings, our desperation, and our longing. When we love what arises in this life we are not consumed by it or lost in it, nor are we at war; we are at peace with what is. We are free in the midst of the Now, and when we act, we act from that place of inclusion, which is wise and compassionate.
The Buddha’s insight, born of his own experience, is this: the deeper our understanding of the interdependent, fleeting, precious nature of our being, the more we let go of our struggle, the more we live our lives in peace and meet what arises with understanding, love, and wisdom. Whatever we feel, we feel without resistance or shame. We are free from the primal reflex to run from the Now. We are free from the belief that things shouldn’t be this way, or that there must be more than this. Maybe there is, but that’s not the point; whatever there is, here and now, is all that matters. We are at peace whether we are in Heaven or Hell or just right here on Earth in the midst of our “ordinary” lives. We do not live from a place of greed and yearning, of always asking what life has to give to us. We cast aside a thousand useless longings and our central concern becomes living nobly and for the benefit of all. Our lives become an offering, a continuous act of generosity. Instead of living only for our own personal happiness and safety, we wish instead for the happiness and welfare of all beings; we recognize and feel our profound kinship with the whole of the world. We take seriously the truth that the world is in part of our making, and we want to make it well. We live the life the Buddha called, in the Fourth Noble Truth, the Noble Eightfold Way of the Awakened Ones.
Liberation is thus not escape: it is just exactly the opposite. It is to run headlong into this messy, complex, bewildering, lovely, heartbreakingly beautiful world as towards a long-lost lover, arms outstretched, the word “yes” flowing from our lips like the great song of the cosmos. Liberation is a profound acknowledgment that things are exactly as they are, and a deep recognition that things are as they are because everything is the way it is. Being is a Whole, a One where the myriad things create each other, imply each other. Every moment the universe is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing. It is an awesome thing to behold. This understanding makes clear the utter futility of struggling against the way things are. We are an inherent part of the way things are, co-creators of the universe along with all things. When we struggle and hate, the universe struggles and hates. When we love and accept, the universe loves and accepts. What then do we want our contribution to be?
Lest you think this is a religious sermon, let me just say that in my own experience I have caught enough glimpses of the end of struggle and desire to know that the Buddha was right. I have known my fair share of wanting life to be other than it is. I have known deep restlessness and desperation. But in the last eight years I have experienced times when that struggle stops cold and what arises in the stillness is quite astonishing — I can only describe it as a peace that feels oceanic, larger than my own being, ancient, and full of vitality. I move so differently in the world when I am in that place, but alas, I don’t stay there for long. It is easy to become dissatisfied even with that and yearn to return to that vast serenity. It seems a paradox that the only way to get there is to stop trying to get there. To let go of and refuse to dwell in dissatisfaction with where we are now, over and over and over again. But as far as I can tell, it is the only way.
The Buddha emphasized that there is nothing to believe in where his teachings are concerned. It is something to take as a working hypothesis and try for yourself. Give your whole-hearted effort to this life, the only life you know that you have. Love it with every fiber of your being, and ask for nothing in return. Contemplate how fragile and fleeting life is. Contemplate how interdependent we all are. Look deeply into your own mind to see and understand the depths of your struggle and how costly it truly is — to you, and to all those whose lives you touch. Let it go, over and over and over again — patience and persistence is a beautiful expression of love. If you can summon the courage and the effort to do these things, day after day, year after year, I guarantee you will come to the end of dissatisfaction and the birth of a deep and abiding peace that is steady and powerful even in the most painful moments life has to offer. You will be free — really free — to the end of your days. There is no greater gift to yourself and to the rest of the world than this. Go forth for your own freedom and set the world free as well.