Buddhism 212: Transcending Samsara–Brilliant Mistakes and Pure Dumb Luck
I don’t know who said it first, much less best, whether Nietzsche, Darwin, Elvis Costello or myself (?!), but the fact remains: we proceed by brilliant mistakes, errors in code providing some of the best clues to advancement, thus spectacular screw-ups are the order of the day, if we’re lucky, stumbling ahead on all twos, trying to remember to fall forward, when we inevitably fall…
It should go without saying by now, somehow, but still it’s worth remembering: no matter how strategically you plot your life and your plans, the biggest mistake could be the best thing that ever happened to you, and the most brilliant success could be the worst. You could have a motorcycle wreck the night of your book’s release party, or, on the other hand, a failed bizniz could start you on a path as spiritual teacher; go figure…
DON’T BEMOAN YOUR FATE! (because you don’t know what your fate is, you only know the past, not the future). Even the best psychics get it right only ten percent of the time. We’re fallible. I wrote an entire screenplay once without realizing that I had forgotten about another B-movie long ago with similar premises and foregone conclusions…
But that doesn’t mean that I copied it, though, and it was still plenty different. But it gave me pause. Then someone else even realized more than a decade later that they could do something similar, also, but make it a successful children’s book series, and then a movie starring Bill Murray, called ‘City of Ember’, and still not make any money from it—so, there…
And so it is with Donald Trump: he could be the best or the worst President ever, for reasons we don’t even know yet, just as ISIL could be the ones who save us from Global Warming, even though environmentalism is far from their list of issues. This is the way the world works, in fits and starts, backward and forward, in no certain order…
On the other hand: A diagnosis of cancer is usually the worst news anyone can ever receive, right? But cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me, the thing that turned me definitively toward Buddhism, not out of desperation, but out of inspiration. For the testosterone-killing drug Lupron (TM) that they gave me as ‘hormone treatment’, in addition to radiation, not only helped kill the cancer, but it killed all desire, too—instant Bodhisattva, Buddha in the flesh!
It’s not that I wanted sex—but couldn’t; I didn’t even want it! This is huge! Do you know what that means? Love is just a drug! So all the love stories, romantic adventures, drama, and trauma are just the hallucinations of a drug, and we’re the junkies! All the hair spray, all the lipstick, all the breath mints, and all the late nights are just cheap chocolates on the sacrificial pillow of personality…
Certain molecules can only bond with certain other molecules, and we’re the vectors that can make that happen—or not! If that’s the case, then life takes on new meaning—or not! Reproduction is optional, and so are all the competitions for turf that go with it. But this is not predestination, the Holy Grail of all religion…
This is simply an existential fact: that we are innately fallible, and this is Buddhist doctrine—that suffering exists. The world—samsara—will let you down every time; okay, so much of the time, at least. Your computer will crash and your car will not start, your spouse will cheat on you, your friends will betray you, your family will disown you, and your dog will die at the side of the road, later if not sooner, less if not more…
The world has its finer moments, true, but, “No one gets out of here alive!” is the way Jim Morrison, lead singer and songwriter of the rock group Doors always put it, ranting out of his mind during somewhat belabored concerts that often featured his penis as prime accessory, making it easy to obscure his genius…
But this is basic to Buddhism, that we are subject to the conditions of our servitude in this world of dubious appearances. And to this there is only one appropriate response: polite disobedience, refusal to cooperate with the standard model of possession and repossession, percussion and repercussion. This is the challenge to our lives and the alternative to silly daydreams and wishful thinking. Good luck out there…
Note: I am using the Sanskrit word samsara in its original Buddhist connotation as ‘the world’, i.e. the material world, something to endure, not in its latter-day Tibetan-Buddhist connotation as a synonym for reincarnation, or its latter-day American Buddhist connotation as something delicious to enjoy…
streaming consciousness... 
davekingsbury 5:19 pm on November 28, 2016 Permalink |
Great freewheeling post that covers acres of ground … and demonstrates the light touch we all need in life. Don’t know if you’ve seen my post on Plato with a few amateur comments on Buddhism, would be interested in your thoughts … https://davekingsbury.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/platos-cave/
hardie karges 5:46 am on November 29, 2016 Permalink |
I did read your piece on Plato, but only briefly, since I’ve been on Internet rations. Also, I’ve been a long-time admirer of Plato, especially the allegory of the cave, so I didn’t want to came off challenging and contentious. The difference, I think, is that you want an elaborate exposition of Plato’s reality, and it just isn’t there. I don’t want that, so I’m quite happy with it, which is for me an inspiration to other-worldliness, similar to Jesus’s parables, or Einstein’s thought experiments, all of whom I consider his equals, along with the Buddha.
Aristotle apparently thought the same, hence his exhaustive expositions on form and content, small ‘f’, limited to this, the material world. So it’s no accident that Plato’s work became the inspiration for much of early other-worldly Christianity, and Aristotle provided much of the philosophical basis for the later Renaissance and Science.
If Plato is examined too closely, it doesn’t hold up, true, any more than Descartes’ innate ideas or Chomsky’s language intuitions. Still a dog recognizes ‘dogness’ when he sees it and immediately distinguishes it from ‘catness’. And I suspect a dog could even recognize its sameness with a bear, with which it is a close relative. So Forms are not total BS, as long as you don’t expect too much. Jesus’s parables don’t hold up as Science, either, and even Einstein had a blind spot for quantum mechanics, which he helped establish…
My modern update on the Forms would be more like the world of Light, which I consider a dimension one notch higher than us, but easily seen in its common forms, not only as light from the Sun, fires, or elsewhere, but also electricity and magnetism, with which it is physically equivalent.
And that world for me is more real than our lesser world of stuff and solidity, probably best represented symbolically, and literally, by sound, or shock waves, physicality, or percussion, the speed of sound defining us the way the speed of light defines the higher dimension.
In modern physics, Light is one of the Four Forces, of course, so sacrosanct in Science, and to me symbolically representative of Heaven, as intuited by millennia of humans and human-like ancestors. And then there’s Gravity, the dimension below, too heavy, and best saved for later. Thanks for your comments, Dave, always a pleasure…
davekingsbury 8:27 am on November 29, 2016 Permalink
Wow, thanks for this response, Hardie! You really take me inside a whole cosmology and I can see that Plato’s analogy can be read different ways – in particular as a caution against taking things at face value. I think recent political events on both sides of the Atlantic have got to me and poor old Plato was my punch bag on this occasion … reckon I should set my sights on a few more modern targets! Thanks again for this detailed reply. I shall certainly remember your striking animal analogy …