When we SEE Reality for what it is, we can't pretend to play the games of reaching, striving, or arriving anymore. You can't get to SEEING. When you are fully engaged in this moment, THIS is seeing. Here there isn't any doubt, there isn't any fear, there isn't any existential angst. There are no overwhelming questions such as 'Where do I go after I die?' because it becomes clear that such questions, doubts, fears, and anxieties are based on buying into an illusion: the self.
At the close of the second millennium, it's becoming harder and harder for us to find meaning in our lives. We've seen through too many of our old stories. Religion does'nt grip most people as it once did. Though a lot of people mouth it, and still desperately cling to it, underneath it all 'God' doesn't seem to be the final answer for many of us.
We don't really live as if we believe in God. Still, in desperation, we swing between the twin perils of cynicism and dogmatism. We continue to run to this or that to inject meaning into our lives.
We don't easily understand that we create this problem of meaninglessnes ourselves through our deluded thinking. If we could JUST SEE this moment for what it is, meaninglessness would never arise in the first place. It's in our very trying to arrange things for ourselves -- trying to identify and assign meanings to things -- that we end up creating a world that is ultimately meaningless.
Whatever we hold up as 'the meaning of life' will ultimately show itself to be hollow, or false, or contradictory. Yet we keep digging in that same bag, continuing to search fruitlessly for a conceptual explanation. Either that or we fall down in despair.
We've tried this, we've tried that, we've tried the next thing, and the next. We've become sophisticated, jaded. After all our searching, all the philosophy and science that we've labored on for centuries, it's becoming very hard to find a story we can buy.
Liberation of mind is realizing that we don't need to buy any story at all. It's realizing that before our confused thought, there actually is Reality. We can SEE it. All we have to do is fully engage in this moment as it has come to be.
The deep hollow ache of the heart arises from a life in search of meaning. But it's by our very desire to find meaning that we create meaninglessness. The very idea of looking for purpose and meaning arises from our deluded thought. When we actually SEE Reality for what it is, all questions of meaning are transcended, and we're free to engage the world as it actually is.
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excerpted from: 'Buddhism, Plain and Simple', by Steve Hagen
