Jun 2nd, 2001
Buddhism
I took a Buddhism class during my Junior year of College and I can still clearly remember how I became enamored with the concept of liberation from suffering.
If what I remember is correct, Samsara is the eternal cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation, like a wheel spinning around and around.
The most fundamental truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering, stemming from the urge to cling onto things which are ephemeral by nature. Only by relinquishing the attachment and dissolving the ego may one reach Nirvana - a state of nothingness and freedom from Samsara.
It made so much sense to me at the time and I set about trying to detach myself from my various humanly thirsts that were keeping me in Samsara: Drinking keg beer, trying to chat girls up, smoking cigarettes.
After several painful weeks had passed I decided that maybe Samsara wasn’t so bad after all and resigned myself to the fact that I might never reach Nirvana.
But sometimes I wonder.
Relinquishing attachment and dissolving the ego go hand-in-hand, but why do you have to necessarily dissolve the ego into nothing.
What if you can dissolve it into something? Or someone?
Maybe by giving yourself onto another, you wouldn’t have that dreaded self-awareness because there wouldn’t be a self to be aware of. Those self-obssessed thoughts would have evolved into a feeling of love.
You would have dissolved into another person and that person into you and the consumnation of your love would be a phenomenon that liberates you.
And when you thought of the transient things that you once clung to, you would begin to see how unimportant they were in light of the love that you have found.
A Buddhist would probably respond to this rubbish by saying that ultimately, in the process of losing your sense of ego, you come to love everything and everyone around you equally.
But I don’t like to share and anyway, isn’t it Buddhism that preaches not clinging to any beliefs, even Buddhist ones?
