What am I? This has been the predicament of seeking men since time immemorial. And the same can be said for me. For a long time there have been these existential questions burning just below the surface of my mind. What does it mean to be conscious? What happens when I die? What was I before I was born? WHAT AM I?
I turned to anything and everything for the answer. Sex, friends, drugs, dreams, family, art, God, Buddha, Christ, Jung, etc., and the list goes on. Sifting through a sort of information overload. Dropping in and out of psychoses: depression, panic, catatonia, glee. Praying, needing, crying...Why did I have this overwhelming sense that SOMETHING was missing? There was this formless, nameless desire that consumed me. The pursuit of truth you could call it. But naming it did nothing to satiate it. I wanted something of substance. I wanted God to descend from his gilded throne in heaven and gently whisper the answer into my ear. Then everything would be okay. I could move on. I could then become human. But I found out, truth is not only enlightening, it can be damning. It can crush you under its weight. It could bury you. Until...
Christ said: "I came into this world, I am not of this world." Yes, that was it! Here I am trying to find myself in a world that I am not contained in. Sticks and stones may break my bones but something within myself remains untouched, untarnished. Death after death, life after life, something remains. What is it though? How does one go about finding it? If it is not in this world, where does one look? And here, the final answer, the resolution: the anatta doctrine.
I had always had a burning interest in Buddhist thought. It had always spoken to me, as if I was already familiar with its ideas. But with it came this nagging problem of nothingness, nihilism. If there was no "I", if there was no ego, then there was nothing. There was no-self (anatta). Nothing to be searched for, nothing to be found. I was merely a conglomeration of physical, psychological elements that went through a constant cycle of creation-change-decay-destruction. No, this did not feel right. The idea of nothingness was not comforting, my intuition told me it was wrong.
And then I came across an old book on Buddhist thought. It's author, George Grimm, had a different interpretation than everything I had read thus far. The Buddha did not deny the Self. His approach was to locate the Self by designating what was anatta (what was NOT the Self). The Buddha found that anything that could be percieved was anatta. Here is an analogy: a camera can take a picture of everything except the film that it takes pictures on. So, in the past I was essentially going through life taking a picture of everything I could, hoping one day I would snap a photo of the film, something that is IMPOSSIBLE. According to the Buddha, everything cognizable, everything that can be known, everything that is perceivable, is not me. It makes perfect sense. If you look at the process of observation, it requires a subject and object, the observed and the observee. You can only observe something different than yourself. In essence, the Buddha proposed that to find yourself, you must first find what is NOT yourself. Take away my senses, take away sensation, take away my body, take away perception, take away my will, and yet, something still remains. But what is it? You cannot conceive it, so do not even try. Can you call it God? Depends on how you define God. Again we are presented with a duality: me and God. Here we still have an interdependent relationship. It seems God depends on me just as much I depend on him. Those of you familiar with the Gnostic creation myth will see obvious similarities here.
There is one thing that brings about this basic bewilderment, this confusion, this disillusion, this ignorance: will, desire, craving, wanting, longing. Desire is endless, it always ends in suffering, in non-fulfillment. Desire no-thing, crave no-thing, abandon your will. What remains? In the words of the Bodhidharama, "Don't know." I know I am on my way out. Won't you join me?
Life is the pursue of anwers, the constant making of questions.
You will never find The Truth. You will find your truth. And that is because each of us are a whole world and reality. We build ourselves with wise words from wise men, until the point we state our own wise words, we become our own wise man.
I can't quite put this into words. What you say here I think it is what we all have experienced, and keep experiencing. The search can consume us or improve us. A risk not everyone is willing to take.
What you have stated resembles a lot to the Tao Te King.
Who knows? Perhaps you are from this world, brother. Perhaps you and millions who are like you are truly from this world. Perhaps the rest are the outsiders.
"Life is the constant pursuit of answers."--yes, and that is exactly what makes life in the end, so goddamn unfulfilling; every answer leads to yet another question. But people like to romanticize this fact. The intellectuals, the supposed truth-seekers say that this is the beauty of life, the endless pursuit of truth. I think that is exactly why we all have that innate, ineffable sentiment that there is just something missing. Because deep down below all of the subterfuge we know without a doubt that we are not of this world. Oh, but we will continue searching. And in the end we will lie fruitless and without hope.
When you say, "You will never find The Truth, you will only find your truth," I wholeheartedly agree with you. Each of us has a truly unique worldview. It is when we identify with things that we sell that individuality short. The trick is to be able to freely choose your identifications with ease. When I need to be human, I will be human. When I need to be spiritual, I will be spiritual. When I need to be feminine, I will be feminine, and so on and so on. But as I write this, I am revamping my thoughts. Maybe...maybe the real trick is to never identify with anything. Is it possible to be human without being human? What I mean is that you are always coming from the same place with everything, with everything you coming from the Source. For instance, when I am being human I am simply expressing my original, ineffable, existential beingness. When I am being spiritual, I am again simply expressing this original essence. It reminds me of the Philosopher's Stone. Always and forever, through anything, there is that part of you that remains.
(The specifics of my thoughts on Buddhism have been taken from Maximillian Sandor's "The Little Purple Notebook on How to Escape From This Universe" @ orunla.org)
Anyone familiar with Buddhist thought will probably have come across the First Noble Truth: Life is suffering. Or in Pali terms: life is "dukkha." However, if one looks in a Pali-Enlgish dictionary one will find that the word dukkha does not mean suffering at all. The root "du-" roughly translates to "dis-" in English. The root "kha-" tranlsates to "whole." So a translation of the word "dukkha" really comes out to something like "unwholesome," or less whole. The First Noble Truth now becomes: Life is unwholesome. Now where the mess-up occurred was that unwholesomeness leads to suffering. When we encounter suffering in our own lives and the lives of others it is due to the fact that we are in a state of unwholesomeness. To resolve our suffering one would simply need put the pieces back together. "I know the pieces fit, 'cuz I watched them fall away..."
Yes humans will always seek truth but most of the normal beings that roam this place are ignorant or just plain oblivious to anything else but their normal everyday bullshit lives. Yes there are wise people who try to look in thier inner self to see what is real but can you define what is real. I think if you take all the senses and everything else you said away and you try to recognize what is left...i do not believe that is god. I believe that is your soul. Have you ever thought that the only thing that really is you is your voice? My body, my mind, my organs everything is just my vehicle i travel in, my baggage. The "real" thing that is left is your voice. Even when you dont speak there is some kind of voice in your head repeating the thoughts you quickly think up. You might say no thats not true i think and tell my filanges to move when i command them to move, but you mind is just the control panel for your body, and your heart is just the gigantic 4 cylinder engine giving the vehicle power.....The only thing recognizable and the only thing that has a name is your voice. You have a thought....you voice your opinion...Thats what i think is left. The innermost you. Once you realize the only thing that truley can be damaged is your soul,...you will no longer be affected by pain, emotion, temperature, fear, or any kind of depression. Depending on what you do with your new found way of thinking depends on what kind of person you are. Are you going to walk around thinking your an untouchable sentient? or are you going to simply act all the more wiser and try to spread the knowledge. There are not many of us so called "wise men" left in this society. No matter how many numbers strong we get we will always be outnumbered by the ignorant. That will lead this world to its end. Dumb fucks trying to blow up other dumb fucks or dumb fucks using more of our limited resources to make people lazier. If our answer to find a way to bring ones self to a higher state of life (being) doesnt get figured out soon....It will be far too late. May god or somebody pity our souls and maybe help us out.
There has to be a final answer. An answer to understand everything. Dont give up...its not a hopeless quest, just a quest with many paths to choose from....we just gotta find the right path to the right answer. DONT GIVE UP.
Last edited by ZoDIaC~303; 08-15-2003 at 02:57 PM..
