21 Lessons for the 21st Century(97)
Hence if you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from this or that direction and mess up your hair. And just as you are not the winds, so also you are not the jumble of thoughts, emotions and desires you experience, and you are certainly not the sanitised story you tell about them with hindsight. You experience all of them, but you don’t control them, you don’t own them, and you are not them. People ask ‘Who am I?’ and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself, is that you are not a story.
No story
Liberalism took a radical step in denying all cosmic dramas, but then recreated the drama within the human being – the universe has no plot, so it is up to us humans to create a plot, and this is our vocation and the meaning of our life. Thousands of years before our liberal age, ancient Buddhism went further by denying not just all cosmic dramas, but even the inner drama of human creation. The universe has no meaning, and human feelings too are not part of a great cosmic tale. They are ephemeral vibrations, appearing and disappearing for no particular purpose. That’s the truth. Get over it.
As noted earlier, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad tells us that ‘The head of the sacrificial horse is the dawn, its eye the sun … its members the seasons, its joints the months and fortnights, its feet the days and nights, its bones the stars and its flesh the clouds.’ In contrast, the Mahasatipatthana Sutta, a key Buddhist text, explains that when a human meditates, he or she observes the body carefully, noting that ‘In this body, there are hairs of the head, hairs of the skin, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidney, heart … saliva, nasal mucus, synovial fluid and urine. Thus he dwells observing body … Now his understanding is established: “This is body!”’21 The hairs, bones or urine stand for nothing else. They are just what they are.
In passage after passage the text goes on to explain that no matter what the meditator observes in the body or in the mind, he or she just understands it as it is. Thus when the monk breathes, ‘Breathing in a deep breath, he understands properly “I am breathing in a deep breath.” Breathing in a shallow breath, he understands properly “I am breathing in a shallow breath.”’22 The long breath does not represent the seasons and the short breath does not represent the days. They are just vibrations in the body.
The Buddha taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying. You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind – but you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfies you.
Suffering emerges because people fail to appreciate this. They believe that there is some eternal essence somewhere, and if they can only find it and connect to it, they will be completely satisfied. This eternal essence is sometimes called God, sometimes the nation, sometimes the soul, sometimes the authentic self, and sometimes true love – and the more people are attached to it, the more disappointed and miserable they become due to the failure to find it. Worse yet, the greater the attachment, the greater the hatred such people develop towards any person, group or institution that seems to stand between them and their cherished goal.
According to the Buddha, then, life has no meaning, and people don’t need to create any meaning. They just need to realise that there is no meaning, and thus be liberated from the suffering caused by our attachments and our identification with empty phenomena. ‘What should I do?’ ask people, and the Buddha advises: ‘Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ The whole problem is that we constantly do something. Not necessarily on the physical level – we can sit immobile for hours with closed eyes – yet on the mental level we are extremely busy creating stories and identities, fighting battles and winning victories. To really do nothing means that the mind too does nothing and creates nothing.
Unfortunately, this too very easily turns into a heroic epic. Even as you sit with closed eyes and observe the breath coming in and out of the nostrils, you might well start constructing stories about it. ‘My breath is a bit forced, and if I breathe more calmly, I will become more healthy’ or ‘If I just keep observing my breath and do nothing, I will become enlightened, and be the wisest and happiest person in the world.’ Then the epic starts expanding, and people embark on a quest not just to liberate themselves from their own attachments, but also to convince others to do so. Having accepted that life has no meaning, I find meaning in explaining this truth to others, arguing with the unbelievers, giving lectures to the sceptics, donating money to build monasteries, and so on. ‘No story’ can all too easily become just another story.
The history of Buddhism provides a thousand examples of how people who believe in the transience and emptiness of all phenomena, and in the importance of having no attachments, can squabble and fight over the government of a country, the possession of a building, or even the meaning of a word. Fighting other people because you believe in the glory of an eternal God is unfortunate but understandable; fighting other people because you believe in the emptiness of all phenomena is truly bizarre – but so very human.