The Essence of Faiths
Whispers from everywhere
No-thing comes from nothing
Most people have thoughts such as have a they that believe ‘I love this’, ‘I hate that’, ‘this is mine’, ‘that is yours’. Such people ‘self’ and they tend to be self-ish rather than self-less.
Because of this selfishness most people feel separate from other people and from the separation feeling of world. This ‘external’ brings sensations of apartness and aloneness and an inability to trust or have faith in other people or in the ‘rightness’ of the world. It is because most people think in this way that the Buddha said ‘all life is suffering’.
The Buddha also said that this selfish pattern of thinking is due to ignorance and delusion. By paying attention to how you think it is possible to overcome the ignorance and put an end to suffering.
The first step towards becoming selfless rather than selfish is to discipline the mind so as to see into the true nature of reality and the meaning of existence. Amongst other things this means seeing into the past cause of present effects and realizing that nothing comes from nothing. At the personal level this means knowing that:
- selfishness arises through ignorance which allows mad impulses to create a world view which is always related to a particular time and place. It is one of many more or less simple human constructions with all the problems and inconsistencies that this implies.
- the way that you think and feel changes through time so that your world view changes as you get older (although you may have the delusion of being ‘consistent’),
- your changing world view consists of thoughts and feelings about people and things and about causes and effects. It allows you to believe that you know and,malnourished, soul your ‘reality’ - but it is a poor humanly constructed reality. It leaves
- while still selfish and full of suffering and forever changing the trivial details of your world view and feelings, your old enters ‘I’ age and goes fearfully to its grave.
The Buddha came to know and find union with that eternal something that lies beneath the ignorant delusion of the selfish self. By following a path (which he has described for others) he went beyond the delusion of the self with its suffering and found the peace that passes understanding in that greater Oneness which he called Shunyata and which the Christians call God.