My Philosophy

For many years I have contemplated the meaning of this and that, usually on lonely afternoons or evenings instead of doing what normal people do.  These thoughts ranged from the fundamental to the elemental and I never came to any definitive conclusions.  I was just happy to have thought about things that were more meaningful than money, bills and TV.

After a while I began to more seriously consider things like happiness, self, death and attachment.  Recently I have dedicated quite a bit of time and study to these subjects.  I found that no religion seemed logical or adequate to explain these concerns, and that organized religions feel wrong to me.  They present us with a set of rules in various forms which are meant to be followed in order to achieve arbitrary goals set forth by men in antiquity.  It is only natural to question anything that is dictated, and even more so when others follow the dictations blindly (i.e. with faith).

Religion & Faith
I completely lack the ability to have faith in anything of a spiritual nature.  This was useful when deciding that I no longer believed in the cosmic God figure put forth in the religions of the West, and disappointing when I found that an element of faith was required by Buddhism and other religions of the East.  I had hoped that in Buddhism I had finally found an education system that I could use to answer my burning spiritual and metaphysical questions, but after a bit of research I found that there is quite a bit of dogma in Buddhism as it is practiced that I simply can’t be a part of.  Bowing to statues, and more importantly to monks, is not my idea of ridding yourself of ego, not to mention the ego of the monks.  Walking around buildings in circles and turning wheels to generate dharma seems ritualistic at best and dogmatic at worst.  Donating money as a way of “making merit” in order to secure a preferable rebirth is an absolute abomination to the fundamental values of Buddhism.  While these things taint my view of the practice of Buddhism by some, it doesn’t change the fact that the teachings of Siddhārtha Gautama (aka “Lord Buddha” or just Buddha) are fascinating and relevant.

Even today eastern religion is not taught to children in almost any sense.  At best, it is glimpsed in movies or at Tibetan Freedom Concerts.  Western religions are not secure enough in their beliefs to introduce their followers to other schools of thought, which says a lot about their undeclared concerns.  Not many Christian sunday school teachers are going to discuss the life and times of Muhammad or Gautama Buddha, what they learned and what they taught, just as young Buddhists know very little about Jesus Christ.  A key difference is that Buddhists aren’t usually told that their system is the only right one.  In fact they are routinely reminded that the Buddha said “come and see for yourself,” reminding his students that the teachings are to be examined by each individual and either accepted or discarded based on your experience.  I can’t remember my sunday school teacher ever telling me that praying was optional.

Reality
The world that we live in is not separate from us, we are harmonious with it.  Just as the trees are physically connected to the earth, we are connected to all things.  When the wind blows over you, does not the air take some small part of you with it?  Who is to say that you are not the wind at that point?  I like to view life like a stream of water – always moving, ever changing but somehow alive and free.  The stream does not end and it does not begin, because before the water was in the stream it was rain in the sky and before that it was a wave in an ocean which was once a ripple in a stream.  In the same way we do not begin and end – we don’t live for a period and then die and go to heaven or hell – we just begin again.  What I am describing is not exactly reincarnation in the traditional sense, because that theory relies on karma and other forces to determine rebirth.  Instead I am rather attracted to the Indian concept of life as a drama that we all act out in a dream and the waking up from the dream is our death and the falling back to sleep again is our rebirth.

In the stream of existence there is also no past and no future, for these are merely abstract concepts created by men to better predict and categorize.  There are memories, but these are simply blips on our brain’s radar screen that change or fade away with time.  Nothing actually comes out of the past and into the present, so you can’t say that the past creates the present.  No past and no future exist because you can’t experience them.  It’s not possible to live in the future, only “in the moment.”

The Purpose of Life
Some see a newborn child as a blank slate with which society and more directly its parents can write upon.  Others say that it is a gift from God and should be made to understand that it is a sinner and must seek forgiveness.  Still others say that the child is a reincarnation of another being and brings the karma of the previous existence into the present reality that is the new life.  I see a child as being in one sense new and in another old.  It is new in a conventional sense – it knows nothing about the abstract nature of the world around it.  However, in a very fundamental way a child is in a state of oneness with the world that we all lose as we grow older, and only a few of us find again through a great deal of effort later in life.

An infant sees everything with a kind of magic and whimsy that equally amazes and annoys adults of our species.  We are in a sense jealous of the child’s ability to be enraptured with a sound, light or object, but also displeased if the child cries because of it.  Since we naturally compare ourselves to everything we see, we often have a feeling that we have lost something that the baby still has – and I believe that what we lose is the clear understanding that all things are interconnected and that to live is simply to be.  There is no higher purpose, no greater meaning.  This may sound somewhat disappointing, but that is only if you don’t see that to wish to be something is only to fumble towards disappointment.  For example, if you wish to become a teacher and find that after years of college and training you dislike the profession, then you will feel that you have wasted part of your life.  On the other hand, if you find that you love teaching you will eventually find that it’s just not enough and that perhaps next you should attempt to teach at a higher level for a better salary.  This cycle continues endlessly until you die, and if you were never truly happy with simply being alive then you could never really be satisfied with what you were, while you were.

Morality
Morals are a staple of society.  They are deemed the building blocks of our humanity.  Theistic religions claim morals are provided by a God, but if this were true then surely their God(s) would never have done anything contrary to those morals.  Other spiritual systems outline morals as precepts and guiding principles, but they’re really not telling us anything that we don’t know through other social or cultural systems.  I think some of our morals are instinctual, on the same level as breathing and growing ones hair – we do no seek to do harm for no logical reason.  While religion gives us commandments and precepts, these are merely mnemonic devices and one must be careful not to worship at the feet of common sense.