Jun/100
Word, dude
Buddhism Plain and Simple (Steve Hagen)
most of us have lost faith in our ancient storybook versions of the world. With the development of science, many of us have come to see the world as an inconceivably strange, vast, complex, impersonal, multi-dimensional, and perhaps meaningless realm of mind and matter.
We may feel forced to deal with this loss of faith by going to one of two wretched extremes. Either we blind ourselves to our predicament and attempt to escape via drugs or alcohol or our careers or any of innumerable belief systems, or we face the woeful prospect that we’re intelligent creatures living in a meaningless world.
Many of us act as though we could find fulfillment if only we possessed enough money, enough security, enough respect, enough love, enough faith, enough education, enough power, enough peace, enough knowledge, enough… something.
There are others among us, however, who don’t (or can’t) buy into this. They sense that real security is impossible to attain. For they know that even if we could manage to accumulate all we desire, it will be inevitably taken from us by death. Our mortality looms above us, as terrifying as it is certain. We seem utterly stumped. How can we possibly find peace under these conditions? Not only do we feel imprisoned by our ignorance, we seem doomed to remain that way.
