Buddhism: What Works For Me...What Doesn't

As a follow-up to my recent post on Buddhism, I wanted to talk about what parts of this impressively introspective and developmental spiritual tradition I plan to incorporate into my own personal mythology. Here goes…

• The Four Noble Truths: A colleague of mine with a Buddhist bend once said to me that “pain is inevitable, but suffering is not.” In hindsight, I believe that he was pretty succinctly paraphrasing the first and third Noble Truths. It’s an outlook on life that I’ve always found healthy; this notion that while we don’t always have control over our circumstances, we do have control over how we react to them. The Four Noble Truths, meanwhile, go on to identify which of our reactions are most problematic. The second Truth says that it is specifically our greed, our avarice, and our delusional expectations about the world that cause us suffering. And I tend to agree. Regarding the fourth Truth, the way out of suffering, I’ve devoted the next bullet point to the Noble Eightfold Path.

• The Eightfold Path: I didn’t need much convincing to see the validity of the Noble Eightfold Path as a means towards changing one's tendencies towards greed, avarice, and delusional expectations. In fact, I’ve been pretty amazed by the similarities between the thousands-years-old Eightfold Path and modern-day Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, one of the treatments of choice for anxiety and depression. The basic principle for both is that our thoughts and our behaviors are closely linked. In other words, you can’t simply change your behavior without changing some of your erroneous beliefs. And you can’t simply change your thinking without adding some new behaviors into the mix. The path out of depression, for example, involves doing things like getting out of the house, acting differently towards others, and building new positive memories, while simultaneously sitting down with a counselor once a week to rework some of those delusional thoughts about the self and the world. The Noble Eightfold Path is simply the mythological, moral, transcendent equivalent.

• My Inner Buddha: I’m not one for viewing other human beings as somehow special or godlike. So worshipping The Buddha is of no interest to me. But, if not for worship, then why consider having the story of The Buddha in my life. As I was pondering about this question (while smoking my pipe on a gently swaying rocking chair as I’m apt to do from time to time) it hit me. The Buddha myth is not about some guy who lived way, way, way back in ancient India. The myth is actually about all of us human beings alive in the world today. And all of the ones before us and all the ones after us. It’s about the “Buddha potential” that we all have. Our ability to grow and better ourselves and find peace. In effect, the Buddha is a possible manifestation of me. When I thought about it this way, the myth became quite relevant to my life and my personal mythology. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that the story of the Buddha jives really well with my outlook on life. The Buddha of myth makes no promises of other dimensions (i.e heaven and hell) or supernatural beings (gods, devils, angels, demons). And he makes no claim to be a god himself. In fact, the Buddha of myth does not even claim to be the founder of his teachings. He simply rediscovered this timeless knowledge that periodically gets lost and found by humanity over the millennia. This seems an appropriately humbling account of The Buddha and human beings in general. In a sense, human beings never actually create anything. We only find clever new ways of discovering, discerning, and manipulating what already exists. So, in short. Yay, Buddha. Yay, human beings.

• Karma as a Guiding Principle: I definitely believe in the principles of cause and effect, which are the basis of our sciences. And I completely agree that our actions create negative and positive energies in us (in the form of emotions, anxieties, and depression), which can, in turn, have a profound effect on the world around us, not only in the present, but also in our future encounters, in the lives of our children, and the many generations to come. So, while I'm hesitant to view karma as a sort of fair and just zero-sum game that provides one with karmic return equal to one's output, I very much value the concept as a messy and somewhat unpredictable guideline in life. I guess you could say that I am committed to improving myself as much for the effect that my development will have on those around me, as I am for the effect that it will have on me.

• Reincarnation as an Abstract Concept: I’ve heard it said before that energy doesn’t die. And that’s my basic belief on what happens to us when we die. Our energy, our heat, our mass, all of it works its way back into the cycle of life as we pass on from life as we’ve known it. In a sense, then, I think we do continue to live on forever through the infinite future life forms our energy will inhabit.

• The Middle Way: This concept is probably my favorite discovery about Buddhism. Essentially, The Middle Way says that while greed and avarice and delusional thinking are the sources of suffering, starving oneself of food, belongings, and human contact is not the solution. The ascetic life is just reactionary extremism on the other end. The Middle Way is about carving a path through life between the extremes of denial and indulgence. And it is this one concept, The Middle Way, that, in my opinion, makes Buddhism entirely relevant and important to the lives of everyday adults navigating this complex modern landscape. The Middle Way philosophy has also been used to address a number of metaphysical concerns in some really interesting ways. For example, according to philosophy of the Middle Way, 'the self' should not be thought of as completely real or completely imaginary. Any attempts to make absolutist statements about the nature of reality will always be partly true and partly false. I've got a lot of ideas about how to apply this thinking to mythology, adult development, and identity. So, stay tuned.

 

With that said, there is also one particular concept of Buddhism (albeit a big one) that just doesn’t work for me…

• The Concept of Enlightenment: I do not find the story of the Buddha reaching a state of sustained, irreversible perfection (thus allowing him to escape the cycle of death and suffering) to be a particularly helpful story for me. For one, I just don't believe it to be a real possibility. From my experience, life always takes work and attention, and always involves steps both forward and backwards, even for the most developed and enlightened among us. This concept of enlightenment as a fixed state is just a bit too supernatural for me. So, while I will happily embrace my inner Buddha as a guide to my human potential, I think I’ll stay away from any thoughts of reaching some state of perfect enlightenment. I have my hands full just working on being a little bit better than I’ve been so far (lyrical credit for that last line goes to The Avett Brothers, and their tune 'When I Drink').