Who are we anyway? Are we the best of ourselves? Are we the made up of little bits and pieces of the good and loving things we have done? Are we glued together by the good deeds and accomplishments? What is the aggregate of human existence? In my heart I know that we are made up of more, of all of it. We are the love and hate, joy and pain. We are marrow, blood, phlegm, water, wind, earth and air. We are the crumbs and the moldy bits. We are also neglect, betrayal, jealousy, addiction and perversion. To be home, to love or be loved, is to taste it all.
I've spent a lot my live trying to learn and remember everything I could that would make myself useful to people who find life to be the simple and amazing adventure that I always felt it was. Maybe deep in my heart, I feel that if I am useful for the basics of community, if my skills are needed by the loving, I will be loved. I learned to cook and farm so I could feed. Then I learned to build, so I could shelter. I study philosophy so I can speak, love, teach and live with clarity.
Farming and building are logical, and to me the logical always felt right. If it wasn't logical, it wasn't practical to me, and had no real value. The strictly logical outlook failed me at some point, left me feeling empty. Logically, human kind is disgusting, and not very pretty. Logically we consume in one end waste from the other and talk to much in between. Logically I am dust, sand, muck and silt, and worthless as such.
Philosophy is not logical. Philosophy is the use of the illogical to unravel and defend against the illogical. Eastern philosophy saved my life, my soul, my worth. The further I travel into the world of philosophy, information and knowledge, the further there is to go, it is endless and without closer. After ten years of studying Buddhism and trying to understand and memorize many lists of concepts and emotions, only three realities have ever stayed with me, three insights.
The first insight is interconnectedness. To me it is truth, the law, a unbreakable reality, we are all connected, no, really, really connected. We need each other to survive, everything needs everything to survive. We need people to get here, and to live here. We need food and trees and water and air, and it all needs each other. For an eggplant to be an eggplant it needs soil and water and sun, it also needs a farmer, and a volcano, glacier, and ocean to make soil and an animal to eat grass and crap fertilizer and a person to pick it and say “hey, this is an eggplant!” before it can be an eggplant. It needs everything else to be an eggplant. Nothing is created without everything else, nothing. Our very atoms are the atoms of each other, of our ancestors, of all living things. Every atom on the planet was forged together with the solar system, and has been recycled over and over since who knows when. Your breath is my breath, your food is my food, your face is my face. We are not connected to it all and each other, we ARE all of it, and each other.
The second insight is impermanence. To me it is truth, the law, an unbreakable reality, everything comes together and apart. This one is easy to understand, but hard to accept. Because of human perception, we have a hard time grasping that nothing lasts forever. We don't want to think of the demise of ourselves, or the loss of people we love. We don't want to think of the loss of places and things we are attached to. But we already know the truth, nothing, nothing lasts forever, not you, or me, or buildings, planets, or suns. Nothing. Do not despair, this reality is silver lined by the first jewel of interconnectedness, although everything is created and destroyed over and over, we never loose anything, or gain anything as a whole. We are stardust, from stardust, and will return to stardust. We are waves in water. Knots on netting. Children of it all. We are love.
The third insight is mindfulness. This is a kind of full awareness. This is the key to understanding human existence and the key to self acceptance. With a well practiced mindful approach to reality, our wrong perceptions, misunderstandings and ignorance begin to fall away, layer by layer. To be mindful means to practice living life aware of every moment, not just letting our minds run on autopilot, but to take a first hand role. This doesn't mean spending our days reacting to every crazy thing that happens in the world, but to only be aware of it all, not react to it all. To be mindful is to stay aware of your surroundings, the people, how they interact and how you interact. We should always be trying to observe the world around us, and ourselves, with inquisition. A mindful state is a peaceful state,an all inclusive state, it leaves nothing out. Meditation is a way of practicing and developing this inclusive state of mind. It took me years to realize that meditation was to get in, not to get out.
These three insights are a humble attempt to put the light into words, passed down from mind to mind. To put the truth into words is to bruise it by putting fingerprints all over it. Community is the light in practice. Sharing food, working together, building communities, our relationships with each other. To me, it is all a part of the big picture, the light. Once I began to grasp the reality of the situation, the world seemed worth it, I seemed worth it, I was free, I was home, if just for that moment.
Mathew Ingles
