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March 30, 2018 at 7:44 am #200035JasonParticipant
They say “good always prevails in the end”
but what if we all some day in this world, we just wipe ourselves out by war or are destroyed and taken over by something. Nothing remains or evil has taken over control.
Where is good then?Feels like an existential crisis. Where will people that do good in the world and us as Buddhists end up? And what is the meaning of all we build and live for… especially if everything just ends up knocked down or run its course and disappear with time one day?
March 30, 2018 at 8:21 am #200091AnonymousGuestDear Jason:
My understanding is that a human is the only animal who knows of one’s death to come, sometime, somehow and surely. Therefore we humans are the only animals that while healthy and young-enough fear death. Because we fear death, and because we are able to think and to imagine, we invented a “solution”- eternal life.
Some imagine eternal life in their bodies as it is, that they will never die, the body never to deteriorate, but youth regained at the end of the world, and life forever it is (Jehovah Witnesses).
Others imagine that they will die but their sousl will live forever, in heaven or hell (Christianity) … or in a new body yet to be born, and that soul finally freed to live forever without a body to limit it (Buddhism).
The truth:
I don’t know.
All existing explanations (as the above mentioned) seem too convenient to me, too convenient to be considered true to reality.
* It is only to us, thinking humans, that death is perceived as a tragedy. In nature, it is business-as-usual. Couldn’t be a tragedy if it happens every day, everywhere, always has happened, no exceptions, can it?
When animals’ homes in nature are destroyed, without a thought ( of course) they re-build. Only humans believe in building and building … building into eternity.
“what is the meaning of all we build and live for… especially if everything just ends up knocked down”-
when you prove yourself a trustworthy person, not betraying a trust in you, especially a child’s, that is something as solid as can be. If you break a child’s trust and do not correct, a whole lot is knocked down, in that child and in many people the child will interact with lifetime.
anita
March 30, 2018 at 9:48 am #200119PeterParticipantIf one travels down the path Buddhism the question of good and evil fades as does the question of what might happen to one tomorrow. What is important is the present moment and acting from the core of one truth as understood in the moment, open to learning, and discovery of themselves.
Interestingly the Buddha had very little to say about the afterlife. Such thoughts tend to lead to speculation distracting a person from the present and attachment to ego
Every breath is purpose, every breath is meaning, every breath is sacrifice, every breath is a death, every breath is a rebirth.
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So, the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” ― Hermann Hesse
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