Patriots say "God bless America." Sports players pray to God for victory. Many peoples worship spirits or divinities that embody or control aspects of nature that are crucial for human survival, and do their best to please such spirits or divinities. Christians similarly (as I understand it, which, admittedly, is not that well) worship the divinity that controls their fate in an "afterlife", and try to please that divinity by being a "moral" person in this life. Basically, people want the good stuff - food, possessions, happy feelings, good health, etc. - and they want to avoid the bad stuff, and most of spirituality and religion are just everyone's attempts to get what they want and avoid what they don't. As another example, I'd bet there are lots of meditators who just want to be peaceful, who want to relieve their emotional discomfort or be nicer to other people, and think that these ends are the main point of meditation.
Instead, the main point of meditation is to comprehend your existence directly - all the good stuff and all the bad stuff - and thus act in accord with it. Clinging to the good stuff and avoiding the bad stuff means that you don't examine the essential nature of all your existence. Without examining all your existence, you won't truly comprehend any of it. The Christian bargain above does get at this essential truth. What you want may get you condemned to Hell if God doesn't like it, i.e., if you do anything to get the good stuff, you may ultimately be worse off. But it strikes me as in the same vein as threatening a child with a spanking if he doesn't eat his vegetables. The point is to eat your vegetables without a struggle of wills, external or internal, because you know it's good for you, i.e., the point is to grow up.
My original goal in meditation was to develop more compassion for other people. Maybe this is indeed the level at which we all have to start, when we realize that we're doing the same things and still not getting what we want. However, my motivations have changed as I went along. Maybe the second paragraph does not actually describe the ultimate point of meditation, but just where I am now. Regardless, what I'm getting at is that most people seem to keep hitting their heads against the same walls in life without stopping to examine the wall, their head, and whether the are perhaps preferable alternatives. Is this just human nature or are the major non-Buddhist traditions partly to blame for not encouraging this kind of examination?
2 comments:
"...most of spirituality and religion are just everyone's attempts to get what they want and avoid what they don't."
I'm not so sure about this formulation. How about other things that motivate people's moves toward spirituality? Like a search for wisdom, fulfillment, a sense of being at peace with the world, with life, with death? I guess these motivations could still be characterized as desires, but they seem to be another level of desire, beyond pragmatic, identifiable desires for food or possessions or the like. I don't consider metaphysical experience to be any less "real" than observable physical experience, but the metaphysical also can't be described or conceptualized with the same terms used to describe the physical.
I suppose the principle of self-interest could also apply to your example of the mediator who wants to alleviate his/her pain at all the conflict in the world, but there seems to be much more than Adam Smithian self-interest in play here. There must be a point at which the mediator abstracts his/her actions into more of an ethical humanist principle that goes beyond the concrete concerns/desires of his/her ego. To me, this threshold of abstraction (compassionate abstraction) is not a point on a line that one can necessarily strive towards in methodical fashion (though the striving at any rate is a worthy endeavor in itself!); it's more like a paradigm shift, a transformative shift in consciousness such that one is not the same person that one was before the shift. After the shift, one is both more (compassionate, able to see the greater good) and less (self-concerned, limited) than what one was.
And though study, practice, dedication, and actions can all help one move closer to the paradigm shift (or rather, shifts, they are multiple, and part of an ongoing process), I believe that the single biggest factor is how open one keeps oneself to learning and change, at all moments of existence--in other words, how open one is to being vulnerable.
-pwl
PWL,
The concept I have of the "good stuff" is more psychological than economical. It's usually not really clear that any particular thing is really "good stuff". Isn't what's good defined along a chain of events the end of which we can't know? What is clear is that we want it, something that will make us happy, and our ideas of what that is can change frequently. This definition borders on tautology, that we want what we want, but it does capture the basic wanting.
It appears to me that your description of abstraction or transformation is the recognition of the equal validity of your own wanting and the wanting of others. You then try to negotiate between all the wants as best as possible.
However, getting what we want in one moment will not necessarily make us happy in the next moment. Eventually, we will be dissatisfied in some way and want something else. Then maybe we will wonder, "What is all this wanting I am doing?" "Who is this 'I' who wants all this stuff, and why do I believe it?" To look into these kinds of questions, you need to look at parts of yourself that don't like to be examined, which we find unpleasant. It's only, as you say, by being open and willing to be vulnerable, that we can begin to understand what's really the case.
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