Signs

Signs, Shapes, Sounds, and Significance

A man's words and actions, especially under stress, reveal who he is. There's no earth-shaking revelation in the preceding sentence, but to you personally, it has a deep connection to the world of signs, shapes, and sounds, of music and language, of how you understand and interpret the world. 

You woke up this morning with a sudden realization that Buddhism is more a therapy than a religion. But all religions and philosophies are forms of therapies. Choose the one that makes sense and helps you the most. Talking with friends and strangers as well as writing, especially writing poetry, are exercises in self-help. In the end, one only can help oneself. Others can point the way. But one has to take the first step of setting foot on the path of liberation and freedom. 

You took in the elements of Buddhism that made sense to you, and rejected the nonsense and the unverified (reincarnation and soul migration). To your way of thinking, one only has one life to live. And upon death the energy that incarnated in an individual sentient being will be absorbed by the surrounding environment, but that does not mean the consciousness that made up that individual would be intact. It died along with the body. The body, where the consciousness resided, was only the temporary custodian of the energy. In other words, the existence of the consciousness was contingent upon the viability of the body. The body was the sine qua non for the consciousness. You are a materialist because materialism makes sense to you. 

So, you don't believe in heaven or hell or reincarnation. You only believe in the here and now, and this beautiful planet on which you are having a brief journey during which you have experienced some joys and sorrows, and will leave behind a legacy of essays, poems, short stories, and a son. The more you live, the more you are convinced that while you are not an outstanding human, you are not a man marked by mediocrity and burdened with common thoughts and longings. 

August 21, 2017