Lord Buddha in Crisis -The Buddha Bar (Part 5)
April 9, 2020
Spirituality as a coping mechanism can be observed to be a powerful resource in the provision of comfort, peace, and resolution for people confronted with a critical crisis when facing the hurdles and challenges of daily life.
The most important thing in seeking the truth is to be honest with yourself. What I find most common is people lying to themselves all the time. If you say “I choose to hold on to the idea that I can minimize pain and maximize gain if I play my cards right. I want to stay asleep, pretend to work a spiritual path, and die clueless and I’m comfortable with that”, that is fine, its an honest statement.
Most people whom I meet on the “spiritual path” say that they take up spirituality to want to be a better person — to their friends at work, to their lover, to their family. Some say they to be at peace. Others say they want to learn to love more deeply, raise their vibrational frequency — to godamn whatever they have heard or read from the teachers and books littering the spiritual marketplace — raising their level of consciousness to create a pathway to access their divine energy and fine their higher selves, whatever that means. Well for all those reasons listed above, you already have an army of “spiritual teachers” and fringe cult communities out there who actually provide ways to keep people mollified within their hypnotized state. Whatever pursuit you are indulging in, somewhere along the line it will dawn on you that it is not leading you anywhere. Wanting to be at peace with yourself means that you are not happy with yourself. This is the greatest disease that every human being acquires as a bad habit — to compare. From the very beginning you are being told to compare yourself with others.
Most people fail to realize that each individual is unique, and comparison is not possible. In order to find peace that you see in others, you have to go to war with yourself. Finding peace would be an impossible goal for you because everything you are doing to be at peace with yourself is what is destroying the peace that is already there — something you find easy to achieve when you mentally exhaust yourself and get good deep sleep. As long as you want something like peace or happiness, you will continue to be at war and destroy yourself, always being unhappy. You can only truly be free from unhappiness when you stop worrying about what others think of you.
New age spirituality is for those who have money, idle time and nothing better to do. It is a mere product of the culture of materialism, a fantasy woven to cater to our neurotic obsession with ourselves and our personal angst. It is a type of escapism which you can’t escape from. When once you have had one pseudo “spiritual experience” there is bound to be a demand for more and more of the same, and ultimately you will want to be in that state permanently. There is no such thing as permanent happiness or permanent bliss at all. Because all those books talk of eternal bliss, permanent bliss, or permanent happiness, you mislead yourself thinking there is one. Before you complain about life, think of someone whom you loved who left this earth too early seeking that very happiness which they could not find.
My biggest takeaway from the maze of challenges I faced in the school of life after years of seeking for an answer is this : You are the purpose of life. You are the meaning of life. You are life looking back at itself in wonder. To be able to see, to hear, to smell, to touch, to taste, to imagine, to love, to feel all sorts of emotions within you — that is what being alive creates for you. There is nothing more than that. Getting a good night’s sleep is the most effective spiritual exercise you can ever do. When you wake up, find your areas of excellence and enjoy the simple things of life. You can miss the bus. There’s always another one that comes after fifteen minutes. But don’t miss out on living your life. Be at awe with your existence. Always remember this — You are the only best friend you have. You can choose to be you own best friend, or choose to be your worst enemy. Surviving happily is a glorious purpose in life. Have faith in yourself.
