Existence is sorrow. Understand, and go beyond sorrow. This is the way of brightness.
Sorrow arises out of clinging to momentary things that you cannot make permanent. It is not in the nature of things. It is against the universal law. It is against dhamma, it is against Tao. You cannot win. If you fight with the universal law you are fighting a losing battle; you will simply waste your energies. What is going to happen is bound to happen; nothing can be done about it.
All that you can do is about your consciousness. You can change you vision. You can see things in a different light, with a different context, in a new space, but you cannot change things. If you think of the world as very real you will suffer; if you see the world as a strange dream you will not suffer. If you think in terms of static entities you will suffer. If you think in terms of nouns you will suffer. But if you think in terms of verbs you will not suffer. Happy Ho organizes best Meditation and Tarot classes in Noida and Delhi NCR area in India.
Nouns don’t exist. They exist only in languages; in reality there are no nouns. Everything is a verb because everything is changing and everything is in a process. It is never static, it is always dynamic.
The second thing Buddha says is, “Existence is sorrow.” To be is sorrow. The ego is sorrow. First he says: See the world as dream, fluctuating, changing, moment to moment new. Enjoy it, enjoy its newness, enjoy all the surprises that it brings. It is beautiful that it is changing, nothing is wrong about it; just don’t cling to it.
Why do you cling? You cling because you have another fallacy: that you are
The first fallacy is that things are static, and the second fallacy is that you are, that you have a static ego. They go together. If you want to cling you need a clinger; if you have no need to cling, there is no need for a clinger. Go deep into it: If you don’t need to cling, the ego is not needed at all, it will be pointless. In fact, it cannot exist without clinging.
The dancer can exist only if he dances. If the dance disappears, where is the dancer? The singer exists only in singing. The walker exists only in walking. So is the ego: the ego exists only in clinging, in possessing things, in dominating things. When there is no domination, no desire to dominate, no desire to cling, no desire to posses, the ego starts evaporating. On the outside you start clinging and in the inside a new clarity starts arising. The ego with all its smoke disappears, the ego with all its clouds disappears. It can’t exist because it cannot be nourished anymore. For it to exist it has to cling. It has to create “my” and “mine,” and it goes on creating “my” and “mine,” in every possible and impossible way.
The “I” exists only as an island in the ocean of “my” and “mine.” If you stop claiming things as “my” and “mine,” the ego will disappear on its own accord.
Neither the wife is your nor the husband nor the children. All belongs to the whole. Your claim is foolish. We come empty-handed into the world and we go empty-handed from the world. But nobody wants to know the truth—it hurts. Empty-handed we come and empty-handed we go. One starts feeling shaky, one starts feeling scared. One wants to be full, not empty. It is better to be full of anything—any garbage—than to be empty. Emptiness looks like death, and we won’t want the truth. Our whole effort is to live in convenience, even if that convenience is based on illusions.
“I demand an explanation and I want the truth!” shouted the irate husband upon discovering his wife in bed with his best friend.
“Make up your mind, George,” she calmly replied. “You can’t have both.”
Either you can have the explanation or the truth. And people are more interested in the explanation than in the truth. Hence so many philosophies. They are all explanations—explanations to explain away things, not to give you the truth explanations to create great smoke so you need not see the truth. And Buddha’s insistence is that you see it—because without seeing it you can’t go above sorrow.
