Deepak on Buddha

Feeling alone, unwanted, unloved, weak, lost, and empty is how the human disease feels today.

At no time in history have there been more stateless persons, refugees, overpopulation, and restless migration. Globalism makes the individual feel lost in the world, overwhelmed by its chaos, which always seems to be teetering between madness and catastrophe. Yet when people came to Buddha, they brought the same complaints. They felt helpless in the face of natural disasters, war, and poverty. They couldn't comprehend a world on the edge of madness.
This dilemma has brought me closer to Buddha in recent years. I carry with me a few seminal ideas that have guided my life so far. One of them was expressed by Mahatma Gandhi when he said, "Be the change that you want to see in the world." Because the world is so huge, it came as a revelation to me --and also a mystery-- that by changing myself I can affect the world. This idea was not original to Gandhi. It's an offshoot of a much older idea, traceable to ancient India, which says, "As you are, so is the world."
That, too, is a revelation and a mystery.

Buddha accepted the inescapable fact that each person is ultimately alone in the world. This aloneness is the very disease Buddha set out to cure.

His cure was a waking-up process, in which suffering came to be seen as rooted in false consciousness, and specifically in the dulled awareness that causes us to accept illusion for reality. The reason that people resort to violence, for example, is not that violence is inherent in human nature. Rather, violence is the result of a wrong diagnosis. That diagnosis puts the limited ego-self first in the world, and regards the demands of "I, me, mine" as the most important things to attain. The reason that people react with fear in the face of violence is that the ego goes into a panic trying to defend itself and its attachment to the physical body. The answer to violence for both the aggressor and the victim is to see through the false claims of the ego and thus to come to a true understanding of who we are and why we are here. Buddha's answer remains radical, but its truth offers a way out that may be our best hope for the future. Let's examine his solution in detail.

Buddhist cure has become difficult, complicated, and confusing.
--Sitting and trying to find a core of silence is beyond short attention spans and doesn't fit into the hectic pace of modern life.
--Watching and examining the shifting contents of the mind is time-consuming and exhausting.
--Confronting the ego is nearly impossible, because it has a hundred heads for every one you cut off.
--Facing the truth that everything is impermanent frightens people.
--Seeking detachment makes people think they will be giving up worldly success and comfort.
--Abiding by a set of higher ethics makes them anxious that they will be prey to anyone who is stronger, less moral, and capable of using violence without any sense of guilt or remorse.

Bringing wisdom to a world built on illusion and suffering is difficult. Solving violence through peace seems unworkable. Detaching from materialism has little appeal when people everywhere are pursuing materialism with every breath. Yet the genius of Buddha's teaching lies in its universality, and whatever is universal is also simple. Buddha's cure has the capacity to appeal to the entire world.
Buddha's cure has the capacity to appeal to the entire world.
Right now Buddha's cure isn't simple for most people because being alone isn't simple. By asking people to go inside, Buddha seems to be asking them to be more alone. We must get to the very root of the problem first. Who feels alone? You and I. The minute we use those three basic words we confront the real difficulty. "You" are someone separate from me. "And" implies that we might be connected, and yet we don't feel connected. "I" stands for my ego and everything it is stubbornly or desperately attached to. Buddha had to resolve all three issues of "you and I" before his teaching, the Dharma, could work a cure.
In the case of politics, I find myself leaning toward compassion as a powerful cure, and when I see signs of compassion in the face of Sen. Obama and former Sen. Edwards, I feel a small spark of hope. Since the death of Robert F. Kennedy, candidates don't run on a platform of compassion.

In the end, how does Buddha fit into the world? I think we will have an answer only after the question is put a bit differently. How does Buddha's purpose fit into the world? His purpose was to bring a kind of spirituality that frees people to live in peace. Right now we desperately need secular spirituality. God has been hijacked by fundamentalism to the point that seekers who don't want to be coerced by a fanatical concept of faith have few places to turn. Buddha opens a path to truth without a church.

Most importantly, Buddha's truth is not packaged. You can't turn it into dogma that authorities enforce or a catechism that the devout memorize. Packaged truth is a trap. It can deepen the illusion it was meant to dispel and wind up making us even more separate. Take a spiritual value everyone believes in, like love. People have killed in the name of love and suffered terribly in countless ways. The positive is always woven in with the negative. Does the good of love outweigh the bad? Buddha didn't measure truth that way. If it were enough to tell people to go and be good, to love and cause no harm, the human disease wouldn't keep spreading. Buddha wanted to pluck out the seed of illusion, not feed the mind with new ideals that would succumb to corruption in the inexorable working of time.

He aimed for nothing less than an "inner revolution," as one commentator has called it. Coming in from the cold, people yearn for this inner revolution because there is a hole inside them where God used to be. But in many ways that God was only an image, as Buddha would see it. Most people fail to find what they want from spirituality because they remove one image of God only to fill in another (they even turn Buddha into a god, the very thing he denied).

Inner revolution, opening a path to liberation, is what Buddha holds out. Nothing less will cure the human disease. If people could see that the human disease is temporary, the whole world would be transformed. Despite the burden of past beliefs that underlie a horrific conflict like the one in the Middle East, Buddha's cure is taking hold, although we don't know on what scale. Secular spirituality forms a separate subculture in every country where people have begun to seek a new way and a new set of beliefs. Their way doesn't have to travel under the name of Buddha. The essence is about moving ahead, not about labels. Where the growth of consciousness is being nourished anywhere in the world, the following trends are evident:

--Meditation will become mainstream.
--Healing, both physical and psychological, will become commonplace.
--Prayer will be seen as real and efficacious.
--Manifestation of desires will be talked about as a real phenomenon.
--People will regain a connection to spirit.
--Individuals will find answers inwardly to their deepest spiritual questions. They will believe in their private answers and live accordingly.
--Communities of belief will arise.
--Gurus and other spiritual authorities will wane in influence.
--A wisdom tradition will grow to embrace the great spiritual teachings at the heart of organized religion.
--Faith will no longer be seen as an irrational departure from reason and science.
--Wars will decline as peace becomes a social reality.--Nature will regain its sacred value.

There is no spiritual path that can succeed without confronting the here and now. Buddha wanted us to be mindful of who were are at this moment because in the midst of disorder and confusion, which dominates every moment, there is the seed of Buddha nature, of awakening.

If you notice these seeds and give them value, they will expand, and in time they will fill the holes of isolation and meaninglessness. The path is subtle but natural, and open to everyone. To notice who you are is simple, not difficult. You can be gentle with yourself. There is no timetable, no need for rigor or discipline.
Your job is to notice that there is light within you, however small. A small candle is only different from the blazing sun by a matter of degree. Both are light by nature. Whatever makes your light grow will serve you. Meditation will not be a practice set apart in your day; it will become the normal state of self-awareness, of being awake instead of asleep. For two thousand years nature has held the cure for aloneness in its heart. When you realize yourself as Buddha, you are still alone, but your aloneness fills every corner of creation as far as the eye can see.

To read more about Deepak and Buddha, see:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/topics/Deepak+Chopra