The Zennist

The problem that everyone sooner than later faces

The pressures we feel remind us that the world has its problems and so does our life we have been living since birth.  But being young and healthy keeps us optimistic in most cases.  I am feeling happy what could go wrong?  The problem that everyone sooner than later faces is what do you do when reality finally confronts you with the finitude of your life?

For some of us it is a wake up call; for many others it adds up to a kind of ongoing depression that becomes more difficult to live through.

For some of us this wake-up call leads to religion or studying Buddhism while for many others they become more or less addicted to sex, drugs and alcohol.  What all these routes have in common is they rely on hope and the imagination.  But what if there is a place we all fear to go to when even hope and our imagination must be transcended?

In the final analysis, Buddhism prepares us to go to this place after our large net of hope and imagination fail to catch the big fish!  But to get to this place we must first have a great deal of hope and a good imagination.  We must keep casting our net over these waters again, and again until one day we accidentally fall down becoming entangled in our net.

So that we don’t deceive ourselves we must go through this last process in solitude, like a hermit.  It is a desolate world where self-deception does not triumph and is easily seen through.  Forsaking all hope and the imagined, only then can we become open to the singular way.  Maybe one night we see what truly lies beyond the burning house.

The Zennist

Author of The Zennist blog since 2007.