When I’m spiritually asleep there’s always a feeling that something is missing. There’s a hole in my soul that I don’t know how to fill. I try to change my life so that thing feel right, but nothing works. If I really pay attention, however, it becomes obvious that I’m longing for love. Without love my life is empty and meaningless. The Buddha taught that the unawakened life is permeated by a type of suffering he called dukkha. Dukkha is an underlying unease and discontent. An existential SOS that arises from the knowledge of death, A fundamental sense of separateness from others. An alienation from the world. The Gnostic Christians wrote about this debilitating alienation in texts such as ‘Allogenes’, which means ‘The Stranger’. And this message resonates down the ages into the existentialist writer Camus’ book ‘L’Etranger’. When we’re lost in separateness we feel like a stranger in a strange land. This perpetual sense of discomfort and alienation is hard to avoid because it arises from the fact that we are conscious individuals. To be conscious is to be separated off from the oneness of life as an observer of the world. We suffer from dukkha when we believe ourselves to be only a vulnerable human being, which is inevitably distressing. We seek to alleviate this distress by making ourselves physically and financially secure. But we’re never secure enough to withstand the storms of life. We seek to alleviate this distress by becoming important and respected. But we’re never important enough to be overlooked by death. We seek to alleviate this distress by becoming successful and admired. But the emptiness within makes all our triumphs seem hollow. And then as the Indian poet Kabir says ‘Everything we do has some strange sense of failure in it.’ Deep down most of us know that only love can fill the hole in the soul. Only love can set us free from the debilitating dukkha that lurks in the shadows on even our sunniest days. Only love can truly...
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 09:05:13 +0000
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