Tag: meditation

This Precious Human Life

Today let’s talk about a topic one of the most basic concepts in all of spirituality. Our precious human life. Someone asked Buddha how precious is this human life. He had an interesting answer. He said imagine there is a blind turtle in the vast ocean. We all know how deep and cast the ocean is. Now in this ocean, there is a golden ring floating around. Our blind turtle is swimming deep in the ocean. What the chances of this blind turtle coming out and get his head in the golden ring when he comes on the surface? Think about it. There must be billions to one or some crazy odds like that for it to happen.

There are theories as to how rare human life is and one theory is that we get a human life once in a hundred thousand years on average. Does not mean one cannot have back-to-back human lives but in general, it is as rare as once in a hundred thousand years.

So now that we know that how rare an occasion this is let’s look at what makes it so special and what to do with it. A human being has an opportunity to work towards the liberation and even enlightenment. An animal does not have that opportunity because they are not capable of learning and practicing Dharma. Only human beings have the opportunity to engage in spirituality which leads to lasting happiness. This is what makes human life precious.

Another way to look at this is to realize that there are more than 7 billion human beings on this planet. Every one of us gets one life and that’s all. No matter who you are – rich, poor, powerful, layman, religious authority, nonreligious person – it does not matter. Each person gets one shot at this life. You are no different than Jeff Bezos in that sense. Steve Jobs tried everything in his power including a liver transplant but in the end, he could not buy more time. You can buy many cars, houses, all kinds of material things but you cannot buy another life. So once this human life is over, it would be very difficult to find another human life so that makes it a rare occurrence.

Now that we understand how rare and precious opportunity we have, we must make the most of it. It means we use this human life to advance our spiritual practice. Get one step closer to liberation and even enlightenment. This makes life very meaningful.

Nearly 150,000 people die on a daily basis in this world (maybe a little more during COVID). To quote His Holiness Dalai Lama:

“Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I’m not going to waste it, I’m going to use all my energies to develop myself. To expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I’m going to have kind thoughts toward others, I’m not going to get angry, or think badly about others, I’m going to benefit others as much as I can.”

Sadhguru tells his followers to put an alarm every hour when they are awake and when the alarm goes off, just say I am still alive.

Can you imagine how it will affect our daily lives and decision-making process? I am sure once we start appreciating our human life, we will stop wasting a lot of time. We will begin to let go of little things and focus on what matters.

So if someone loses a considerable amount of money, how can they just shake it off?

Let’s say someone loses their month’s worth of income. Now by all means, if there is a possibility of getting it back do it. If not, the first thing you do is to learn not to make that mistake again. Beyond that though if you let it bother you, it will start affecting your health and your relationships. So it certainly does not make sense to let that keep bothering you.

Does Inherent Existence mean everything is a mind game?

We are not saying nothing exists. What you see does exist but not an inherent existence. The existence of phenomena is a dependent existence as opposed to inherent existence. For example, if you look at a car that is coming at you, you are able to see it and hear the noise. So it is in your experience. But if someone is deaf and blind who is seating next to you, does that have that car in their experience as they cannot see or hear the noise the car is making. So the existence of the car is a dependent existence since one of you can experience it and another cannot. The idea about all this is to reduce our attachment to things. Once we know things do not exist inherently, hopefully, we will reduce our attachment to things. For example, if you lose some money, if we don’t have attachment towards our money, hopefully, it will not bother us and we will be able to carry on without much suffering.

Inherent Existence Continued

We have been discussing inherent existence for the past two weeks. Let’s continue on that topic one more session to make sure we have a good understanding of this topic before we move on to the next subject. Inherent existence means existence as the object’s basis of imputation. Inherent existence refers to the false idea that any entity can exist independently. Every characteristic defining an entity arises dependently from things that are not the thing being identified. You cannot have an object that is independent of its parts, causes, and conditions or mind that perceives it.

Things do exist just not in the way they appear to be existing. Things lack inherent existence means that things are existing by themselves. They are existing dependent on other factors. Let’s look at an example of a tree. All of us love to go watch fall foliage. A tree changes during the different seasons. Why does it change? It changes due to being set up dependent on other factors such as weather. That means that objects are constantly changing. If a tree were inherently existent it would never change. It would stay the same color with fruits and flowers all the time. It would stay the same not affected by weather all any other phenomena. But we know that is not the case.

Let’s look at a couple of more examples. A friend of mine used to have anxiety issues. He would be in the car in a rush hour and would get upset about the traffic. We had an interesting discussion maybe 10 years ago. I asked him if he would consider just ignoring the traffic around him and focus on music or something during his drive. He said, well, that’s not me. That is not personality. I said maybe you should consider changing. He took a big offense he said that is my identity how can I change who I am. I let the subject go. Fast forward 10 years and he has calmed down considerably. Things don’t bother him as much in traffic. He adopted. What he thought was his identity changed. 10 years ago, he thought that was inherent existence. Today it is clear that it was not since he has changed.

Let’s look at another example. Have you ever been absorbed in a movie? I know I certainly have. If it is a well made gripping movies and you are fully captivated by the plot; you can feel everything being real. You even get a physical reaction if there is an unexpected gunshot or something as if it just happened in front of our eyes. Even though we know we are watching a movie, at that moment we think it is inherently existent. We feel everything that is happening is real. We know it is just fiction.

We will do a longer Q&A session today than usual so we can clear up any questions on the subject. This is a profound subject, and I would like all of you to contemplate the subject and try to come up with your own examples to make sense for you in your experience. Once this clicks, the rest of the wisdom teachings become a lot easier to grasp.

Inherent Existence Part 2

We discussed inherent existence last week. Let’s continue on that topic to make sure we have a good understanding of this topic before we move on to the next subject. Most people take all phenomena as inherently existent. As we discussed last time, there is no inherent existence. All phenomena are imputed existence. During our discussions, we talked about examples of a flower and a car. We tried to find both of those objects within their parts or a combination of parts. To our amazement, we could not find either object. So today, we will try to find something different from scratch to bring this point home.

We all have a good understanding of what a forest is. I think we can say, we will know when we see one. Say one of our friends bought a house on a large tract of land – say 35 acres. They start planting some trees say 5 trees on their property. They call and ask us to come over to see their forest. We go there and see 5 trees and say well, this is not a forest. I have five trees in my backyard. It does not make a forest. So he gets disappointed. He starts planting more trees. Now he has maybe 40 trees. He calls us and says now I really have a forest, check it out. We go take a look and say still not a forest may be a grove but definitely not a forest. So he goes back to work and keeps calling us every few weeks to see. Every time, we see more trees but disappoint him when we tell him it is not a forest. A year or so goes by. He calls us and we go this time. We can’t count the number of trees on these 35 acres of land. We can’t figure out where the trees begin and where they end. We say this is a forest, my friend. You did it! When did this group of trees become a forest? Can we point to one tree that made this a forest? No, of course not. So forest we all agree that it is an imputed existence. It is a forest because we all agreed to call it a forest.

In some schools of thought, they call this a dependent existence because it depends upon the sense perception of the person who experiences the phenomena. Let’s look at things we see for example The images we see are made up of light reflected from the objects we look at. This light enters the eye through the cornea, which acts as a window at the front of the eye. Because the front part of the eye is curved, it bends the light, creating an upside-down image on the retina. The brain eventually turns the image the right way up. In other words, what we see is on our mind and not out there. Without the interpretation, there is no object. Similarly, when hearing music, we are hearing music in our mind and not out there. This is called dependent existence. So there is no inherent existence.

I know it is a profound subject and will take some time to get clarity on the subject but once that clarity comes, life becomes simple. We no longer grasp on anything and take things as they come without any attachment towards these objects. If we look at things that we grasp on a daily basis, it is insane. For example, some of us are attached to our cars, our homes, our computers, our 50 pairs of shoes, our money, and whatnot. But if we start looking at this and realize that there is no inherent existence our attachment towards these objects will gradually reduce. And at some level, we know the fragility of all this but we just are not ready to accept it or do not have the awareness to see it at the moment. Something to think about.