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Venerated Citizen Losing Self by Sophia Barkat If life is a maze, then every dead-end is a re-incarnation. One hits a brick wall in one's life. It's just how it goes. Whether you are a mother of four inundated by homely duties or manager of a huge Fortune 500 company, there will come a point in your life when you will have hit a brick wall. Having just hit some myself, I know this. A brick wall is simply one of those dead-ends in the maze that make you wonder if all your work was in vain. It will happen because we all have expectations. Whether it's about our friends, ourselves, our children or our parents. Our beliefs will be tested and some will fail. Our companies will close. Good ideas ingrained in our Constitutions will be abolished by some ignorant lowlife. That's just life. It is easy, after a couple of unexpected failures to lose hope. Should we have no friends? Should we respect no elders? Should we not go to Church? What should we do but become inert and immune to the world? At some point it becomes clear to us that all our sorrows are self-created, embedded in our expectations. The loss of a child is the loss of an expectation. The loss of a marriage, the same. All sorrow originates in our claim to the outer world -- our quest for control. I cannot control many things. It has been a great challenge accepting this. I cannot control the actions or speeches of people close to me. I cannot control what my heart desires or where my mind takes me. I cannot control the body and it's decay. It is ridiculous of me to suppose that I may control everything just because I may be able to influence some people. It is ridiculous to be disappointed by loss of control. Can I be a writer if no one reads my work? Must I try to make my work readable? How can I control the market? Will I be unhappy if my work gets bad reviews? I cannot control how people perceive me or the world. It would seem that the only person I can control, shape, define is myself. But outside of accolades and adoration, failures and embarrassments, who am I? In the quest to lose control of others and to see oneself less and less in others' eyes one makes a conscious effort to lose part of one's self. In so doing one reduces suffering. This is the quest of Buddhism, the one in which I am ankle deep. When I started understanding that I had hit a brick wall, and that Buddhism was the only religion that focused on Nibanna or Freedom from Self, I knew it was for me. And yet, I had no clue how I would make the change. I'm an omnivore who loves eating meat. What would it mean to be a meat-eating Buddhist? Celibacy, vegetarianism -- you name it, I wondered if I could live as a Buddhist, for that is how I had defined it. More so, meditation was something I had never been successful at. As a Muslim, I had spent years trying to pray only to find myself laughing on the prayer mat. Searching for God and some ultimate being was not interesting to me. I couldn't care less whether God had come down to earth as Jesus or had sent Buddha or Mohammad, or how He spent His time or why He created us. How the world was created was interesting and that's why I studied Physics. I would laugh when someone prayed or if I saw someone meditating. "What in hell are you doing, staring at a candle flame?" I'd ask. "It helps you focus," they'd say, those people experimenting with meditation. I'd try it and then go away laughing even harder. Years later, as I use my brick-wall theory to realize I needed to reform myself I begin to view meditation completely differently. It is no longer "what will I think about when I am meditating", but "how soon can I meditate". But it took me some time to understand why meditation was important in the quest to lose self. I was talking to some Buddhists recently trying to understand what meditation is, and they said, "you'll know it when the time comes." I felt clueless for two whole weeks wondering what that use might be. But one day, like an epiphany, it came to me. I realized that meditation was not staring at a flame chanting "I can focus, I can focus. Good thoughts are coming to me." Meditation was not a mindless chore. It was an escape. Immediately I felt a sense of urgency to try it. And I did. Like an escape door, meditation is the way we leave our material world behind for a small while so that we may reduce the stress of our daily lives. It sounds a bit suicidal, but it is not. "Why do you want to leave the material world?" a fellow friend asked. "To relieve stress," I answered. Fact is there are many times in the day I want to run away for a few minutes. Meditation is my secret door. I can be anywhere. Working, cooking, and talking to people -- the escape is easy and I crave it. It's a few seconds of rush you absolutely enjoy, and depending on the stress level it can be longer. But once you make the conscious choice to get in, you have probably made a conscious choice to lose the Self. It's a scary feeling. "What if I lose my drive to achieve some worldly goals? Will I become a monk and roam the streets begging for food?" Meditation will change you. There will certainly be a great detachment from things that stress you out -- the world of suffering. If your mind is a switchboard and all that defines the self are switches, you will have made a conscious effort to turn off some of the switches. In so doing, you hope to gain control over yourself, albeit claiming to lose the Self. Buddhism is by no means easy. Once you're inside your mind trying to lose the self you'll wonder if you can ever come out of it. Is life as a Buddhist an unending trance or do we ever show emotion? I feel more and more distant from my own emotions these days, and also from the world. It helps me to manage stress and to not be miserable because my expectations were not met or if I don't do something as well as I could have. I have never seen a Buddhist monk talk with emotion -- only an even-temper and a look of genuine detachment. In a way I am beginning to feel that detachment and I wonder if one can ever stand knee-deep in this. My non-Buddhist friends are finding this quest of mine quite amusing, but my Buddhist friends are understanding it word-for-word. And we both know that there seems to be no option but a complete plunge. Buddhism is a steep slope. You cannot do it half way. But how does one reconcile material life with one's trance-state? Can one be interested in worldly success or worldly needs if one can detach so easily one's mind? Buddha says in the Eight Fold Path that one must reconcile and enjoy the worldy life. One must take the Middle Path. So, it is tricky, what one must consciously choose to keep alive in oneself. Detachment can lead to disenchantment if one is not careful. Disenchantment must be avoided. I find myself laughing at my dilemma, as I write this. I'm experimenting with losing the self and yet burdening myself with more things to accomplish. The desire to control is hard to give up. The very desire to lose the self is an expression of control, no matter how I look at it. Let's see how it goes -- if I can do this right or eventually have to leap out of the waters. |
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