Mahendra’s musings
So who are we? We are descendants of apes with a history of at least 200,000 years going back to an origin in Ethiopia. The latest finding in Morocco takes us further back to at least 300,000 years. Fossil evidence leaves no room for doubt at all that what we now know as Human or Homo Sapiens Sapiens did not exist in the early stages of the formation of Planet Earth Millions of years ago. It is therefore abundantly clear that the traditional Christian teaching of Creation and the story of Adam and Eve cannot be true. However, the Big Bang theory which is now accepted is also totally baffling and incomprehensible to me. How can a massive Universe originate from something which was trillions upon trillions of times smaller than an atom? All this first happened in a mere fraction of a second and then expanded hugely and continues to expand to form our massive Universe. By “thinking” and reflecting, I just cannot get my head around it and is reduced to accepting it on the basis that there is supposed to be good mathematical proof for it. What about quantum mechanics? A particle being in two places at the same time (superposition), particles light years apart influencing each other simultaneously (quantum entanglement). No wonder people are prepared to accept supernatural beliefs on the basis that the fact that we cannot understand it is not proof against it. But one must be careful in not extending this argument superficially. The fact that we cannot prove that a Hamburger is circulating around the Moon does not mean that we cannot discard such a ridiculous notion. In fact the more difficult it is to disprove something; the more likely it is not to be true.
The big question for me is what are we really? We know that all matter, including living matter is constantly changing and a permanent entity of anything is not possible, unless an entity is defined as a continually changing one, so that “what is now is what changed from what was before” and “what will be is what is now changed into what it will be”. It is an entity in that there are separate entities (like evanescent but separate Tom, Dick and Harry) but each one is impermanent and not unique. It could be looked upon as a collection of changing entities.
It appears to me that each person has a physical component, i.e., the body, and something on top of that which we could call the mind or consciousness. I find it difficult to accept that the mind or consciousness does not need or does not function through, a physical basis, i.e., the brain. With my medical and neurological background, I have witnessed people with cerebral damage through disease or trauma, change virtually completely in personality and behaviour, depending on the area and extent and nature of the damage. Either our consciousness or “mind” expresses through the brain or damage to the brain also damages the mind (consciousness), whatever it is!
If we are all a bundle of ever changing particles and mind, what is our place in the Universe as a whole and more specifically within the animal kingdom? Why do we reflect and act introspectively and if so, is it just us humans, or is this behaviour more widespread? Do animals think? Have they got self-awareness? Do they possess consciousness? Do they exhibit moral behaviour?
As we progress from birth to death, we strive to be free from painful and unhappy experiences and be filled with pleasant and happy experiences. But is this just a change within a spectrum of awareness of what is pleasant or what is unpleasant? Can we “feel” happy if we have never felt what it is like to be unhappy? In other words, we can only actively feel unhappy or happy, just at the time when our experiential state changes, and is not lasting? Are painful and unhappy experiences a necessary evil to being able to experience the opposite? What sort of experience will it be to be neither happy nor unhappy? Is this what we call contentment? The analogy is the way we feel temperature. If we enter a room which is at a much lower temperature than the one we were before we entered the room, the room will feel hot. On the other hand, if the temperature of the first room was much lower, we will feel warm or hot. After some time, a new equilibrium may be reached where you are neither hot nor cold. In other words, we respond more to change than to absolutes.
Buddhism teaches us, that it is impossible for a human being not to experience sadness of some kind or other in his/her lifetime. The term “Dukkha” is often translated as “suffering” which is really inaccurate and misleading. When we say that our existence can never be free from “dukkha”, the reference is to the fact that we are all subject to illness, injury, separation from loved ones, not being always able to get what we desire, not being able to make our elation last and not being able to avoid death. There is a lot of fun in between! But we cannot avoid the hazards. Even pleasurable sensations do not last forever. The acquisition of something you yearned for will make you elated but the needle will come down and you will most likely move on to acquire something else in order to feel happy again. Every attachment runs the risk of detachment resulting in sorrow. Life, therefore, cannot be perfect however rich, talented or powerful you are. A better word for Dukkha is unsatisfactoriness.
If so, what is the answer to us leading as happy a life as possible, given the fact that some of the downsides are unavoidable? The answer appears to be in two parts. Buddhism advocates a way of life minimising attachments to objects or people, thus minimising the risk of dispossession which causes unhappiness. It also promotes an ethical or moral code of behaviour. In the end, however, Buddhism advocates a solution which is based on a rather radical explanation of living systems, at least as applies to the animal kingdom. This is the teaching of a “life force” which is not in any sense permanent (as for example a soul) but is present in some complex fashion in an animal distinct from its body. I am not certain whether this is part of consciousness. It is not a permanent entity such as a “soul” but little explanation is provided on exactly what it is. According to this, when an animal dies, it triggers the birth of another being and the circumstance of that birth and the nature of the new “born again” is determined by the collective past actions of the animal that died. This collection is called “karma” and is continually changing according to our actions. There is a moral element in it which says that “good action or karma” begets “good results or karma” (“we are the result of what we were and we will be the result of what we are"). This is hard to build into biological systems as we understand them through science. The principle of “an action having a reaction” is easy to accept in physical terms. For example, if you heat a piece of paper to a high temperature, it will catch fire. There is no “purpose” in it. Even in some areas of behavioural change the sequence of action and reaction is easily seen. For example, if we refrain from smoking tobacco, our chances of suffering from heart disease and strokes are considerably reduced. It becomes harder to explain when we delve into moral responsibility. Sometimes it is obvious. If you are rude to a person, it is likely that you won’t be treated well. But if somebody utters a lie, an untruth, it is said to bring a bad result purely because lying is bad. Lying is a “sin” or lying is an “akusala”. But in reality, a lie might save your life or the life of another! When the murderer came looking for your brother to kill him, you said he is not here, which was a lie. The matter now becomes more complicated by stating that the result of an action will have a favourable moral consequence if the action was motivated by a good intention. This too has problems as killing a fellow human being is classed as a sure way of generating bad karma but what if the only action you could take to save your mother was to shoot the gunman? Your motive was pure. Buddhism also teaches that an action has good or bad consequences according to (1) the motive (2) the nature of the action itself and (3) the intended result of the action and this does make some sense. But why should this kind of morality operate at all in the Universe? One explanation is that we are all subject to the “will” of a supernatural being, a God who has laid down all the laws. The difficulty arises when this Power is said to be All-Powerful and All-loving which appears contradictory when we see the prevalence of gross unfairness and injustice in this World. If He is the Creator of everything, He is also the Creator of harmful bacteria and viruses. If He is All-loving, he picks and chooses who to bestow his largesse. The oft-quoted Christian view that we are all sinners and we are suffering for the “original sin” is catastrophically unfair as generation after generation is being punished for no fault of theirs. To sentence all humanity for the conduct of one person is unjust whichever way you look at it. In any case, an all-loving power should not be in the business of punishing. Then there is the contention of being granted a “free-will”. If the Creator of Man created a person who when given the ability to make a choice between good and evil makes the wrong choice, I would blame the Creator who surely had the wherewithal to produce a better specimen. I know many very ordinary human beings who lead exemplary lives, unaffected by temptations to do the wrong thing. Why didn’t He create such a being in the first instance? In any case, what is He up to creating beings and watching them behave or misbehave? Is the whole Universe an experimental playground? I am yet to see any convincing argument to support the God belief. I have my thoughts on why it is so strongly held and why it has such a long history and I shall return to that later on,
But returning to the process of “rebirth” for lack of a better term, if we consider a human birth for the time being, and let us for the sake of simplicity and discussion talk about John, a kind man who has a few blemishes in his life which he is not proud of , who is about to die and be born as Sarah, to an English family consisting of a mother with a genetic disorder with dominant inheritance and a father who is almost always drunk, living in a socially deprived area. The chances of Sarah blossoming out to become a worthy young girl are heavily weighted against her. This implies that in some amazingly complicated and unfathomable way, John’s karmic accumulation selectively “chose” Sarah’s mother’s womb and this included the choice of a mother with a certain genetic constitution as Sarah is at high risk of inheriting the mother’s dominant disorder. Even if we are prepared to consider this possibility, we cannot even remotely come up with a hypothesis to explain how it could happen. Our lives are conditioned by our genes and our environment. How did these aspects of Sarah come to her from Peter? The implication is that Sarah’s genes were in some way affected by John’s. To make it even more complicated, in some totally spooky way, Sarah became the “chosen one” to succeed John through a mechanism that was able to take into account the social background into which she was born. This can only be accepted as a matter of faith. It seems so far-fetched and unlikely.
It is even more difficult to explain what this “life force “is. We know that the Human race has grown by billions and does it mean that life forces, whatever they are, can move from humans to animals and vice versa? Do these life forces come from outer space? Where did they come from? Have all animals got it? What about an amoeba? A Mosquito? If a human is reborn as an animal, is that the end of the road for final salvation as according to the Teaching, only a Human being can attain final salvation.
The Buddhist solution for ultimate bliss is to stop this cycle of births and deaths. The persistence of the life force is said to be driven by ignorance and the desires leading to attachments or clinging. “Who” or “what” is able to experience such emotions? Once these are overcome, the life process ceases and dukkha is thus abolished. But if we do achieve it, who or what experiences it? And even if as some say, this state can be achieved in your own life, what happens when that life ends? That is why I am not able to comprehend how this is a solution when the person who had the problem also ceases to exist. We are told that with our limited intellectual abilities, we are unable to comprehend this state called Nirvana. There appears to be an implication that although “you” cease to exist, “something” is experiencing a kind of supreme bliss. Furthermore, Buddhism refers to other realms of existence including some which are supremely “happy” but yet subject to death but in these realms, they are unable to attain total enlightenment as the latter can only be achieved as a Human Being.
The carrot however in the teaching is that this attainment is within the reach of every human being and by following what is called the Noble Eightfold Path, realisation or Insight will come to the Practitioner. We are told that it is something you can only experience. It cannot be visualised or imagined or logically derived. The path is shown and it is entirely up to you to test it for yourself.
I am forced to conclude that acceptance of Buddhism as the ultimate Truth of our existence and of our Universe is also a matter of faith just as acceptance of God is a matter of faith. What we know of our Universe and of Human Evolution does not fit in any way with what is expounded in any religion or philosophy. These doctrines were propounded when our scientific knowledge and understanding was backward, when many what we now know as natural phenomena were attributed to Supernatural powers. The list of phenomena being transferred from the “Supernatural” to the “Natural” is growing all the time and will continue to do so as we gain more and more knowledge.
However, I find some of the practical advice given to lay people on maximising happiness and minimising sadness (I call this a state of contentment), through a Buddhist approach very helpful. But religions (classifying Buddhism arguably as one) cannot be eclectic. We cannot make up a basket of things from Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism etc and produce the “Real truth”. Each claim to be the Truth and only one can be. A basket of components promoting good behaviour and a life of relative contentment can be built through the adoption of some aspects of many Religions. The big appeal of Buddhism to me is its highly sophisticated understanding of human psychology, the teaching of self-reliance and self-improvement, the lack of dependence on a supreme being and the non-violent, universal love it promotes among not just human beings but also all animals. The practice of Buddhism in a Society will produce a just and relatively peaceful and content one. Lastly, it is ahead of its time when The Buddha said “Don’t accept things because your elders said it, don’t accept things because holy texts say it, don’t accept things even though I, the Buddha said it, but see for yourself and accept it if it seems right for you on the evidence”. This is known as Ehi Passiko – come and see for yourselves.
In my next instalment, I shall be musing on “Morality” and Religion. Are they evolutionary responses for the survival of the species?
