The Beast Within and Without

Buddha pacifies a raging elephant

It is possible to look at the mystery of Life from a variety of perspectives. If we believe in any one of them, it will always look real. An interesting perspective suggests that human thought and reason are a specialisation of Nature in response to the need for survival.

Existence is a huge burden and may even become a living hell when under the weight of fear and the need for defence from an outside threat. When we see what the primitive man had to face at the start of his journey one can almost feel a certain compassion for him. Just look for example at the first part of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Primitive man is depicted as an animal struggling for survival every day. From every side lurked the danger that threatened the primary directive present in every living being: SURVIVAL. It is from this danger that our fear was born.

Words are not It

samsara

Again, from Aldous Huxley's book "The Perennial Philosophy", chapter "Truth":

 "(...) The experience of seeing the sky or having neuralgia is incommunicable; the best we can do is to say "blue" or "pain", in the hope that those who hear us may have had experiences similar to our own and so be able to supply their own version of the meaning. God, however, is not a thing or event in time, and the time-bound words which cannot do justice even to temporal matters are even more inadequate to the intrinsic nature and our own unitive experience of that which belongs to an incommensurably different order.

Lovelessness of State, Corporation and Religion

Aldous Huxley rolls in his grave
Artwork by dregstudios

Excerpt from Aldous Huxley’s book “The Perennial Philosophy”, from the chapter “Charity”

“(...) Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness. We begin by lacking charity* towards Nature, so that instead of trying to co-operate with Tao or the Logos on the inanimate and subhuman levels, we try to dominate and exploit, we waste the earth’s mineral resources, ruin it’s soil, ravage its forests, pour filth into its rivers and poisonous fumes into its air.