The Buddha said all quests are foolish but the one that liberates us from the wheel of rebirths, but we have found that the notion of rebirth is itself illusory, a fantasy compensation for the unredeemed suffering in a single lifetime, which in our view is all we have. Since the props of the karmic system have now been kicked out from under us, we will have to sustain the meaningfulness of life in the terror of its imperfection by finding the meaning in the imperfection, from the freedom, from the onceness itself. When we bravely throw aside the comfort of rebirth to face the onceness of life, dukkha remains, but by accepting dukkha as an ongoing feature of life, as a troublesome and almost incorrigible friend, we discover new and deeper motivations for compassion and understanding that do not require an afterlife and may not even require God.
We pay attention differently in our onceness. Our mindfulness is a mindfulness of the flow of time as well as the arresting totality of the moment -- of process, of history, of social development, more of progress and retrogression and less of circularity. And in paying this attention, which is really Solomon's attention to timing, we may discover better means for mitigating, if not eliminating, the sting of dukkha in its current temporal manifestations. By relinquishing ourselves to the onceness of life we may free ourselves to find better ways to deal with it. In this we return from the East to the West, but we bring the meditative disciplines with us as tools. Mindfulness and the clear analysis of the impermanence of the self strengthen us to be ourselves in the moment.
To the extent we struggle with, rather than transcend dukkha, we become capable of social, cultural and ecological advancement by developing competence in the turning points of fourfold love and wisdom, not in pursuit of a final goal, but toward endless openness and diversity in the onceness of our contributions, living our lives and building civilizations, arts and inventions and moving beyond the planet itself in some as yet unforeseen way.
To be willing to live according to our own best lights, without assurance, in the face of radical uncertainty, mortality and onceness, is what I call authenticity. To make the commitment to take on the project of one's life, to discover and possibly invent new values, to establish one's own criteria for validation, which means that for better or worse our efforts may fail, to deal with the problems, perplexities, mysteries, paradoxes and binds of our lives with mind and heart together in all its stages of growth, with its pleasures and sufferings, confusions and understandings, this is our problem to solve, to solve by living. Plunge in.
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)