Why Buddha Touched the Earth

This will probably be a later chapter. Rough draft.

Compassion and the "Meaning" of Life

The Buddha started with the problem of human suffering, and ended up recommending cultivating compassion. Since compassion means opening ourselves up to the pain of others, this is worthy of some deeper thought.

Compassion? What's in it for me, you wonder.

Cultivating compassion expands the self. I'm pretty darn sure that the human body known as "Tom Swiss" is eventually going to stop functioning and in some way dissolve (rot in the ground, be burned up, eaten by squirrels, whatever). If I completely identify "myself" as "Tom Swiss", well, then, that's it for me. Maybe I can tickle the pleasure centers of this lump of meat a little bit before it dissolves, but that seems an unsatisfactory goal.

But is identifying "myself" as "Tom Swiss" the only option?

Throughout history, some people - people who seem to derive a great deal more contentment from life than the average Joe - have suggested that transpersonalization provides a more satisfactory experience. This means identifying "yourself" as more than your individual human organism.

By "more than", I do not mean anything supernatural, I am not speaking of a "soul" or anything metaphysical like that. But what if, for example, you were to invest a portion of your own concept of identity into your family? Unless all your relatives are childless, your family will outlast your body, so that "you" might have a larger and longer existence than your body.

What if you were to invest your identity into your community, your city or your nation? That's an even larger and longer existence. Perhaps we even have here a sensible argument for patriotism, at long last. But why stop there, when by identifying "yourself" with the whole human race, "you" get even bigger and longer-lived?

Now, hold on there, you ask. How in world am I supposed to accomplish this "investment of identity" that you're going on about? Well, it means to think of yourself as these other people. It's an exercise of imagination, to see things through their eyes, to feel what they feel. With that exercise, eventually it can be seen that the ordinary idea of "self" is just a mental construct, just an idea, not an immutable reality.

In other words, compassion is the tool and the method to get You out of you, the "big You" of consciousness out of the "small you" of identifying with finite flesh.

Indeed, if you get good at it, you may find that you can see "yourself" not just in other humans, but in other animals; in the trees; in the whole biosphere. Expanding "yourself" until not much identity is left connected with the individual human organism.

Compassion also provides a good answer for the question of the "meaning" of life.

Must a life have "meaning" in order to be enjoyable and satisfactory? What is the meaning of a sunset, or of a flower, or of a mountain, or of the rings of Saturn?

It's one thing to appreciate the beauty of inanimate objects without assigning them meaning, but what about human actions? When
I noodle around on my guitar, there's no inherent meaning, but it's fun. When children spend the day making sand castles, knowing that they'll be gone when the tide comes in, they still spend hours playing at it. What's the meaning of a snow angel, or of the tune I whistle while waiting for water to boil on the stove?

Meaning is something we create for ourselves, if we choose to. And compassionate action makes a fine meaning to choose.

Beyond even this, though, is the idea the Hindus call "lila" - the universe is the "purposeless play", the "spontaneous game". If, through compassion, we can expand our notion of self to encompass the whole universe, then the question of meaning loses its intensity - we are the tune the universe whistles.