Miscellaneous Remarks

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust

We humans always want a solid base to stand on. Some idea that we consider bedrock, completely unshakable. For example, the idea that if I meditate, things will go a certain way, or that if I pray to a deity, life will work out a certain way, or that if I'm a good person, nothing bad will happen to me, etc etc, are all ideas which might serve as a solid base. And yet they are all delusions. Part of the difficulty of life is acceptance of the fact that nothing is truly unshakable. There is no idea that cannot be overturned. Once we realize this, we need not cling to our ideas so tenaciously, and thus not suffer so much when we need to let them go. It seems to me that people tend to become angriest and even violent when they see a genuine threat to their core beliefs. Giving up their core beliefs, they unconsciously feel, would be more painful than violently lashing out against the threat. I think this is why there was so much violence associated with the civil rights movement. This is why ordinary people became distorted with fierce rage. The very foundations of their personalities were being assaulted. I, too, am guilty of this. When I first moved to my present location in the midst of the Bible belt, I became angry and resentful at the omnipresence of evangelical culture. I perceived the local culture as a threat to my worldview. In the end, I got over it. Why should I become angry at people for having opinions differing from my own? The answer's pretty simple in my case: insecurity. Not having enough belief in myself to allow others to disagree with me. Thinking about it now, I'm rather astonished about how worked up I was.