Daily Religion

In the past decade or so, I have been reinventing Buddhism. As I struggle to cultivate or even maintain mental wealth, I hypothesise one dictate or principle of Buddhism after another. Sometimes a year is needed to rediscover one.

I suppose I don’t regret it too much: I have no faith. I cannot believe what makes no sense to me. My principle hypothesis is that there is in fact nothing to believe in. There is only something to cultivate.

Here is my conjecture: if one is free to dream anything, then what you dream is what your predilections and mental habits sanction. Why would an afterlife look any different? Maybe because of something you believe? Then why do you not dream of that afterlife? Why do you have false beliefs about your dreams that keep you from realising that they are dreams? What good are beliefs you cannot remember? No, Occam’s Razor claims that dreams are your litmus test. What you dream is what you are going to get, if anything.

Awareness matters.

Mindfulness has nearly my entire life had no meaning for me. I tried it, found it tiresome and pointless, and moved on to more entertaining past-times. It wasn’t until I was forced into practicing mindfulness for two uninterrupted weeks that I made a break-through.

First, it brought clarity of mind — a fragile clarity, but a clarity nonetheless. Mental clarity is not like a philosophical insight. One may not believe in it. One may not decide to have it. It is a mode of awareness. It is how you are. I think, any one who experiences it realises that it is the most important aspect of existence. If you have clarity of mind — or rather, enough of it — you can make do with any circumstance life can throw at you.

Your satisfaction with an art project or with a technical project has not to do with the ease by which the thing could be slapped together, but by the skill and creativity that you were able bring to the problem. Similarly, your satisfaction with existence has not to do with how easy it is for you, but with how well you manage its difficulties, both petty and great.

Secondly, I immediately saw its application to dreaming. The hardest aspect of dreaming lucidly is staying on task, not getting distracted, and not forgetting. Awareness is the name of the game, and it is not something one is born with. It is not part of the human endowment. Awareness has grades. And it can be cultivated.

So, whatever you think you’re doing with your religion, you are going to do with your awareness. The quality of your awareness is going to determine the quality of that experience. This is what makes mindfulness the primordial, or prerequisite, religion.

By coincidence (just kidding), we have been thrown into a world in which we must react to exigencies not of our own making, a world in which attention to detail matters, where persistence and decisiveness matter. Our ancestors needed to be mindful to survive — mindful of smells, a change in wind direction, an unusual sound, the change of the seasons, each blow to a flint blade. In contrast, we need obedience to survive. We must show up to our jobs on time, do what we’re told, submit tax declarations. Our survival is nearly guaranteed, as long as we obey. Driving cars might be the most mindful thing we do, except that it is highly regulated and we listen to music or chat while doing it.

Our civilisation does not require mindfulness and it even celebrates the opposite: endless entertainment and scandal and distraction. In fact, one is hard pressed to imagine a lifestyle more contrary to mindfulness. And yet, if the history of our species were mapped onto a single day, the industrial era would be only a minute long. What we consider normal is anything but. We have gotten off the human track.

Flipping a switch provides no satisfaction, so why make any compromises for the convenience?

I have a laundry machine now, which is a great time-saver. However, I probably spend the saved time on the internet. I haven’t come out of the bargain with an improved mental life. And yet, I can remember a summer during which I washed my clothes by hand, using water that I schlepped in jerry cans. I was mindful and purposeful in a way that I am not now. Every minute I spent on such chores was an investment in my mental life. I’m just realising the full weight of it today because this morning I was mindfully engaged in some ordinary tasks. By lack of purpose, I accidentally fell into the forgotten habit of mindfulness. I got into the grooviness of making my movements efficient, making the sequence of events efficient, of being successful at what I was doing — not because I was doing an important thing, but because I was doing it. When I came out of that reverie — reverie is only word I have for it now — I see what I’ve lost.

When I was a teen-ager, all my friends claimed at one time or another to prefer death to dementia or the mental feebleness of old age. The problem with dementia is that at the beginning, you think that it’s not so bad and that you can manage. By the time it is so bad, you’re unaware of it — because you have dementia.

That is what happened to me. I returned to my ordinary life, thought I could manage it, and as I lost clarity of mind, I couldn’t see what the fuss could be. It takes mental clarity to evaluate mental clarity.

Today, I must put one foot on the ground, followed by the other. I must claw my way back.