Buda Persuasive Essay, Research Paper

Something that interests us all is ourselves – because we are the subject and

main focus of our lives. No matter what you think of yourself, there is a

natural interest because you have to live with yourself for a lifetime. The self

view is therefore something that can give us a lot of misery if we see ourselves

in the wrong way. Even under the best of circumstances, if we don’t see

ourselves in the right way we still end up creating suffering in our minds. The

Buddha was trying to point out that the way to solve the problem isn’t through

trying to make everything right and pleasant on the external dimension, but to

develop the right understanding, the right attitude towards ourselves, and to

overall just do what we can. Living in the US at this time, we expect comfort

and all kinds of privileges and material comforts. This makes life more pleasant

in many ways, but when our every need is provided for and life is too

comfortable, something in us just doesn’t develop. Sometimes it is the struggle

through hardship that develops and matures us as human beings. But when we give

up or surrender to restriction and to restraint through wisdom, we find

liberation. Life is the experience of restriction and restraint, being born in

our own skin and having to live under the laws of nature. Mentally we can fly to

the sky, but physically we are bound to limitations that get more and more

restrictive the older we get. This isn?t seen as suffering by us because

that?s just the way things are. The sense of oneself is something that we are

aware of when we are children; when we?re born there is no sense of a self as

being anything. As we grow up we learn what we are supposed to be, if we are

good or bad, if we are pretty or ugly, if we are smart or stupid. So we develop

a sense of ourselves. Even when we get older, sometimes we still have very

adolescent attitudes or childish emotional reactions to life that we have been

unable to resolve except by suppressing or ignoring them. There is one way of

talking about the self that makes it sound very doctrinal. It seemed to me that

Buddhists can sometimes say that there is no self, as if it was a proclamation

that they have to believe in; as if there were some higher being saying

"THERE IS NO SELF BOYS AND GIRLS!" It doesn’t seem true to just go

announcing that there isn’t any self- because what is this experience that we

are feeling right now? Where I am now there seems to be very much a sense of

oneself. I?m feeling, I?m breathing, I see, I hear; I react to things -

people can praise me or criticize me and I feel happy or sad. ? ?All states

are without self?, when one sees this in wisdom, then he becomes dispassionate

towards the painful. This is the Path to Purity.? (134 Rahula) So if this

isn’t me then what is it? And am I supposed to go around as a Buddhist believing

that I don’t have a self? Or if I am going to believe, should it be in something

like God where I can believe that I have a self, because then I can say things

like "my true self is perfect and pure" even if it?s not? That at

least gives me some kind of inspiration and reason to live my life, rather than

saying that there is no self and no soul, leaving a total of zero possibilities.

These are just examples of the use of language; we can say ?there is no

self? as a proclamation, or "there is no self" as a reflection. The

reflective way is to encourage us to contemplate the self. The Buddha was

pointing to the fact that when we really look at these changing conditions that

we tend to identify with, we can begin to see that these are not self. What we

believe in is not what we really are: it’s a position, it?s a condition,

it?s something that changes according to time and place. Each one of us is

experiencing consciousness through the human body that we have. There are

moments in our lives when the self does stop functioning and we get in touch

with the pure state of conscious experience. That is what is known as bliss. But

when we have those blissful experiences, immediately the desire to have them

again takes over, and no matter how hard we try to have it again, as long as

we’re attached to the view of wanting bliss again, we will never get it. But in

this state of attentive awareness, we begin to see what is actually taking

place, then we can let go of the causes of our suffering. We see how it actually

is, and we have that intuitive wisdom to let go. So in this life as a human

being from birth to death every moment is an opportunity for understanding in

the right way.