Can you tell me the answer?
There is one big mystery, no one yet has solved or provided a solution for.
Emperor: What’s the first principal of the holy truth?
Bodhidharma: Vastness, no holiness!
Emperor: Who is it that confronts us?
Bodhidharma: Know not!
- From the Hekigranroku. Zazen.
Why is the world like it is? Beautiful, screwed up, joyful, suffering? Whatever you choose the world to be - we still must ask, why is the world like it is?
I think most reject the thought that the world is what we make it. This tires quickly, reality consumes our puffy, hot thoughts. The world is created outside ourselves and at the same time through ourselves. We are small and insignificant in the totality of things, no matter what the nightly news tells you.
But why is it, what it is (whatever, however, you define that “it”)?
There are many other ways to fashion this question.
Why, if there is a godly creator, is there evil and suffering in the world?
How come entropy is central to all existence and everything proceeds from the perfect to imperfect, all things unraveling as we go through time’s whipper snipper?
Why are men, women, people, and societies so unable to live in peace and love?
So many theories out there. People make a lot of money pretending to know the answer to this question. From the sub-atomic and quirky quarky level, right up to the heuristic, religious, and catch-all level - you got gurus out there selling you an answer.
Myself, I take solace in the surreal and Godot’s words - “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
I think there is no answer. Even the monk after 50 years of sitting quietly on the mountain, death knocking, gets up and says, “Is that it?”
You might say, religion has answers. I don’t believe so. It has faith but that is different than an answer. And besides, like science (which is a form of belief and religion), religion seeks to influence the future. And I can’t go for anything with that much magical thinking to it.
However, I do believe there is some relief if we ask the right questions. It allows you to breathe for a while before the vacuum again starts to smother you.
I’ll leave you with a few great minds who could ask good questions and who when reading, always provided us with a few more moments of being able to breathe and endure the reality that presses down on us.
The literature of consciousness is ultimately about the bewilderment of the naive. Why do men carry guns and build prison camps when the earth is made for freedom? - Cynthia Ozick, A Tale of Heroic Anonymity
The insurrection against evil is above all, a demand for unity. The rebel obstinately confronts a world condemned to death and the impenetrable obscurity of the human condition with his demand for life and absolute clarity. - Camus, The Rebel, Nihilism and History
I do not know what creates civilization but I suspect strongly that what keeps it in existence is nothing more than an unrelenting preference for the agreeable on the part of the few, in the face of widespread opposition. Gyorgy Faludy
Speechless
I'm a little scared
of what the world's
coming to.
I'm a little scared
of the things I'm gonna
have to do.
It's a little unsettling
how heavy the world can
weigh on you.
It's a little unsettling
how you now know
you'll be doing the things
you once
didn't know you could do.
There are so many things
not one of us
will ever know.
I wish I had a cloth
to wipe it all away
then hug each n every
damn one of you
bereft, left
like this poem
with nothing else to say.