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We’re All Avoiding
On Dharmaseed, Heather Martin has a talk about accepting. Heather is funny. She likes the evolutionary explanation for human identity and patterns of reaction, which makes sense to me, but she talks about humans having to avoid dinosaurs. She’s a Buddhist teacher, not a paleontologist, so I’m willing to give her a pass on that one.
The need for Buddhist teachers to talk about accepting implies the opposite problem. A search for “accepting” on Dharmaseed gets six pages of hits.
We’re all avoiding. This is a basic problem for humans. We really do not want to have to pay too much attention to our situation at any given moment.
This is perhaps not surprising, since the Buddha, upon awakening and seeing reality, came back and told us to abandon all hope. From an unawakened perspective, it is not a pretty picture.
Faith is a kind of complicated topic in Buddhism, but as Lou Reed put the point, it takes a busload of faith to get by. You just have to choose what you put your faith in.
