Starting Point

From a school's webpage:

"We define our teaching method as "Transformative Educaction," since it is created with the idea of making personal and social transformation possible. We say that each human being has, in their essence, something they ignore; existence itself is the manifestation of that ignorance. Nonetheless, life is the (only) possibility to get out of this predicament; education should be an element that contributes to existential understanding and comprehension."

My summary: existence is the manifestation of our lack of comprehension regarding our essence. Being alive is our only chance to understand our essence and never have to be born again. I am going to have to disagree completely.

Religions create dogmas and ideas and then pawn them off as absolute truths. The above philosophy (based on buddhism) supposedly is about becoming free in thought and action; yet the philosophy itself is establishing guidelines with which we are supposed to view and judge the world. We are alive. This is a predicament. We would not be alive if we understood the essence of being. So we must try to understand our essence in order to not have to keep being born.

What if I said - We are alive. This is a predicament. We would not suffer in this life if we did not have original sin. So we must try to maintain a belief in god in order to not suffer eternally - ?

I'm tired of every religion creating a starting point that says our existence is punishment. Does learning that not seem like something important in our formation and how we view things? Thinking that 1) we have to suffer and 2) it's our fault. Existence as our fault? Is a dog at fault? Or a chicken? Or a tree? What are they guilty for? But they suffer, and they exist! This establishing existence as something negative is bound to shape our worldview, how we interpret the things that happen to us, and ultimately, create confusion. We go through life cursing our days and our very existence, viewing it as a "problem," or a "punishment," even though we didn't DO anything.

It's all dogma, some of it is just better disguised.


I maintain that these things are not true:

1- The material world came first, and then later (and separately) man appeared.

Man is a result of evolution, the same evolution that created crustaceans and tornados. We are a natural product of the development of the cosmos, a species that came about and continues to morph, as does the entire Earth and all of existence. The Earth is not a static place, even though we are taught to view it as such. It is constantly changing. It did not exist first and then we appeared from some other dimension to "do something." This worldview separates us from the rest of the world, from everything that's around us, when in reality, our very cells are made up of the same materials as we see in our surroundings, and when we die, will become parts of cells of other organisms. That's why we go about completely dissconected and abusive of the rest of the world. We're part of this.


2 - Existence is "equal to" or a "result of" guilt.

Existence is. Guilt and being punished is a human concept, created to try and establish some kind of security and order in our societies. When a snail dries up on a sunny day and dies, do we say it is guilty? No, it's natural. We have arisen as a species as part of a natural process. The psychological suffering we endure during our lives is, indeed, due to a misunderstanding of the essence of life, but we are not being punished.


3 - Each person has a separate and unique "soul."

Each person has an "ego," a persona, a personality which is the result of a combination of their genes and their environment. We are convinced that we existed before we were born, but what, exactly, existed? Life is a current that flows beneath all of these physical bodies that we see, it alone is the constant - each person/personality is but an accumulation of their past.


4 - Reincarnation - where there is a definite, unchanging entity that remains intact throughout it's various "lives."

See number three. Personally, I think that reincarnation could originally have been used to mean the constant interchange of energy in the world; when you eat an apple, it dies and it becomes part of you, when you die, you are buried and become part of the soil, which then nurtures a tree, etc. I think that reincarnation then became used as an excuse to maintain a status quo in society; think caste system. It is the Eastern version of original sin - you are in the lowest class because you deserve to be there, I am in the highest class because I behaved in a past life. What does an amoeba have to do to move up in the system? But it is an excellent way to avoid uprisings from the lower class and assure privelages to the higher class, and remove any responsibility the higher class may have had towards the lower.



My point is (do I have one? maybe) - don't let dogmas influence and create your worldview. Don't even take what I say as truth. Be daring and forget everything you were taught, and go find out the truth for yourself.