A theme has emerged in the beginning of this year. Over and over again, the courses I’m taking and the books I’m reading and the people I talk to all seem to converge on the idea of a constructed reality—a reality that is, in truth, an illusion.
I’m reading Robert Wright’s new book Why Buddhism is True in search of an interpretation of my faith in words. The unique and entirely common scenario of Asian-Buddhist-in-the-West isn’t actually captured and articulated anywhere that I could find. Where does the line between culture, tradition, and religion lie? I think I’m about 10% through the book and, so far, it has introduced the idea of illusions being ever-present and our human brains being ill-equipped to dispel these illusions. Like the illusion of self and self-importance that can lead to self-destruction.
Societal and Environmental Systems is a course about complex systems: those that are dynamic, non-linear, and very large. It is giving me a fresh perspective on the world. Namely, that the world is not as simple as we would hope and that it is constantly, and forever, on the verge of collapse. The purpose of life is to avoid the collapse of the world, which takes work—a lot of work.
Evil, a religious studies course that I didn’t expect to intrigue me as much as it does. The revolutionary modern society is constantly reimagined by the people that exist within it. The structures and cultures of society interact to develop the world as we conceive it to be, and it is this ever-changing society that gives rise to new evils. The world as we know is an illusion, carefully constructed by the evolving social order in which we all participate.
In short, there are a lot of things to learn and question and change. Excuse me while I marinate in these thoughts.