I was taught that there is an almighty being or God who controls all things. As I have matured through the years, I have flirted with knowing a God and pretending he doesn’t exist. My bible and I would have strong love affairs for several days, one even lasting for a week, before my brain forgot about the promise I made to myself and God. To read your bible for a certain amount of time everyday was said to create a better understanding of God and Christ. What a load of malarkey. The more I read my bible, the more questions I had and more confused I got.
My mother is religious about reading her bible every day. She has been doing it for years and has exhausted several study bibles. Whenever she told us she was going to go study, it meant she was going to spend some time with God through the written word. One time I asked if I could give her a list of questions. I told her that I wanted to know the answers to them all. She agreed to see what she could do and tucked them into her bible. It’s been several years now, I haven’t seen that list since. I don’t remember any of the questions I wrote, but I am sure if I were to pick up my bible and start reading again the same ones would be exposed.
Currently I am reading Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge. Terry writes a personal narrative in braided form and tells of her struggle with family, cancer and religion. While reading I came across something very interesting: "Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering." Later she concludes the chapter with this: "Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does." To me those words struck home and caused a realization about my connection to camp.
“Buddhi” means to wake up, while “Buddha” means the enlightened one. This makes sense as the goals of Buddhism are to teach purity, enlightenment and proper viewpoints, while focusing on suffering as a way to better oneself. The foundation of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths which teach a) knowing the importance of suffering b) knowing the cause of suffering c) knowing how to put an end to suffering and d) knowing the path that can end the suffering.
The word suffer comes from the French word “ferre” which means “to bear”. To bear an emotional or physical weight is to suffer. The Sanskrit word for suffering is “dukkha”, meaning incompleteness, imperfection, discontent, dissatisfaction and pain. My discontentment and dissatisfaction was not being able to have the liberty of living at camp anymore. What was once so readily available to me, that all I had to do was step out my front door, is now separated from my by three hundred miles, six hours, a lot of gas and tolls, and three states. Buddha categorizes suffering in two ways, mental and physical. Birth, aging, sickness and death comprise the physical sufferings. The mental sufferings are more in depth as follows: suffering of separation of loved ones, suffering of contact with hated ones, suffering of frustrated and non-practical desire, suffering of the illness of Five Skandhas.
I have concluded that what I am experiencing is the truth of the cause of suffering (second Noble Truth) in the mental sense of suffering of frustrated and non-practical desire. By knowing what causes the suffering I can end or solve the problem of suffering. Buddha says that people crave pleasant experiences, material things, and eternal life or death. The desire to acquire the material things has three major sufferings: a) the problem of getting it b) the problem of protecting it and c) the problem or suffering of losing it.
If you were to ask me today if there is a God, I would say that it depends on what a person believes. Just about everything these days is driven by a person’s personal preference. If you were to change the question to ask if I believed there is a God, I would answer truthfully that I don’t know. I have not devoted myself to finding out. I only know that when I need someone or something to talk to or yell at, and nothing is around that qualifies as good yelling material, I will talk to the air, aka God. He doesn’t talk back which is ok with me, so all the unanswered questions that have scary truths stay unanswered.
It’s like owning a damn it doll. When you are frustrated or confused, you can grab it and beat it, strangle it, throw it, kick it and no harm is done to anything important. You feel better and the doll has served its purpose. Nothing was solved but it that doesn’t matter anymore until the next time. "To acknowledge that which we cannot see, to give definition to that which we do not know, to create divine order out of chaos, is the religious dance” states author Terry Tempest Williams. Religion is a confusing thing, a bunch of philosophies that regulate our lives if we choose to let them, and if you’re knew to dancing, it’s hard to know where to put your feet.
Learning about Buddhism has proved to me that I still have a lot to discover about everything regarding religion. The conclusions I drew from my research was that the problem or suffering I am having is the loss of camp and not being able to be there now. If I had known this when I first moved to Maine, I wouldn’t have put myself through any of the pain and torture of missing camp. I understand the Four Noble Truths because I have suffered, have realized my suffering and have ended it.
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