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The Buddha’s Mid-life Crisis
The story of
Siddartha begins when he’s about thirty years old. He belongs to the wealthy
upper crust, has everything he wants. He’s in the prime of life, good looking
and healthy, has 3 country homes, a Ferrari (sorry, a classy steed +
chariot), lots of booze, music and dancing, a beautiful wife, an adorable
child, a doting dad and caring aunt, yet wakes up every morning feeling
miserable. He feels
miserable, hence is suffering, because he feels dissatisfied, unfulfilled,
incomplete, frustrated and consequently uncertain of himself. And he asks
himself, like a zillion other people, “What’s happening to me? What’s gone
wrong?” And there
you have it! Modern story? No, it’s the
universal story! So what did
go wrong? Half way
through his life, indeed, Siddartha, the logic bio-machine, lost its logic
and was crashing. And that’s what his suffering was telling him. And why did
the logic machine lose its logic? Because it
failed to generate a task (i.e. goal). After all, a logic machine is logic
because it performs a specific task. If and when the task is complete, its
logic if proven. Proof (indeed, perfect self-realization) pays off in a surge
of energy, which is initially self-represented as enlightenment, then
re-jigged as a surge or rush of happiness, joy and so on. In Buddhist
terminology, logic task completion, and experienced as fulfilment, is called
samma-sambodhi. Happiness signals logic function completion. So, how to
he get over his albeit early mid-life crisis. Simple. He
became a logic bio-machine again. And he did it by inventing a task to be
completed. And the task he invented was to figure out why he was suffering
rather than enjoying life when he had everything a young man could possibly
want. Eventually
he understood the origin of suffering, namely failure
to complete (a logic function, i.e. task). And he figured out at least
two solutions (to failure to complete).
Firstly, find or invent a task and complete it. The task can be real or
imaginary, and any task will do (after all, it’s an open universe*). The pay-off for attainment, meaning task
completion, is rapturous joy, followed by peace/nirvana (i.e. @ relative rest
status). And secondly, sky dive without a parachute, and achieve parinirvana,
i.e. @ absolute rest status. Having
resolved his own problem, namely his personal crisis, by becoming whole and
complete via perfect completion of his task, namely finding the solution to
his problem (and which was his True Self ≈ atta), he then
universalised the entire procedure for the welfare of all those likewise
troubled, and Eureka, the Buddha, i.e. the
Perfect, Fully Enlightened One, and Buddhism, his universal cure for the
suffering/self-punishment endured for non-logic behaviour, was born. * … The most efficient
Buddhist suffering elimination task is to avoid starting any task.** That avoids the ‘failure
to complete’ ‘stick’; this is easily done by means of distraction, to
wit, by running either the ‘emptiness’ tape or a white or monochrome coloured
(for instance, Tibetan purple) noise tape in the head. ** … The minimum task to be
performed, and which makes an act logic, is a random collision. In everyday
terms: “ Difference makes a (real/true) difference!” Failure to collide with the different
is self-punished by suffering. The 4 Noble Truths of Samma-sambodhi
The 4 Noble truths of a Buddha The 4 Noble Truths Index |