No matter what’s going on in our lives, no matter who we are, how we live or what we do, there’s not much we can call our own.
All the material side is the first to drop off the list. We can’t take anything physical with us in beyond the grave. Not even our own body. It’s like a tunnel: we get our body when we’re born and we give it back when we die. And everything that’s physical already existed before us and will do so after we’re gone.
We then move to our ideas, convictions, our values and principles. This is something we might call our own because it’s something that’s formed inside of us, didn’t existed before. Imagine new ideas and concepts. But all the ideas we get, the values we have are based on a previous experience, parent teachings, school education, friend activities, worldly knowledge. So if somebody could find a line between what we got from the world and what is new, then we might just find something our own.
But what happens when you have an accident and your mind gets scrambled? You forget who you are, don’t remember what your job is, who your friends are and so on… you forget everything you were taught. The values and principles are also gone. A knock in the head, a car accident, a meteorite hit or such and you lose those. Then your mind resets to zero and the learning begins again. New habits are formed, maybe new principles. The old ones? You don’t own them anymore, they’re gone.
If you’re a religious person and following a typical religion, then there are the sins. They go beyond the physical world, they don’t disappear if you have any kind of accident or you suddenly forget everything. Instead, they tend to accumulate based on what you did. If you did something wrong by principles and rules established by religion, then you committed a sin and this will be judged by the god of that certain religion. I don’t know how this goes if you pray to trees and rocks and believe that there’s a spirit in everything. If you don’t believe in anything, then this is out of any formal frame.
There’s also the idea of reincarnation. You are born, maybe coming from another life (or another world), live this life and then die, going to another life, becoming a dog, an insect or another human being. The question is here what do you bring or take with you in the other worlds/life. Is it the so called instincts? Creativity? Feeling? Natural way of living? Is there something that’s hiding the rest of 90% of our brain that we’re not using? Is there something that transcends these worlds?
Based on that reasoning, how can we so unhappy when there’s so much space to experiment? We can practically do anything, try all that we have the time for. All we need to do is to escape the normal frame established by the society. Who says what beauty is? Who can tell if you love more or less than the other person? The next guy to say you’re smart or dumb is just another person in that same frame.
Happiness and inner peace comes once we accept everything that comes in our path, when we escape the normal conventions, when we learn to enjoy things as they are.
hapientia 