Superficial aspects

A young man slips into the river while fishing and the swift current pulls him over the falls. A couple snores gently under a heavy woollen blanket. Two elders, no longer able to walk, are left in the forest to freeze. A twelve-year-old girl dies in childbirth. A wrinkled woman tends a parched field every day for decades. Three children are sacrificed to the mountain. A canoe of men slides quietly onto the white sands of a virgin island. A boy leads a line of camels across the setting sun.

People have lived in many different ways over the years. By learning about their experiences—the few that are recorded—one can begin to understand that many things that we take for granted are not inherent aspects of reality. It is not necessary to have goals in order to live, or to accomplish anything at all. It is not necessary to have children, nor to love another person. It is not necessary to be good or kind, it is not necessary to fear anything, and it is not necessary to have possessions—not even a name. Relax your grip on any of these things, even for a moment, and you will notice that your heart continues to beat.

It follows that the elaborate games that play out across our society—politics, economic striving, dating, intellectual achievement—are not different from a chess match that I might play with a friend. What seems to confer a distinguished status on those larger games is the presence of stakes: wealth, pain, or even death. But it could be that I am so deeply identified with my intelligence that I perceive losing at chess as equivalent to the annihilation of all that I am. How, then, can anyone say that one game is inherently more real than the other?

There is nothing more disturbing to the conditioned mind than the fact that we are simply here. There is nothing more freeing than accepting this.