Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Muse - Butterflies & Hurricanes

Shiny happy people probably aren't Buddhists.
Well, people have been writing about religion a lot on LJ recently (nothing new on LJ!), so here's my thoughts.

Although I'm not religious in any way, ever since I stopped being a Catholic there's been one religion that's made a lot of sense to me, and that's Buddhism.

There are four principles to the basic belief of Buddhism. They are 1) this world is full of suffering, 2) we are only suffering because we are constantly filled with desire, 3) the way to end the suffering is to end this desire and 4) the way stop the desire is to follow the Middle Path (the Buddhist way of life so-called because it's right in the centre between self-indulgence and self-torture).

For me, Buddhism has hit the nail on the head in regards to the human condition. We are pre-disposed to being unhappy.

I'm not being pessimistic or morbid here; it makes complete evolutionary sense. Humans are only happy when we are doing things, achieving things. If we aren't constantly feeling that we are "doing" something, we get unhappy - we feel that "life is empty" or "there's a void" etc. It's all the same feeling; innate dissatisfaction. You could perhaps say that happiness is an absense of, or distraction from, unhappiness. Perhaps happiness should be called "unsadness."

The number one instinct that governs human behaviour is the preservation of our self and our genes. Almost EVERYTHING we ever do is about our survival and replication of genetic material. And the humans who are most likely to survive are the ones who can develop new and better means of achieving genetic immortality. And the best way to do this is to constantly be doing things, achieving things. So, nature gave us a personality that meant that we could never be completely satisfied with what we'd achieved in life. After all, if we were pre-disposed to being happy and content, we would never develop.

So to me, that's why people feel it's necessary to have a hobby, or get married, or start a family or whatever. But, we will never be totally content with what we've got, because our preservation instinct will kick in and tell us that there's a void somewhere, something that needs to be filled, something we're not doing. And to me that's why people take drugs; it's a way of chemically altering your brain so that dissatisfaction-instinct is temporarily supressed. And, as a non-religious person, I believe it's part of the reason the majority of human beings feel the need to follow a religion. It's doing something, it's justifying your existance, it's satisfying your instinct to feel like you need to be achieving things. And the older you get, the stronger this instinct and dissatisfaction grows, and you panic and feel the need to do things like have families or write books or do anything that preserves a part of you on Earth when you're gone.

Buddhists believe that it is possible to rid yourself of this instinct, by shedding material desires through conditioning (meditation etc). I don't think this is possible; it's a deep, deep part of our human quality and I don't think you can ever completely supress it. Except perhaps with mind-altering drugs like heroin, but I don't take those because I see them as only a temporary solution which'll probably make you more unhappy later on. I think the key is to learn to live with it. You have to realise that if you're unsatisfied with life, it's probably just be brain chemistry telling you that. You've probably achieved a great deal, but your mind just doesn't retain it. Just try and convince yourself that there's no reason to be unhappy. You're allowed to feel happy.

And don't let any New Age books tell you that Buddhism is a nice, happy, smiley rainbow religion. In it's basic form it's one of the most gloomy religions out there. Even more so than Catholicism.

Today's Kanji: 売春 - baishun - Prostitute