Hi Everybody,
Hope all is well with you wherever you are. Beautiful late summer day here in Kew with warm sunshine and long shadows from the lower sun, and a sense of summer edging away. Always a slightly nostalgic time I feel. Anyway since I had such a long gap while I was away soaking up the sun in antibes I thought I would have an enthusiastic week with 3 episodes. And here's number two. We're in the middle of the chapter on the ten worlds. We've looked at the lower four worlds, the unpleasant ones that can wreck people's lives, hell, hunger, animality and anger. We've looked at the life state of tranquility or humanity as its often called and now we're onto rapture.
Rapture represents what is described in Buddhism as relative happiness, that is to say it is very much a transient rather than a deep-seated or long-lived sense of well-being. As its name suggests it is the wonderful up-welling of joy and exhilaration that we all experience when we achieve something that we've really set our heart on. So it brings with it the sense of personal fulfilment and the outburst of energy that comes with passing the difficult set of exams for example, getting that difficult promotion, winning a big prize or just setting off on a long-awaited holiday perhaps. Or falling in love. Indeed the modern ideal of romantic love is perhaps the most accurate metaphor for what we mean by rapture. But however wonderful and exhilarating it may be however much it enriches our life, the reality is that by its very nature rapture is short-lived, a sudden spike of joy in the normal curve of our lives.
Although many people today are inclined to equate this essentially transient state with the highest possible state of life, our maximum happiness as it were, and yearn for some way of making it permanent in their lives, Buddhism, and indeed our own common sense, tell us that the idea of permanent rapture is simply unreal. It only takes the passage of time, or a slight change in circumstances, for that peak of exhilaration and joy to pass, to be replaced by anothe rlife state. it is, by definition, a passing moment. The yearning for it to stay and be there forever, a permanent part of, our lives, is a delusion that can only lead to suffering.
Buddhism tells us that the six life states that we've been outlining briefly describe the reality of life for most of us. These are the worlds we spend a lot of time in, and one of the key insights that Buddhism offers is that we experience them very much as our response to what is going on in our external environment. They are very closely interlinked, and we can slip very easily from one to another as the day passes. And the argument is that as we fluctuate between these states we are pretty much at the mercy of our environment, now up now down, now left now right, depending on what is happening to us. The clear implication is that our life state, and in a sense therefore our identity, from moment to moment, how we think and feel and behave and look even, is, to a considerable extent, dependent on what comes to us from without. Happy when things seem to be going well. Unhappy when they don't. It leaves us pretty much like a rudderless boat, blown this way and that by whatever winds that blow. Bounced up and down by whatever waves that strike us. That is obviously a great simplification of the situation. I'm sure we all see our lives as being very much more complicated than that, but then overall message is clear enough, we can all too easily spend a lot of our lives simply responding to what happens to us, good and bad, rather than making and shaping our lives.
And that's where the next four worlds take us.
That's it for today.
thanks for reading this far.
See you next time,
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available from Amazon as a paperback or it can be downloaded from Kindle. Lots of people have said very encouraging things about it, for which I'm immensely grateful
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