Siddhartha The Buddha Essay, Research Paper
Why do we exist? What is the aim of the human kind? What is the meaning of life?
Those are the questions every person thinks of at some point in it s life. World religions try to give answers to these questions. Art and science give us some interpretations of the meaning of life as well.
Ever since humanity exists, individuals tried to capture their thoughts and ideas about life. Hesse s book Siddharta is one of the most successful trials of explaining the concept of life, love and the divine. Since the nature of words is in fact very limited, we can t find definite answers to the above questions as we can find the answer to a mathematical equation. Still, the story of Siddhartha gives to me personally a very close insight in the nature of Being. A good amount of imagination and unprejudiced mind is necessary to understand the concepts of this and similar writings.
Religions of any kind, which existed ever since there is humanity, tell us that the meaning of life is to follow the rules of God or to reach God. That is the unique similarity of all religions. Every believer is promised a reward for his lifelong faith in the Almighty.
That is what I believe too, but I think that it s free to everyone to decide who this God is and how to reach him. For me, God is everything in us and around us. God is the law, according to which everything happens, evolves, and ceases to be. God is the law of nature, so it is in no means with the human sciences of the nature. Above all, God is love towards everything that exists. Siddhartha experienced that love in the moment of his enlightenment. Jesus, Mohamed, Krishna and other spiritual leaders too, did experience and share this love with the people around them. (What the leaders of churches made out of those people s teachings is another story.) This love can t be explained using rational human mind nor it is necessary to be explained. It is more important to experience that love, that unity of all things that exist. There are techniques and methods which can be learned, how to experience that love, in other word, how to become one with God. Expanding the consciousness through meditation, yoga, prayers, magic invocations, art or drugs are certainly the most powerful ways to become aware of God, of this unique Love that Consumes . Siddhartha was a god master of some of those teachings, but he noticed the lack of completeness in them. They lacked the one component that will make the universal conciseness eternal. This component is individual for each person although it follows the same rules as everything else.
Is the intellect strong enough to show us how to reach that eternal awareness of the love that consumes, or is it the limiting factor? Isn t it all about understanding? Yes, it is about understanding, but understanding through experience, not through intelligent or rational thought. How can you teach a person the feeling of falling in love if that person never did fall in love, There are certainly millions of references about love we can look up and be told of, but only when we fall in love we begin to understand how it is.
At some points of deep insight and inspiration I had the luck to experience the understanding of some concepts and forms of life and God. Those insights as such were the most wonderful things that happened to me, and yet many times so simple or nothing that spectacular. Since then I began to believe. Faith is the fundamental component in becoming aware of God. Then God becomes real for us. If you believe in something, than it begins to exist for you. If you believe in Aliens, than they exist and only because you never saw one, doesn t mean that they are nonexistent. You can live a complete normal life, and still be aware of the love that consumes. Siddhartha was a ferryman, so we can keep on doing all the things we do, with the only difference that now we understand the role in the universe of what we are doing. Even the tiniest taste of that awareness makes us better persons, because we start to recognize what is really important for our happiness. I think that this awareness will grow as the evolution of humans and the evolution of the individual grows, but we still didn t reach the depths of our stupidity and blindness. Siddhartha also had to recognize the evil in him in order to overcome it and find salvation. Speaking in earthly terms, trying to become one with God has only good and pleasant consequences for humanity, since there in no place for materialistic wealth and thus for all the evil in this world. All the pleasures of life are included in the love that consumes, so we no longer seek to be satisfied by small earthly pleasures. Expanding the awareness in order to experience the universal love should be the primary goal of each individual and it must be in harmony with that individual’s free will.
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