Today’s Drifting Thoughts: In Another Dimension

Hmm… where I was these days? Well, every day seemed normal except for yesterday which I was volunteering for the 2007 Buddhist Cultural and Art Festival :).

But the main thing is that these days I’m pretty much in my reflective mood, but somehow I just felt as if I’m living in a completely separate dimension. Was I completely alienated by others? Or that my life is lacking any sort of meaningful human interaction? Not sure whether is it really a problem… I mean, life does lack a lot of colours when there’s no human interaction and connections, but yet… it’s not really a life and death situation, it’s more like… how should I put it… How much soul nutrients does one really need? From a normal standpoint, the current situation that I’m having would have raised some red flags a long time ago.

Meaning that I’m exhibiting behaviour that was anti-social? Hmmm….

Somehow that comes to the question of “happiness”, I guess. As in to what degree of fulfillment we can say that we are happy? Was the smile on the face on that fleeting moment should constitute into the definition of “happiness”? Should “happiness” be viewed as something that is short termed or one should seek the eternal?

All these subtleties of the word itself opens millions of perceptions and interpretations. And the thing is that our own perceptions were bound to a limited space which is highly based on experience. As in you can only perceive and understand to a degree similar to the depths and understanding of your experiences. And “experience” itself is bound to be something from the past, which may not for any sort of basis in the present moment.

Seeing things from different perspective, ever since I came back from Cambodia, somehow reflecting that experience to whatever concepts in my mind seemed to form some sort of an alternate dimension. (I’ll write more on Cambodia next time, these days I’m not feeling like writing them out) Pretty much through the different worlds that we are living in, it’s pretty much the first time I got deep into seeing how much differences between lives of different social and economic status. It just appeared to me that all these questions that kept drifting in my mind and all my emotional anguishes are essentially “rich man problems”: meaning that I’m in a certain way fulfilled in terms of physical comfort that my focus of fulfillment (greed?) came from emotional and spiritual (??) planes.

Which comes to the question: if such “rich man problems” does not really matter to one’s survival, then what’s the point of worrying about them? Then that question would pop another question: what’s your perceived “value” of your own “survival”? i.e. What’s the meaning of life? By what you say that you are completely fulfilled in life? Those were quite interesting questions to ponder about, I think :).

Anyway, I drifted too far away, coming back to the Buddhist Cultural and Arts Festival, through the whole experience of the festival itself, it greatly reflects back a lot of things back to myself: the disconnection with the human world, my shortcomings, the “noises”, problems and stress that I introduced into my life… Well, it’s not that I’m completely negative at that time, just that they were being highlighted to me under such situations. I can’t say much about how each of these feelings were triggered, that would be too long of a story.

But any, the whole festival just so seemed to me so… Christian (due to personal biases, I admit) that I can’t help but being sarcastic. I mean, from the use of “brotherhood and sisterhood” concepts (as in addressing your peers as “brother this” or “sister that”), Buddhist children songs CDs, talks that highlights the suffering of others… It just felt extremely awkward to me, in a way. It just felt as if you take away the Buddhism out of the picture and use another religion (say, Christianity) as the context of the event, it wasn’t in anyway different. I mean, I can’t stop thinking stuff like, in children songs, you portray Buddha as some sort of imaginary friend, and sending blank cheques (from a point of view) saying that if you practice a certain virtue (e.g. love) you’ll be able to achieve something. That made me wonder, what really is “religion”? What really is “spirituality”? Everybody seemed to try to impose certain kinds of ideology on everybody else , but to me it just seemed that imposing ideas is never going to help, at most you can only get is blind followers or imitators and that’s it. If these kinds of preaching and religious teaching were the way of educating people to the “crystallization of the enlightened soul”, why we are unable to see more people enlightened?

Or probably it is the case that I’m unable to know whether one is enlightened or not… not even knowing what degree of spiritual understanding one had…

Somehow something just doesn’t seemed to make it pieced together…