Why You Must Be Selfish to Reach Enlightenment: Part I

"If any man come to Me and hate not his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple." - Luke 14:26

At the age of 29, Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, abandoned his wife & child to search for truth and along the way engaged in extreme self-mortification. So important to him was finding the truth that he stopped caring about earthly life, and indeed Buddhist monks were encouraged to do the same. Like Jesus, he seemed to be making a rather harsh and seemingly irresponsible demand of his followers: to stop having any regard for themselves or their families, to in fact completely abandon worldly concerns and worry only about their faith in Jesus Christ or their desire to reach enlightenment. To a lot of people, this seems rather harsh, but the truth is, it's not.

Why? Because the entire point of spiritual practice is to expand your worldview beyond just you and the few people you care about to everyone. Why? Because we are all God's children, or to put is the zen way we are are all one thread of consciousness and every living being is animated by a part of that thread.

As silly as it sounds, let's be honest: no one knows what happens we die and no one knows exactly what it is that separates a dead body from a living one. We may know the cause of death but that still does answer the question of why death occurs, nor why life comes into being in the first place. All we know is it's an endless, constantly changing parade of new life forms popping into existence and gracefully fading away to make room for new ones, and we are part of that dance.

Jesus and the Buddha were people who learned to do that dance with more ease and grace than most human beings will be able to in their lifetimes. They did this by setting out to do exactly what they demanded of their followers: separating themselves from the daily world of obligations and responsibility and constant distractions that ruined their ability to see what was going on underneath the surface, what made us tick, and what a human's ideal life would look like. Then they decided to pass on what they learned.

In Christianity there is an emphasis on renouncing this earthly world, in Buddhism a focus on letting go of attachment. The reason for this is rather logical: we know that all of these earthly things are going to pass away. Every living body, every wine glass, every experience, literally everything is going to pass. To focus only on a few select objects that will eventually disappear - and this includes you and your family - is to set oneself up for a lifetime of misery. Every time a relationship fades away, or a glass shatters, or a family member dies, we are surprised and upset. We feel as though our world has ended even though we knew it would; indeed if we're paying attention we realize the world is changing every minute and we are not who we were two seconds ago - with our moving lungs and blood vessels and skin cells shedding everywhere and our mouth now closed where before it was open - and the environment around us is forever and always in a state of flux. Why then cling to *anything*? Why then not just cling with all your might to this very moment, the only thing you ever really have that's not going to go away?

Try it. Try it for a day. Treat everything around you as already broken, every experience as already gone, every person around you as already dead. They are if we're honest with ourselves and free of fear. Sit down somewhere and don't look at your phone, just notice everything around you. As you eat a piece of fruit notice the texture of its flesh on your tongue, the juice as it squirts between your teeth, the slow creeping fullness of your belly. When you're with a family member notice the smell of their hair, how hard they make you laugh, how loved they make you feel. As you drink swankily from your crystal wine glass tap it with your spoon and enjoy the soothing ringing sound, appreciate the crisp scent of that chardonnay, stare at the light reflecting off the crystal. Do this so well that when the fruit is digested, or the family member's life force fades, or the wine glass is inevitably dropped, you can't even feel sad because you loved them so well. When you can joyfully let everything around you go, you've reached the right level of non-attachment, which is quite literally heaven or nirvana: being present in and enjoying every moment, always.

So yes, I am saying you can reach heaven or nirvana if you practice enough. You begin to feel it, maybe once at first and then all the time: this feeling that the constantly fading images around you are not real, indeed that "you", this body-person, one image out of so very many, are not in fact you - you are everything, all of it, all of the now constantly shifting and changing, the stream of consciousness in every life. When you see the world this way, the view is breathtaking.

Perhaps you can see quite clearly now why one "gives up" one's family and self to follow Jesus or the Buddha - it is not a harsh commandment to have *no* regard for one's family, it is simply foolish to value or cling to one's temporary self or family when both disappear and even more foolish to only take joy in you and your family's joy instead of everyone's. It is necessary to be temporarily "selfish" to reach spiritual understanding, but that's a topic I'll address in Part II.