We are creatures that muddy things up, born to over-complicate, over-inflate, and just generally overdo almost everything we do.
We don’t mean to, not most of us, it just happens as easy as breathing and we’ve been practicing this skill since we first started painting on cave walls and sharpening sticks into spears. We’ve honed this skill from the time where fire was magic and warmed the stone we sheltered beneath, since we called out hopeful words to the gods we thought must be shaking our walls with thunder, illuminating us with the flash of lightning in the deepest part of night.
Along the way we’ve gathered millions of different beliefs, different systems of them that we sweep up like leaves and compile into big books all wrapped in leather and gold foil. We believe them hard, we strange bipeds, and we fight to defend them once defined.
Do this, not that. Fear this, not that. Repent. Golden rules, karmic balances, covet not thy neighbors wife (or car, or hot tub, or private jet), give 10% back to the temple you spend your weekends within. Love all, say most, but the definition of the word all becomes unclear and opaque with each holy book that gets quoted. Some say all means only those that think what they think, that accept who they accept as their savior. Some say all means all but those who love someone born with the same parts they were born with, all but those who don’t feel their gender represents the person they are inside. All but them, say they, they don’t count to them, their book told them so.
Some beliefs tell us we must spread them, we must travel to far flung pieces of a planet built to hold a billion different species, and convince others that who they speak to when they are sad or scared, lonely or lost, is not the right one to speak to, that theirs is better, and so force it upon them. Some judge, though they forget that old words inked by old men in old books told them to judge not. Some believe in the great nothingness, the meaninglessness of it all and call us accidental blips on some cosmic timeline.
Some are simpler. Some reduce down, some distill, some seek to run the water until the waters run clear, until the mud rises to the surface and spills down the walls of the vase that holds it. Some take the complexities of a philosophy that is over 2500 years old and whittle it down to three simple truths that shape the entire foundation of how he lives his life. When asked, the Dalai Lama said the entirety of his outlook on how to live a proper life could fit into these three ideas:
I am a human being.
I want to be happy and I don’t want to suffer.
Other human beings, like myself, also want to be happy and don’t want to suffer.
He believed it was this distillation that provided the framework for being an adaptable person on this planet. He said:
“It is the ability to reduce our value system to its most basic elements, and live from that vantage point, that allows us the greatest freedom and flexibility to deal with the vast array of problems that confront us on a daily basis.”
Flexibility of thought, a trait so unique to human beings and so few other creatures. We applaud it and stand in awe when we encounter other creatures capable of such ability, though forget its importance in ourselves. Forget that it stands us apart from almost all we share the earth with. Without this, rigidity and a stubborn refusal to change anchors us to the people we were, the beliefs we held.
Without this reduction, without taking all we’ve been taught, all the books we’ve read—be they Bibles or pamphlets, scrolls or scientific journals—we inundate ourselves with so many complex systems of belief and thought that I often wonder if they become almost impossible to hold. The ‘do this not that,’ and million shades of grey on what is and is not allowed create conditions for our kindness and empathy that I truly think distract us from the simple point of our existence on this planet:
To be good, to do good, and to give away our love and kindness freely.
This is all it is, in the end. The Dalai Lama reduced the unimaginably complex history of Buddhism, a belief system so robust and encompassing that its core ideas (shaped 500 years before the birth of Jesus) are shockingly close to those of Christianity as a whole, to three simple statements that are as universal as they are important.
We are all human beings that want to be happy. That want to avoid suffering.
In the poem below, Typewriter Series #1584, I wrote along these lines. “Do you know how little it takes/to heal a heart,” I asked. It’s just kindness, and it’s always just been kindness, just simple words said with honest grace. These words can save a life, change a life, and start the healing process in so many that are broken. In ourselves. Just kindness.
We are all humans that want to be happy, and somewhere along the way we made things infinitely more complicated than they ever needed to be. We wrote long books about the sins of mixing fabrics in our clothing, we transcribed over and again, complicated words in languages we no longer even speak, and left them to be fumbled over and debated about and translated in a dozen dozen different ways. We created these belief systems that far too often lead to the pointing of fingers instead of the reaching out of tender hands.
We are this, they are that, has become the consequence of this complication, this befuddlement. What if we just reduced all the different religions, all the different belief systems, to their simplest components? What if we did this for it all, for our politics, our egos, our identities, our lives? What if we took out all the fluff and bother and unnecessary nonsense? What would remain? It’d just be simple truths, in the end.
We are here a short time, temporary creatures in a temporary place.
We are all doing the best we can.
We all just want to be loved.
We all don’t want to hurt, to lose those we adore.
Our beliefs should liberate us from what plagues us, not cage us in the room with it. With simplicity comes compassion, and with compassion comes true empathy.
I think it all begins there, and I believe it all ends there. To feel what others feel, to want for them what we want for themselves, and I know that’s what every single religion on this planet is probably saying at their cores.
Enough with complexity, enough with the fabrication of all these rules we are convinced we need. Maybe it’s time we strip it back to only what matters, to the very root of it all.
What would your beliefs be, if you did this? What would remain when you took all the rest away? If you had to reduce everything you believe down to three things, if you had to call them your CORE TRUTHS, what would they be? Let’s do this until we have one giant list, and then let’s find the simplicity in that, the three that unite them all. Let’s call them the Signal Fire Creed, and start from there.
I have a sneaking suspicion it’ll be simple, and it’ll be so close to what the Dalai Lama uncovered. Let’s find out.
If we reduce them,
distill them to single truth:
We want happiness.
Song of the Week
The simplest belief I have is this: In 2 days, my book is out in the world, and it’d be so sad if you didn’t have one! THERE IS TIME!
