A beginners guide to Buddhism

Sitting in the sunlight

on a rare sunny day I am thinking about Impermanence. Following on from my musings about not having a stable basis for believing, we see, hear or smell and therefore have to conclude a so called rationalised assumption of what is going on around us, it leads one to question virtually everything we have previously taken for granted. 

One of the pillars of Buddhist teaching is the understanding of Impermanence and the importance of a cycle which we can call the journey of life to death and the Buddhist would add, rebirth. Tied in with this is the acknowledgement of Suffering as a constituent of life. Much of our suffering is our attachment, to not only physical things but also the mental development of the person I think I am. 

Like our reliance on the fallible senses, the self image is purely a concoction and has no reality in truth. 

To overcome this albatross we have to start again, acknowledging the baselessness of our lives and reconstruct a substitute based on fundamental contemplative ideas on what philosophically can be gleaned from a lifetimes study. To understand that everything is Impermanent and what has concerned us and made us suffer is of little importance. Our concerns of what drives us and makes us who we are is irrelevant, Religion as a focus on how to be a better person becomes irrelevant, our sins become irrelevant in terms of seeking forgiveness from a higher being. Society becomes irrelevant other than the need to behave in uniformity to societies norms as a way of human cohesion. The linchpin of my world, my ego has to be substituted not by an alter ego but by something disconnected from my worldly understanding of the place I occupy. This ultimate nirvana, this mental plateau which can only be obtained through years of study and immersion and then, for most of us, not even then, is the goal. As important is the "path" which we should undertake to know more about the essence of what life and death is really about and it is this journey which makes the Buddhist Philosophy so intriguing.