Buddha Dharma

I must first share with you the Dharma, the Sacred Law.  This exact Law was taught by the Buddha over 2500 years ago.

This Law is the Law of Impermanence.

Nothing endures forever. Change is the essential nature of reality.  Change is the only constant.  Stars come and go.  Galaxies arise and pass away.  Planets exist for a brief moment of infinity, and fade back into nothingness. Subatomic particles arise and pass away trillions of times a second.  Empires rise and fall.  Truth itself is not a fixed constant, but an evolving process.  And we are all going to die.

Materialism, then, does not and cannot lead to spiritual fulfillment, for the material world is left behind when we die.

The Lords of Materialism want you to believe otherwise.  America’s popular business mantra is, 'He who dies with the most toys, wins."  The unstated, unconscious goal of materialistic life is to acquire more and more possessions, and to devote all of our resources to taking 'ownership' of more and more of our physical reality, which we then leave behind when we die.  If it sounds like an absurd strategy for happiness, it is.  Its like trying to sunbathe on a submarine.

We loathe impermanence.  We want to keep our youth, we want to keep our lovers, we want to keep our wealth, we want to keep the good things and hang on to the good times in life, but we can’t, because change is inherent in all phenomena.  Ownership is just a way of pretending like we get to keep the things we want.  Possession is a neurotic control trip, which always ends badly.

This leads to the first corollary of the Law of Impermanence - the Law of Imperfection.  Existence isn't perfect.  A moment of it may be, or an evening of it, or possibly even years of it may be perfect, but nothing lasts forever.  And when the good times end, it hurts.  This pain is unavoidable.  We cannot exist in a perfect reality that always changes, for change inevitably leads to loss.  This is not a flaw in existence - it is merely a characteristic of existence which the Dark Lords would keep a secret from you, so they can sell you a pill to make suffering disappear.  Relatives, no such pill will ever be invented.  We cannot avoid the pain of existence - we must learn to embrace it.  Suffering is inevitable, but struggling is totally unnecessary.

The Dark Lords of Materialism, then, attempt to poison our mindstream with the delusion that life is meant to be perfect, and any imperfection is a flaw they can fix - for a fee.  They also choose to poison our mindstream with the delusion that if we can't own it, then it doesn't have value.  And so, the world of nature and living beings is enslaved to the greatest possible extent, and servants of mammon attempt to own all they can, whether it be ancient redwood groves or children or the ancestral land of indigenous people or the genetic makeup of our food, or the money printing process, or sovereign nations...  And what cannot be owned is destroyed, be they whales, or forests, or indigenous culture, or differing opinions, or the ocean, or women's bodies... the Lords of Materialism desire nothing less than complete ownership of life itself, to be hoarded, stored in a vault, controlled, and enslaved forever.

Needless to say, this is not the will of God.  This is in violation of Creator's Sacred Law.  Jesus said, “Do not store for yourselves treasure upon Earth, where moths and rust corrupt and thieves break in and steal.  But store up for yourselves treasure in Heaven, where moths and rust do not corrupt and thieves do not break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

The Law of Impermanence tells us that our body is constantly changing, and our thoughts are constantly changing, and that ultimately we will leave our bodies behind, and all our wealth, and all our possessions, and everything we ever thought we 'owned' and even everything we ever thought we ‘were’.  This means that a fulfilling life must have different priorities than those which the Dark Lords would instill in us - he who dies with the most toys didn't spend their time wisely.  The Dark Lords desire to dominate life, while the Dharma guides us to celebrate and serve life. We are not the masters here - we are the servants.

And here we find the second corollary of the Law of Impermanence - the Law of Selflessness.

From a spiritual perspective, the aforementioned military industrial complex manufacturing global war represents our own ego.  The ego desires to control and dominate, as compensation for its inherent inferiority - for the ego is a fictional character.  Conflict is thus a requisite for the survival of the personality, as it were.  As personalities, then, we are choosing familiar, dead-end, ego-reinforcing behavior patterns that deny our deep need to connect, relate, and merge.  Our ego is manufacturing enemies for us to fear, in order for it to survive unscathed.

Relatives, nothing survives unscathed.  Merging with what lies beyond ego demands a personality fluid enough to disintegrate and be reborn.  A personality which cannot let go of its own existence in order to merge and be reborn is trapped in a prison of its own making.  The ego must learn the art of composting itself in the field of itself.  The personality must learn to see the rigid, inner voice of the ego as a prison, and escape it by denying its power and moving out of the head and into the body.  We escape the prison of the inherently selfish ego with egoless, and thus selfless, service.

  Service is the path of transcending the selfish ego.  In order to escape the prison of the mind, we must learn to serve, especially when the ego sees no benefit.  Rational self-interest may make good capitalists, but capitalism makes a world enslaved by mammon.  The Law of Selfless Service requires us to transcend the rational ego by paying homage to the irrational wisdom of the heart.


 According to the Dharma, then, the most fulfilling life is the life spent in service - a life spent in love.  Not attachment, for attachment is the desire for ownership, the desire for permanence.  Love is not attachment - love is letting go.  When we are able to let go of our desire for ownership and control, and let go of our desire for permanence, then we are able to love.  This love manifests as action - a life of love is a life of service.  According to the Dharma, then, he who dies with the most service wins.

We don't take our possessions with us when we die:  The Lords of Materialism desperately need us to ignore this obvious fact.  What we take with us is our karma - our thoughts, our speech, and our actions.  Love manifests in these three realms, as does fear and greed.  A life spent acquiring possessions gives us the heavy karma of fear and greed, which feeds the Dark Lords and gives them tremendous power in this world.   A life spent in service gives us the liberating karma of love and forgiveness, which aligns us with the Dharma and the will of God.  Karma, too, is in the Bible:  “As ye sew, so shall ye reap.”

The reign of the Dark Lords of Materialism is thus fueled by the fear of death.  Servants of mammon fear death, for they are heavily invested in, and thus trapped by, materialism, and are poorly prepared for what lies beyond the material world.

The reign of the Creator and the Sacred Law is fueled by love, and the fearless embrace of change, even the transformation that takes place at death, for the Dharma teaches us that we are ultimately nonphysical beings having a brief physical experience - an experience worth celebrating, but not an experience worth getting attached to.

This, relatives, is the Dharma.  In Pali, the language of the Buddha, "anicca" means impermanence, "dukkha" means imperfection, or suffering, and "anatta" means selflessness, or no-self.  These terms are the bedrock of the Buddha's teaching - the Buddha Dharma.