Every Year’s Resolution: Just Exist

I made a choice at a time in the recent past (I can’t quite remember when) to “just exist”, as an existential goal.

This is neat because I can’t fail—I exist by default. If I cease to exist that probably means I have achieved some kind of prajñā insight into no-self, which is a win-state anyway.

On a deeper level, the Pure Land Buddhist (Shinran’s, especially) point that there is nothing “you” “can” “do” to achieve nirvāṇa holds that the goal of any kind of religio-spiritual practice is simply to exist, while the machinations of compassion and wisdom work themselves out in the background.

Awareness of this can be kickstarted by manual, intentional practice, but it only settles once awareness starts to run itself (this is one of the places where Shin and Zen start converge).

This ties into another choice of mine to not “believe” anything systematically. I believe in things — compassion, love, peace, the usual Dharma ethical wheel — so to speak, but I don’t feed seeds of belief about things.

I am not concerned about having the “correct” understanding of the cosmos, the nature of the Way(s), of God(s), of Buddha(s), whatever it might be. I can just stand watching it all, and go “yep.”

🐘 As I posted on Mastodon: “feeling like you have to be correct in speech is a heavy burden — a lot easier to replace with being kind in speech”

Peace,
⭕

---

---