Tuesdays with Morrie

Everyone has read it. I never felt the need to read it. But oh well...so I picked it up from the school library.

Hmm....I am not impressed. But something there did make me think a little, or rather made me reflect.

So Morrie is telling Mitch that he wants to be happy at the specific moment when he passes. Even when the pain is all engulfing, he wants to be able to detach himself from the moment so that his last thoughts are not those of fear and suffering.

But before this, he had shared with Mitch that we all needed to stop living in fear. As life is full of possible negative consequences, pain and suffering is then an irrevocable possibility of every action.

This then led me to think about what I had realized about the beauty of life, the irreversibility of time and the fragility of that moment when our minds were "open".

But then, to be able to achieve detachment as Buddha preaches, I don't know.

Normally my entries are very impersonal and objective, but for once, I am going to break out of my shell and share a bit of my personal feelings. Because it is the "mortal", "ego" side of me that is holding me back from the ability to love fully and in turn to be able to free myself (detach fully).

We can consider any kind of pain. As I had theorized before, since I now understood the beauty of real man and moral reality and moral truth, I also stated that it is entirely impossible to live based on my understandings of the moral truth since we have to function in the world of social reality which is still very real.

What is holding me back? Pain. More specifically, my fear of pain and suffering. Which is human, I guess. To truly be unafraid, we have to look it in the face and live in the moment. We have to live with our emotions on our sleeves consistently.

But of course, the problem here is that (merging with Eugene's theory), not all of us are playing at the same game level. We are not all playing at the level of the moral game, most probably the other is playing at the level of the "ego" game.

I think this is what perpetuates our fear of pain and suffering, thus we will never be able to experience fully what love is (for example) and then since we can never fully grasp what it is to love (unless we surrender fully to the experience and allow our minds to be open to it), then we can never detach ourselves from what we do not understand.

Of course, to bridge this gap and incongruity in playing levels, "free agents" are then necessary.

So yet again, I realised the vast spiritual, philosophical and mental challenge that Buddha was able to overcome as he loved fully and in turn could detach himself fully.