All is Vanity . . .

Avalokitesvara, the bhodisattva of supreme compassion, hears the cries of the world, the pain of all worlds and feels great endless compassion.

What do you expect her to do with the cries? Does it alleviate the suffering to hush the child and close its eyes with motherly embraces while murmuring that everything will be all right? All cultures pray to the Mother—what do they want? Most want solace and to have themselves hushed to sleep with a full tummy. This does not help a being to grow toward the light. The suffering then keeps bounding and rebounding onward over lifetimes, forever. How does Avalokitesvara Kannon Qwan Yin Mother Mary help the child see that all suffering is an illusion, all praise is an illusion, all joy or lack of joy is an illusion. . .

What do you do with the things you see and hear? Do you let tastes and smells and touches rule your life? Do you make decisions based on the feelings that you allow to arise from what your senses tell you--what you are trained to think they are telling you?

Psychologists can demonstrate that your eyes will often deceive you—that although your belief in what you “saw” is unshakable it can be proven to be dead wrong. Do you still trust your eyes? Our words, our concepts of the physical meaning of these senses are crafted using these senses. How can we know they are real? The sound of the tree falling in the Forest of No Ears is meaningless. The concept of sound exists to protect beings from being hit by falling trees. It has no other meaning.

Physicists discover evidence that what we know as solid matter is only probabilities, that far from being made of particles, what we touch is made of vibrations of energy. All our senses have evolved to detect changes in energy for the purpose of taking us safely through a physical environment and prolonging our lives. To what end?

So what of music and art and sex? Wonderful things, cultural things, vehicles for our enlightenment, but not our enlightenment Not ends, but means. At our perfect attainment of wisdom we will feel as much joy in the movements of our brother Flatworm as we do in listening to Mozart. All life is Joy, all culture is narrow parochialism, all life is going the same direction, your cousins are bears and paramecium. Be part of life, have great compassion for life, see beyond life, see that all is illusion, even your seeing that all is illusion is illusion is illusion . . .