Over there
If you boil Buddhism down to its very essence, what you get is a meditation practice. Above all else, that’s what the Buddha taught. Yes, compassion, yes love, yes interconnectedness and service to others. That all exists, but that all exists in meditation. Meditation teaches us to connect to the present moment and when we are truly present, we know perfection. We know love, interconnectedness, and the importance of being of service. The point isn’t to quiet our mind necessarily, the point is to see things as they really are, to remove any illusions that are fogging our ability to know who we really are. Among the biggest of these illusions are the illusion of a separate self, and of a moment other than the present.
We are not separate. We are one. And so are dogs, tables, air, space, stars, and q-tips. Trying to explain this in words is hard, but with a dedicated meditation practice, you might begin to see. You might also begin to see, that there is no moment except for now. We can plan the future all we fucking want, but it’s not real. We can dwell on the past, but that’s not real either. And when we really start to embrace that reality is this exact moment, we can see just how perfect that really is. People spend so much time and energy trying to be somewhere else, thinking that life might be better over there than over here. Why would you want to go over there? Over there sucks. Over there isn’t fucking real. In fact, this obsession with being over there keeps us from being over here, and over here, right this very second, we have everything we could possibly need to experience the fullness of life. This isn’t going to last forever, let’s enjoy it while we’re here.