Monday, 25 April 2011

• The Great Deception

  

  I recently found myself having a conversation about people, and how they go about looking for other people with whom to share their lives.

  "People go around wanting other people to complete them," my friend said. "They want to find their missing half. They think it's like this," he said, touching his two thumbs and two pointer fingers together, forming one large circle from his two hands. "When really it should be like this," he went on, touching each thumb to its respective pointer finger, forming two distinct circles that were linked.
  

  A few days later my brother, who recently broke up with his girlfriend of two years, shared a quote with me from the book The Art of Power, by Thich Nhat Hanh.

  The idea behind the quote is that each of us feels like we lack something; that we are only half a person. We may not even be consciously aware of this inferiority complex, but deep down we feel incomplete because we do not believe that the good, the beautiful and the true exist within us - we think we must find it elsewhere. So we wander around looking for our other half, and we fall in love with those we perceive to contain the essence of the beautiful, the true, and the good.

  After we get to know this other person, we inevitably discover that they cannot symbolize the good, the beautiful, and the truth that we were looking for. We say that the person has deceived us, and we suffer. So we look for someone else to love. If we continue this way, we might spend our lives constantly looking for someone to complete us with their beauty, truth, and goodness, forever unaware that these things already exist within us.

  "Because we wish we had these things, we try to seem like we do, even if only on the outside. We want to show other people that we are good, that we are beautiful, even if only in appearance. And so we try to improve our appearance with cosmetics, clothes, diets or plastic surgery. We want to appear more truthful and knowledgeable, so we look for things to study or unusual experiences that will bring us prestige. We adorn ourselves with medals and awards.

  We are all deceiving each other. Deep down we feel there is nothing good, beautiful and true in us, and at the same time we are desperate to show each other how good, beautiful and truthful we are. And so we deceive ourselves from generation to generation.  And while we are deceiving others, we are also being deceived by them.  We are each others' victims.  We are trying to make ourselves up so we will look less ugly, and others are doing the same.

  Sitting at the foot of the bodhi tree on the night when he realized the truth, the Buddha discovered something that was very surprising to him and also to us.  He saw that the good, the beautiful, and the true are to be found in everyone, but very few people know that.  People think that the true, the beautiful, and the good exist somewhere else, in someone else.  They don't know that they are true, beautiful, and good at their core.  Our whole life, we are looking for someone else to replace what we feel is missing."

       - Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Power

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