“It’s an Arittha World, and I’m Just Living in It”

 Throughout my lifetime and the interactions I’ve experienced thus far, I’ve seen to have met a plentiful majority share of those with rafts piled high on their backs and many swinging snakes overhead with the grasp of their tail. When the time came in my life years ago when I was asked to take inventory and specifically label my religious orientation, the best answer I had was, ‘I have no idea what that means.’ My uncertainty was met ultimately with trying to label and explain in words the transcendent thing in my life that couldn’t be explained, something that could be defined I suppose as a ‘religious experience’. What I struggled to understand was how others belonging to a specific religion or religious denomination were more involved with texts and terms and accumulated knowledge and lacked any interest in addressing the fundamental truths veiled beneath the abstracts and in practicing the ‘truth’ in daily life. I’ve come across modern day Arittha’s who misinterpret the truth and fail to grasp the totality of meaning. In response to my blog post last week, ‘What does it mean to be religious?’,  the answer ‘to be religious’ among world consensus might be more closely tied to the variance of the value of truth within each individual realm. The teachings of Buddha and Dhamma seem to make the answer more clear. In personal experience, the Snake and Raft similes seem to nail the bulls eye. With a compassionate and honest eye, I’ve witnessed more blind interpretations among those devoutly ‘religious’, seemingly farthest from themselves and many who instrumentally conceive teachings without any regard for the active pursuit of underlying truth and the self reflective practice that sustains time. Those who grab the snake’s tail while waving to the raft holders seem to interpret in the wrong context and acknowledge truth as an absolute, an end. With the idea of the thought consuming notion of ‘means to an end’, where is room for the journey itself? With a more pliable mind and receptive eye, there seems to be a greater chance at defeating self-deception that can insurmountably confiscate efforts in attaining the ultimate truth. We may live in a world of Arittha’s that make it difficult to understand the truth in it’s genuine context, but that’s the beauty of the journey-to assimilate, to be open and to have an active reflective acceptance of the truth.