According to the adepts of Zen Buddhism with whom I used to sit zazen (meditate), Buddha's basic two commandments were not 'Love Your Neighbor as Yourself' and 'Love God Above All (other) Things.'
The Buddha's basic duo is more factual statement than dual command.
Buddha said 'Life is Suffering' and 'Life is Change.'
Now there's no question about disbelieving those two maxims if you have lived at all.
No matter how pleasant life can be - and sometimes it can be wonderful - we know that certain things are going to come along and knock our life-train off the tracks. There are thorns on the prettiest rose bushes and cores in even the sweetest apples.
Life is good, but it certainly contains suffering.
As for Part Two of Buddha's claim, there is no one who avoids change.
You may avoid suffering until late in life. You may keep your parents into your forties, marry the absolutely right person, have wonderful kids and even like your job.
But even if all those things are true, other facets of your existence will be changing. Constantly.
I just had burgers the other day at Two Bells on Fourth and Bell.
The burgers are still great and "the Bells," as we all called it 15 years ago, is still a nice spot.
But it is a very different place than when I first walked in there in 1988.
They still have some local art on the walls, but the place was once a hotbed of artists, writers, musicians and the marginally employed, folks who once made Belltown a veritable Arts Central in Seattle.
Now most of the old apartments are gone or condominiumized, rents have skyrocketed, and computer screens have generally replaced canvases as the medium of choice for the upper scale denizens of the community.
Everything changes.
Except us.
People.
Oh, we get older. We notice gray hairs and slackening midsections. Eventually we even die.
But the way we live, the human we are at our center, seems almost totally resistant to change.
Friends who have certain problems with their wives get divorced and a few years later are having the same problem with a new, totally different lady.
People who were addicted to alcohol become addicted to religion.
We are a strange species.
Dr. Sigmund Freud, arguably the most important theorist of the 20th century, once said in response to a questioner that a person who entered psychoanalysis with a real determination to change might shift his or her personality 10 percent in a lifetime.
Freud saw 10 percent as tremendous change, and if you think about anyone you know, it does seem mind-boggling.
And yet it's still only 10 percent.
I was a counselor-facilitator in the state of Washington, working with convicted felons for two years two decades back.
Studies were done.
States that didn't provide counseling for violent offenders being released back into the societal tidal pool showed a recidivism rate of more than 80 percent.
States that did provide counseling and followed up on the inmates after they got out, cut recidivism down to around 75 percent.
That's five per 100.
Seemed worth it to me then to help. And still does.
Five per hundred is 50 inmates per thousand released.
Fifty (mostly) guys who clean up their act with help and no longer clog the courts, no longer prey on innocent folk.
Yet and still, it's only 5 percent.
What is it about us that doesn't allow us to move out of our comfort zones except on rare occasions?
More than 90 percent of the voters polled have said they are already convinced who should be our next president. Debates, facts, none of it matters.
We are a species who know what we know even when we are shown we don't know it.
Life is suffering and change, but people are amazing and strange.
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