Reseña del libro "Life: Insights of a Buddhist Monk and Nun (en Inglés)"
We experience life at two levels. The first level is where we live, where we work, love, and do the things that people do while navigating through the days that define our existence. The second level is what this book is all about, a level of passion where our destiny is determined. Our memories, our thoughts; these are not passion; passion moves too swiftly to be fooled by these impostors. These things - our memories, our thoughts, our dreams - we use them, or they use us - but they are not what breathes life into us. Passion is the amazing thing that makes all the difference. A passionless life is a mechanical life where we merely go through motions. If passion does arise, even fleetingly, it is usually short lived for most of us. Once we feel this passion however, we remember its rare ecstasy, usually until our last breath is taken. Our life depends on this passion that we seldom can completely express because we fear coming face-to-face with something so powerful that nothing else matters. Everything else ties us in knots, and it is this imprisonment from which we are desperately trying to escape. Too few of us become seekers in search of ways to break free from a mundane existence that we all understand too well. But is it existence that is the problem? Or is it our lack of passion within existence? Within the shifting sands of life is an oasis, a secret place that few discover. An oasis with cool water and shade, a place outside of contrived existence. It is timeless, impossible to understand or prove, yet a place we can know. The ones that know this place are ones that cause no harm, cause no wars, cause no hatred. They understand humanity because they are humanity, nothing more, nothing less as they exist in a world that no longer affects them. Once we glimpse this oasis, there can be no going back, and it is this glimpse of unbridled freedom that this book is about - the freedom to see life as it is instead of through the lens of images, and the freedom to say things that those caught up in images will fear, yet know in their hearts are true. Life is revolutionary. Refuting widely held beliefs that happiness results from finding the right circumstances, Life introduces a radical idea - that happiness does not depend on circumstances at all. Happiness depends on something much more intriguing. Life challenges contemporary self-help schemes by taking things a step further; an extraordinary and truly groundbreaking step. Current thought is that positive thinking will solve our problems; that we can get whatever we desire in life. In the end, however, our happiness is brief because our cherished desires turn into liabilities repeatedly, forcing us to thrash relentlessly from one escape to another - and the secret to happiness evades us once more. The carrot dangles just out of reach in front of our noses as we continue seeking our entire lives, all of us in different ways, but never finding contentment for long. We just can't understand that the real secret to happiness is only accessible when we stop running toward happiness itself. We cannot surrender to the obvious fact that unhappiness is a part of our lives. Although we attempt to refute this, intimations of this tremendous revelation ease through the rigid cracks of our structured existence all the time, and when this happens, our knee-jerk reaction is always the same; to fight it. Only when we understand things and surrender to the ebb and flow of existence can we begin to relax and perhaps find a deeper contentment than an unstable happiness can provide. Life is a guide to discovery of this and many other secrets for ourselves in the many facets of our lives, and once this discovery takes hold, anything that we previously relied upon for our happiness is changed. The passion that builds from our exposure to this new reality alters our entire life experience, as we become something that we could have never dreamed possible.
