A Different Take
Many of us had experienced a sleepless night where we try so hard to sleep but we couldn’t. In this situation, our brain dives into some weird thoughts depending on the person some think about love, career, and life imagining themselves in the world they have created in their mind. One night same thing happened with a boy named Akutra in his late teens. His mind dove into his thoughts. He started thinking about his life in the future what he would do and more importantly why he would do it. When we are young say below 15-16 years we don’t think about these things. We may observe everything around us when we are a child and question everything. But slowly, our brain is designed to not think about these things much and take the world as it is. And many continue this thinking when they grow and accept the world or in a broad sense the universe as it is and try to mimic people around them, which is fine as this led to humans' survival for more than a million years. But few had questions about the universe and life, they used their minds to answer these, this realization last only for some time and soon they also accept the way the universe works.
Akutra was lying in bed and thinking about his future. He had a lot of career paths and was confused about what to choose. He then starts asking himself why he would want to become this or that. He was interested in technology and wanted to become a scientist or engineer. He asked himself why he would want to become this. He answered he would be able to invent things that would improve the lives of people. But the question now is why. Well, some will argue that improving people's lives is good, but it doesn't answer why anyone would do that. We were devoid of any technology 5000 years back yet we are here and humans still live. Akutra was also inclined toward medicine so he asked himself why he would want to become a doctor. He answered himself that by becoming a doctor he would be able to help people with their diseases and would cure them. This is a good motivation to pursue this career but then he wondered what would happen if there were no doctors in the world, will it matter to the world or the universe? Humans have survived a major chunk of their life without medicine and most animals today do not have a way to cure their diseases yet they live. The point is everything thing in the world is meaningless if you put it in front of the gigantic universe. But people don’t care about the universe they only do things relative to others and want to achieve things they see in their surroundings.
Akutra started thinking does he have a purpose also. What is the purpose of human life or any life in the matter? The hard truth is no! we are just the manifestation of a series of fortunate or unfortunate events leading to the creation of life made of stardust. And after millions of years of evolution, we are blessed/cursed with a brain capable of transferring electrical signals across our neurons to perceive the universe as it is today. Akutra was really confused now. He was realizing that everything he has done or is doing is just a very complex chain of chemical reactions going inside his brain. And we can say that we are basically highly complex “organic” robots made by accident. After the arrival of our cognitive “intelligence”, very few people ever tried to understand the working of ourselves and I am not talking about those who do experiments with other’s bodies, I am talking about people who tried to understand themselves. One of them was Siddhartha Gautama a.k.a Gautam Budhha whose stories we all have read, but very few understood. In Theravada Buddhism, ‘Buddha’ refers to one who has become enlightened through their own efforts and insight. He was a Samyak Sambudh who attained enlightenment and is fully awakened. And he is not the only Samyak Sambudh, he is actually the 28th and also the last one to date. What goes inside their brains no one knows what we know is just their teachings. Akutra was now really tired from all these thoughts and slept. The next morning was a fresh start. He had forgotten about the last night and starts preparing to go to school.
Often what we had think in solitude goes away when we interact with the world. Same thing happened to thousands of people, the thoughts they have deep-dived before sleep goes away in the morning. And for the most part, it is good. To accept the world as it is, not everyone can be Samyak Sambudh and we are not wired to go beyond our brains.