Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism

by Stephen Batchelor

Lasting and stable peace of mind is achieved not through discovering the permanence of anything, but through fully accepting the impermanent as impermanent and ceasing to insist that it is otherwise. Likewise, genuine contentment is found in realizing that what one previously assumed to be capable of providing satisfaction is actually unable to do so. It is in accepting this fact and not in an ever more strenuous attempt to force the world into an impossible shape that a realistic outlook is achieved which ceases to expect from the world something the world can never provide. Paradoxically, in this very act of acceptance one finds the happiness that had always eluded one before. But it is insight into the lack of self-identity that finally undermines the instinctive misconceptions we have of ourselves, others, and the world.