Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

by Stephen Batchelor

The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act.

Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?

Reflective meditation is a way of translating thoughts into the language of feeling. It explores the relation between the way we think about and perceive things and the way we feel about them. We find that even the strongest, seemingly self-evident intuitions about ourselves are based on equally deep-seated assumptions. Gradually learning to see our life in another way through reflective meditation leads to feeling different about it as well.

Over time such meditation penetrates our primary sense of being in the world at all. It helps us value more deeply our relationships with others, whom we come to regard as transient as ourselves. It evokes the poignancy implicit in the transitoriness of all things.

LIFE IS NEITHER meaningful nor meaningless. Meaning and its absence are given to life by language and imagination. We are linguistic beings who inhabit a reality in which it makes sense to make sense.

Dharma practice is founded on resolve. This is not an emotional conversion, a devastating realization of the error of our ways, a desperate urge to be good, but an ongoing, heartfelt reflection on priorities, values, and purpose. We need to keep taking stock of our life in an unsentimental, uncompromising way.