BROADCASTS.com

I will continue north today. Via Patma, it is at least 10 days to walk to the edge of the Himalayas. I would like to hike from here to the northeast and at the foot of the Himalayas to the Sikkim region, to Darjeeeling and Gangtok. I don't have a real goal today, Patma is too far, so I let myself drift and see where I can find a good place to spend the night. I took a little booklet about Buddha's teachings with me and turn the pages over and over again when I stop to rest a little. I realize on thing. Buddha tried to get to the heart of things and did have a tendency towards exaggeration and extremes. Therefore, his first attempts at salvation were extreme. He joined ascetics, the hunger monks. He realized this was not the right path for him and proclaimed the middle path as the right way. If you are looking in the extremes it is a great realization that the right path is not extreme, but lies in between.. That is why his first journey after his enlightenment was to meet his former colleagues the hunger monks, whom he wanted to inform about his findings. In his speech “all is burning”, which deals with the inflammation of the senses and the psyche, you can feel his tendency to exaggerate. He wants to clarify his thesis and is also taking a radical approach to the solution. He defines egoism as the central evil and proclaims that there is no self, an ego existing. The non-existence of the soul is therefore his creed. This radical thought should encourage us to connect more with the world in order to avoid inflammation of the senses. I can see the young, talented, and intellectual Siddharta right in front of me. He himself suffers from tension and nervousness like many brilliant minds and he leaves everything behind, his small endangered kingdom and the tightness of the family, which have great expectations of him. He goes out looking for peace of mind. But he does not find this peace of mind within himself, but in the dissolution of his own being. He realizes that we are only part of the cosmos and that we find salvation from our sufferings in connection with the cosmic worlds.