Curiosity Killed The Religion

Where is the spark?

When we talk about life, what we are truly talking about is sentience. When we talk about love, what we are truly talking about is understanding. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh says “To love is to recognize; to be loved is to be recognized by the other.” Love is recognizing and understanding the beloved. In other words, sentience is love.

If you are a thinking person, if you are plagued by the need to understand existence through thought, you can’t help but ponder the nature of sentience, and what it means to be alive. Ever since one of my very good friends committed suicide, I have been thinking about the nature of sentience deeply. Actually, many years before my friend decided to hang herself with a rope, I sat in my bed as a boy and cried myself to sleep, worried about my my parents death. Now, my father suffers the ravages of dementia in a care facility, a real life manifestation of that nightmare.

Once we find ourselves in a real nightmare we realize that the experience of living through things we dread is both worse than we thought, as well as oddly ordinary. Death is actually quite common, as it happens everywhere all the time, and is simply the mirror of birth. Suffering is what characterizes being alive, while joy is the mirror of suffering, and offers temporary surcease from the common pains of living…