Searching for the Middle Way

Buddha taught the middle way. From today's Buddhist Beliefnet:

Let me tell you about the middle path. Dressing in rough and dirty garments, letting your hair grow matted, abstaining from eating any meat or fish, does not cleanse the one who is deluded. Mortifying the flesh through excessive hardship does not lead to a triumph over the senses. All self-inflicted suffering is useless as long as the feeling of self is dominant.

You should lose your involvement with yourself and then eat and drink naturally, according to the needs of your body. Attachment to your appetites--whether you deprive or indulge them--can lead to slavery, but satisfying the needs of daily life is not wrong. Indeed, to keep a body in good health is a duty, for otherwise the mind will not stay strong and clear.

This is the middle path.

-Discourse II, From "The Pocket Buddha Reader," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000.

I don't think the Buddha would have spent a good deal of his life teaching the middle way if it was something most people around him were doing. In that way, I am not different. I am also not different in that I need to be told over and over again, reminded, told in different ways, different parables, within different contexts.

My impulse is toward extremism. I have often thought, and feared, that I would probably have been ripe for the Nazi youth movement had I grown up in Germany in the 30's. I fear that I would have been susceptible to that kind of extremism. Not because I am anti-semitic, but because I would let myself get caught up in the intensity, drama, and energy of the extremism of nazism. I hope not, but it has passed my mind on occassion.

In the current climate of violence that we live in, there are all kinds of extreme ideas going around. Last night on CNN there was a report on how conservative Christians are believing that we are on the verge of armageddon. There are millions in this country who believe in the rapture, in armageddon, in a 1000 years of peace after Jesus returns. That's a pretty extreme thought. There a extreme Muslims who believe that if they commit suicide by killing infidels they will go to heaven and be gifted with 37 virgins. That's a pretty extreme idea, too.

My own sense of facination with the morbid is related to extemism. I'm facinated by stories of serial killers. I've watched countless films and news footage of the holocaust. I watched videos on the internet of 4 Al Qaeda beheadings. If it is fiction, Stephen King, horror movies, I won't watch it or read it. It has to be real.

I remember when the movie Gremlins came out. I went to see it with friends. It was a completely fantasy based film and it frightened me so much that I kept having to leave the theatre and walk out into the lobby. There I was, me and a group of 4 year olds, waiting for the scary parts to end so we could go back into the theatre. Yet I watched the beheadings, with sound, and while cringing, watched every second of the video. That's pretty extreme and my own impulse to see humans at their worst, whether it be executioner, serial killers, or genocidal dictators, is also extreme.

I'm not sure why I have this impulse. Perhaps it is my way of seeing my own life as the middle way, between psychopath and saint. But if I need to go to those extremes to see the middle way I don't think I will make much progress on the eightfold path. So I search on to find the middle way.