Oftentimes, we tend to assume that wholeness is a good thing. It seems pretty intuitive that wholeness should be something we strive for, and that it’s better than whatever alternatives we might propose. Fragmentation? Brokenness? But wait—let’s ask a Buddhist what they can contribute to this discussion.

The Four Noble Truths that are often used to summarize the Buddha’s teachings leave much unexplained, but nonetheless are a good starting point for our investigation. The First Noble Truth simply points out that suffering exists. Life is dukkha, suffering. Buddhists aren’t pessimists—far from it. But Buddhists are realists. If we are alive, sooner or later, we will come across the truth of suffering.

The second truth identifies the cause of our suffering as tanha, or desire. The word, however, connotes a specific kind of desire, the desire for private fulfillment. It consists, as Huston Smith puts it so well, “not of all inclinations, but of those that pull against life and a whole.” Suffering occurs when we seek our own fulfillment without regard for the whole.

Traditionally, Buddhists have identified three such desires: craving pleasure, material goods, and immortality, all of which by their very nature cannot be satisfied. Most UUs, I think, don’t fall into those three traps, at least not in their more blatant forms. We may, however, as do a lot of people, crave something we identify as “wholeness.”

The third truth draws the logical conclusion from the first two: to end, or at least limit suffering, not only for ourselves but for all beings, we need to rein in our hunger for our isolated, individual fulfillment at other beings’ expense.

(The fourth truth maps out an Eightfold Path for accomplishing this. It’s important in Buddhist teaching but is tangential to my analysis here.)

Our individual quests for wholeness pull against the fabric of life when we do not see that our individual existence itself is an illusion. The Buddhist teaching usually referred to as “no-self” has been the source of a great deal of misunderstanding and hasty dismissal of Buddhist teachings more broadly. Our minds react reflexively to such as assertion: What? Of course I am an individual self! I mean, I’m me and you are you. Sure, I change, but underneath it all, I’m the same person I was when I was born.

A primary implication of the teaching of no-self is that each of us exists only as a part of the entire web of life. Our sense of separateness from the whole of things is illusion—the totality is undivided, has no boundaries and no labels. Our life by its nature is communal life. Our wholeness is intimately bound up with the wholeness of the entire web of life and all beings past, present and future that comprise it.

Everything is impermanent and changing. Importantly, this includes what we think of as our self. This, too, is impermanent and constantly changing. It is also, as noted above, communal rather than personal. The only wholeness—or lack of it—that we have is right here, right now, in this moment only. Stop, pay attention, and let it find you.

We had some stormy days while we were on the Florida coast this year, with winds that prompted the posting of beach hazard warnings for rough surf and dangerous rip currents. Those warnings always include the reminder that, if we’re caught in a rip current, to relax, float, and try to swim parallel to the shoreline.

Struggling against a rip current is usually futile. It tires the swimmer out and makes it less likely that they will be able to reach the safety of the shore. Swimming parallel to the shore, on the other hand, can allow someone to swim out of the trough where the current is rushing outward. I’ve not had the opportunity to test this out for myself, for which I’m thankful.

What this analogy suggests to me is that there is a time to “relax and float.” Struggling toward wholeness isn’t always necessary and may indeed be counter-productive. There are times, to be sure, when we need to work actively to claim our wholeness. This psychological and spiritual work can be long, difficult, and painful. But it’s also helpful to know when to stop struggling and let wholeness find us in this very moment.

The second reminder in the beach hazard warning is to swim only where there is a lifeguard and not to swim solo. In order to be and become whole, we need community. We need the safety of others. We need people whose eyes we can gaze into to see our best selves reflected back to us. And we need to be those eyes for others. We need others to pick us up when we need it and we need to pick others up. We need community to celebrate our joys. We weave wholeness, or perpetuate the lack of it, together. We need communities that encourage and support our engagement with fostering the wholeness of the web of life itself.

In Community,

Rev. Julia