The picture of this article comes from the film Quartet
Only when he is really alone can he understand Li Shutong's choice at that time. He chose a religious retreat. I don't believe in religion, but I can choose secular retreats.
The need for practice is felt only when one is alone, and it is also felt when one is really idle. In the busy worldly life, in the viscous interpersonal relationships, trivial things occupy life, some pleasure, some pain, but lack of contemplation and cultivation of inner desire and time. When a person is alone and completely idle, a deep perception of space and time comes to the human heart. This is Kant's so-called "looking up at the stars" state of mind.
When busy with mundane things, people cannot feel space except the environment and surrounding scenery; except for the small urgent things and fatigue, they cannot feel time. Only when you are leisurely and alone, when you sit idly by the sea and look at the vast blue sea, you suddenly feel the contours of space and the passage of time. The universe and the vast starry sky came to people's consciousness, feeling like a lonely boat, floating in the boundless sea, not knowing where to float, no goal, no direction, no matter how hard to paddle, just in place, in vain. In the helplessness, time passes, just a few decades, like a moment. Looking at the lonely boat again, the people in the boat have disappeared completely, and the boat is floating in the water, so it is not desolate.
When such a feeling came to my heart, I really couldn't figure out why I had to do something. The practice of Buddhism is to see through this, so just sit still and do nothing all your life, and the essence of its practice is that the four great voids are empty. This idea cannot be said to be not a true insight, but most people in the world do not want to accept this desperate and helpless fact, but just blindly bury their eyes in the sand like ostriches.
Strictly speaking, the motivation of the world to do everything comes from the persecution that must be done, but there are two types of persecution, one is persecution from the outside world, and the other is persecution from the inner world. Persecution from the external world is the pressure to survive: to do things in exchange for a minimum of food, clothing, comfort and spiritual pleasure; the persecution from the inner world is the creative impulse of artists and scientists, artists feel the call of beauty, scientists feel the call of curiosity, to create this beauty through their own labor, to reveal the mystery to satisfy their curiosity, so that their creative impulse can be vented.
However, people who have inner impulses to vent are rare in the world, and the vast majority of people do things only to survive. Why should people do anything after everything they need to survive has been satisfied? This goes back to Schopenhauer's pendulum theory: man feels pain when the necessities of survival are not satisfied; boredom when the necessities of survival are satisfied. Life swings back and forth like a pendulum in pain and boredom. His pendulum theory can encompass almost 99% of the world's people, but fortunately he is open to those 1% of people, that is, artists who have inner impulses. So in a sense, artists are the darlings of the Creator, they are some of the happiest and happiest people, no one in the world can compare, the emperor will be the star of the giant can not be expected.
If you are fortunate enough to be born as an artist, of course, you can enjoy yourself and secretly rejoice, but what about ordinary people who make up the vast majority of the population? In my opinion, there is basically no way but to let it go and break the can. It's just that you have to cultivate to be able to accept this cruel fact relatively calmly, and don't fall into too many inner troubles and entanglements. This is the reason for my current cultivation and the content of my cultivation. The goal of my cultivation is to enable myself to finally accept my current situation and destiny, and to truly achieve the state of calmly accepting myself as I am.