Our Real home

Quyen Ngo

According to Buddhism, conceptualisation and convention play a large part in enmeshing us in ignorance. Language and convention on one hand enable us to communicate and negotiate our ways through life, but at the same time convention puts a thicker veil on reality and drives us deeper into illusion. We grow up adopting many social conventions. We are expected to conform to these ‘norms’. Whilst intellectually, we recognised these social norms pertain to certain cultures and they may not be the ‘norms’ of other cultures. Nevertheless, these social conventions do have strong influences on our perceptions of life. Furthermore, we tend to categorise and pigeon hole everything in life according to our previous experiences. When we meet new people, we ask them where they come from, what jobs do they do? We then form impressions of new people according to their backgrounds with the assumption that they have strong influences on their mentalities. Of course, this is a very rough way to gauge people, but we all do it, knowingly or not.

As a result of one’s own culture and upbringing, each of us comes to adopt this ‘identity’ as part of one’s ego. As part of one’s ego, one defends and protects it because it is one’s personal identity. This illusion is not just delusional, it is also socially dangerous! For example, how often have we heard about people fighting over their national or cultural identities ? We do not like it when someone insults our country, race or religion. Why? Because we own them, we made them parts of our identities, our ego-making.

One enormous benefit I found from travelling is that you get to see how superficial these ‘values’ are. There are attributes of cultures and we do not have to make them as parts of our identities. We can see that behind these attributes, people are the same. Regardless of different cultures, all people desire to live in peace, want to be free from harms and be happy. We can then see that cultures are as superficial as the clothes people wear. Therefore, to discriminate against someone because of his or her background is akin to judging someone by what he or she wears. When we see this, we can also begin to peel off layers of our own egoistic concepts. We can let go of some of the things we took as part of our ‘identities ’. The result is not loss as we gain freedom from letting go. When we let go of our sense of belonging, we are free to roam, and free to make the world our home. Wherever we are, we are at home with ourselves. Home is not some place out there.