Brains.

Think with me for a minute.

I recently stumbled upon a picture of a human brain captioned by a young doctoral student,

(Source: http://medicalschool.tumblr.com/post/20478544652/the-human-brain)

The first time I held a human brain in Anatomy Lab I was completely speechless. I looked at my classmates expecting a similar reaction and they looked back at me confused like…”dude let’s start identifying the structures.” I had to take a step back and let it process…in my hands was someone’s entire life. From start to finish, every memory, every emotion, every bodily control…was right there in my hands.

In all reality, this struck me as truly fascinating and heavily terrifying. These thoughts I am having are essentially the result of this grotesque mass of gray matter encased in my skull. The person I know myself to be is an 8 pound neural organ. Everyone in my life is a brain with individually characterized ridges and crevices.

Then the truth became even more heavy. I began to understand that the standards, rules, and expectations we set for our society are the mere consequence of this wrinkly, pink mound between our ears. When we really boil down the caramel of life, we are all ripe, ceaseless organs built on the same principles as every other sentient being on this planet.

And do you know what that means? The bodies we meticulously measure, preen, and decorate are just evolutionary protein casings meant to carry on the process of life. Why do we set such specifically unrealistic standards for ourselves, when each of us is biologically identical in an anatomical sense?

But yet again, is it not the brain that learns, implants, and accepts these expectations in the first place? It's a complete contradiction with no explanation to be made for it. Our brains are too powerful for their own good! As completely nonsensical as it seems, we have to accept it for it is, and if we can't do that, then we must laugh at it. As my brother's favorite comic character, Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes), says, "I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don’t make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life."

To put this in terms of Buddhism, the world will be as the world will be. Reality is perception, and this is how our brains are programmed to be. There is no practical use for meddling in the affairs of reality.