The Buddha, whose name was Gautama Siddhartha, was born royalty. He had seen opulence in truckloads but had the intelligence to quickly understand that it was a rat trap, conspiring to hold his legs tight and becoming the biggest obstruction to his happiness.
Was opulence bad to him? No.
Did he say renounce the world? A big NO.
Then how was he different? I'll tell you. He was different because he was intelligent enough to get to the point.
Was he selfless? Well, he was really interested in his own liberation first, so he was a human just like us.
How did he think that was possible? He had focused his sharp mind on this very pertinent question: what brings one suffering? And the answer that made cathartic sense to him was none other than the old suspect, attachment. Like we get attached to our child, our car, our cats. Yes, that's the trap one needed to be wary of, as per him.
Those who thought he was right became his followers, and they soon saw the benefits of non-attachment. Non-attachment is kind of a software update in your system, but it's not just a bug fix, it's an OS overhaul. You don't get a new mind but a new perspective of looking at the mind. That fresh perspective can be labelled mindfulness.
"No two are the same" is a great cliché. They are absolutely the same if they are cultural animals. The only distinction can be imported via mindfulness. The same instrument that helped our beloved Sid gain his enlightenment.
