Gautama (The Buddha) spent his life trying to understand why there was so much suffering in the world, and his great realization was that the source of all suffering is desire. No desire, no suffering. So the whole point of the religion is to learn how to free oneself from desire, and thus attain eternal peace. Meditation is part of that -- a technique that you can learn, not so much to stop thought altogether, but to stop planning or preparing for things, because these only make sense in the context of desires. The ultimate goal ("Nirvana") of complete freedom from desire is damnably difficult to reach, though, because as soon as you realize how blissful that state would be, you desire it. Oops! Back to the beginning. When enlightenment does come, it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise -- the Zen version hits you with a stick for good measure. You just have to be prepared for it.
Meanwhile, in physics, time is just a dimension, pretty much like the three dimensions of space, and nothing more. The three spatial dimensions have no natural direction; that is, there's nothing about left that makes it more "special" than right, and similarly for up and down, and backwards and forwards. What's especially important is that there doesn't seem to be anything about the basic laws of physics that has a preference for one temporal direction over the other, either. A movie played backwards is just as consistent with the laws of mechanics as the same movie played forwards.
Most physicists (not all) believe that spacetime is like a four-dimensional container of events, as opposed to a three-dimensional container of things that change over time, and doubt that there's any fundamental distinction between past and future, at least as far as laws of nature are concerned, even if the two really look different to people.
One of my favorite books (Time's Arrow & Archimedes' Point, by Huw Price) makes a really good (but rather complex) argument that time really and truly doesn't have a direction at all. Price doesn't say this explicitly, but this seems to be where he's going: The reason for the "uncertainty principle" of quantum mechanics, and for all of the associated fuzziness, is that the determinants of an event are not all in the event's past. Some are in the event's future, effectively backwards causation. (This is 100% consistent with all known physics, so it's not a new physical theory, just a new philosophical perspective.)
The problem for people is that they can't think this way. We're "agents," which means that we plan things, arrange things and do things, always with a view to the future. You can't make any sense whatever of a reversed life. What makes death more frightening than birth is that death puts a stop to our status as agents; that's it, you're not doing anything more, so stop planning.
So, to tie all this together before the reader's eyes glaze over, in the real world of physics, the freedom presumed by all our planning and preparation -- the "power" to do things -- is illusory; it's just a curious fact of human psychology that we can't help thinking we're free. From the four-dimensional perspective, with directionless time, you exist (in a tenseless sense of the word), with clear boundaries in spacetime, which define your entire life, and it doesn't really matter which way you look at it, east-to-west, death-to-birth, it's all the same. But this really hurts a person with desires. Desires make death look like a terrible ending when there are still things you want to do. To be at peace in the real universe, you have to come to grips with the fact that "agency" is nothing but an illusion; that is, you have to "overcome desire." A difficult trick, but at least the Buddhists have the right idea. (Prayer-wheels and incense don't help much, though.)
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