Buddhism East and West: It’s All in Your Mind (hint hint)…

The meeting of east and west occurs in my mind every day, on a good day, and that’s the way it should be, a smorgasbord of delights and selections, delicacies and confections, on display for the life choices that I relish as a symbol of my free will, which is only partial, of course, but still significant, because without it, we are just slaves on the plantation, where all the food goes elsewhere, and the dignity mostly goes lacking. And this is now proven, more or less, that the paradigms of East and West have little to do with East and West, really, which are not so different, after all, in terms of longitude and latitude, landscape or race, but almost total opposites conceptually, amid the hardening of positions and platitudes, and after the passing of time and space, so much so that they could almost seem like each others’ own devil’s advocates, merely taking a position for the sake of argument, as if that might be the only way that thought can progress beyond its proto-consciousness of silent awareness, itself blessed and sublime, but maybe a bit too boring for the troubled teenager with places to go and things to do, and who must be accommodated at least somewhat for the sake of the species and all the future repercussions to be encountered. So we stake out positions for the sake of the view, just to see what happens, in this bold experiment of biological life, in which consciousness becomes a dialogue and dialectic, rather than a far more simple acceptance of things as they merely are. So genetic science now proves it, that not only are the Brahmins of India and the Christians of the West intimately related, but that in fact we are all related as humans, not just by common analogy and metaphor, but literally, by DNA, both maternal and paternal, as the lines get crossed and history moves forward, on knees both bent and bandied, starving for succor and begging for forgiveness. And this is where religion comes in, because this is the challenge of all religion, all philosophy, all psychology, all sustained thought that trickles down to individual human consciousness or bubbles up from the same, which is to sustain us with words both momentous and motivational, both trivial and triumphant, now that language has captured consciousness and no return is possible. Because religions aren’t all about truth, except of the kind that can be agreed to upon faith of conviction and threat of excommunication, so nothing to do with the trials of empiricism and the results of experimentation. Religion is all about feeling good, in this life and this world, even if the means for that is the promise of a better world, or the promise of release. Either choice can bring the desired results, in brief: Don’t be angry at the past. Be hopeful for the future (and don’t forget to find some peace in the present)…

Advertisement