#Dharma without the Drama: #Buddhism on the Half-Shell…
Buddhism is not supposed to be a religion to get all excited about in the first place, if it’s even a religion at all, but just the opposite, regarding the excitement, that is. That’s Christianity, or Hinduism, singing and dancing, playing organ and banging drums, maybe even a guitar or two, if you’re lucky, and a bottle of wine, singing about Adam and Eva, “In a Gadda da Vida”…
But Buddhism is not like that, not at all, and maybe just the opposite, a bit gloomy at times, I frequently the cheery one in the group, and I’m at least bi-polar, maybe even tri, triple Gem(ini), at least metaphorically, but who’s counting? And if Christian hymns are the paradigm for the cross, carrying you away to places you’ve never really been before, in a swoon of frenzy, for Buddhism the paradigm is meditation, focusing on the right here and right now, where you’ve never really left… (More …)
and the little voices inside saw me ‘starving hysterical naked’ and said, “get thee to a monastery, young man, before it’s too late, while there’s still time, before you do something you’ll regret, so as to lay down your weary crosses and your over-worked swords, and your virus-ridden little laptop thingie, at once and forthwith, for I sentence you to life without parole, to suffer in silence, and be very glad for it, free of the distractions and defilements that inevitably lead to karmic rebirth…”
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Karma is one of the major tenets of Buddhism, and one of the most misunderstood. The issue of past lives I’ll save for later; first let’s deal with this life. The basic idea is that if you do good things, then good things will happen to you. And if you have to take at least one religious tenet on pure faith to qualify as religious, then I’ll take that one, which I firmly believe, that by doing good, the world is thereby incrementally vaccinated against evil. Thus karma is frequently called the law of ’cause and effect’, BUT…
The Smiling Pilgrim are discussing. 
One of the first glimpses of consciousness—self-consciousness—for any self-respecting member of angst-ridden rebellious existential youth is that, “life has no meaning.” And apparently that is a rite of passage from adolescence into adulthood, as palpable as puberty, as awkward as rolled-up jeans, as unforgiving as suicide–or so I hear…
So now that I’ve self-identified as Buddhist for almost a year, I figure I know pretty well the heart and mind of the Buddha, and so should begin second-guessing him, in order to clarify a few points that remain confusing after 2560 years (cue snickers). Okay, so here goes: everybody knows the Four Noble Truths, right? 1) The prevalence of suffering; 2) the cause of suffering: craving; 3) the cure for suffering: don’t do that, and 4) the way to accomplish that: follow the Middle Path, avoidance of extremes… 
Christianity is the only modern religion based on emotion, rather than reason, submission, devotion or some other. Christians apparently LIKE suffering—read: passion—and so don’t avoid it but seek it out, with daredevil stunts, extreme sports, torrid romances and hot hot bodies, buffed and tanned and laid in the sand, for hours at the time, until well-done…
streaming consciousness... 
tiramit 8:37 am on May 28, 2017 Permalink |
Great, I never really thought before that the future doesn’t seem to hold as much as it did for us and therefore we’re less likely to wander off into it when we’re supposed to be in the here and now. But I see you’re writing for that kind of audience, and meditation is about sharpening our skills in ordinary presence, not so much about blissful realms. It’s this heavenly thing that Western newcomers to it think is what it’s all about, so they don’t stay with it for very long. What else can they do, it’s not everyone who has immersed themselves in a culture that’s so completely different from the mother ship for a number of decades and still be considered a farang…
hardie karges 5:14 pm on May 28, 2017 Permalink |
For me the only proper use of here and now is in meditation. Everything else is wishful thinking. I DO have a viable vision of the future, though, but it doesn’t have much to do with self-driving cars…
hardie karges 3:13 am on May 30, 2017 Permalink |
I should probably clarify that my hypothesis that ‘Nowness’ is thriving because of a bleak future sees that as a subliminal cause. I doubt that many people would admit to it…