Religion as Existence, Being and Emptiness…
” The born metaphysician is a person…astonished at the fact that there is anything at all.”
Those of you who’ve never asked the Big Questions of life are really missing something, I think, because the best part about the big Q’s are the Big A’s, of course, and the fact that, despite all odds, we in fact are here, on a thinly congealed surface suspended between hot glowing molten rock and cold black outer space, the Goldilocks species on the Goldilocks planet, of all-too-unlikely biological life, the Middle Path ‘sweet-spot’ people…
…foraging for fruits and flowers in forests and fields, eating not just desserts, in so-called deserts, still not deserted after all these years, but intent on finding the beauty in nature, even when the obvious signs are forbidding, though if you poke around the edges and look between the cracks, then you just might find something there to sustain organic life through thick and thin, sickness and health, for better or worse, till death do us part… (More …)
I only know that it is more appropriate for these self-engorged capitalistic end-times than the prevailing paradigm, which is probably the cause of this effect. The original teachings of JC and the Buddha are almost superfluous at this point, anyway, what with so much cultural baggage added on over all the years, much of it far from the original teachings…
It has long been predicted that Buddhism’s future is in the West, and for better or worse, that may very well be true. So the question then becomes: what kind of Buddhism would that be? For purposes of dialog and dialectic, I see the two chief protagonists to be the Thai Forest Tradition and Zen, both of which have numerous and faithful adherents in the West, and both of which can claim some purity of faith and doctrine…
The loneliness of travel should be crushing sometimes, but it’s not, not really, and I seem to attract it, by design, as if to do otherwise would mean I’m lazy, and corrupt, too weary in my old age to do the right thing, stay true to my principles, those principles of non-possession, non-attachment and non-consumption…
One of the Christian cardinal sins is pride, of course, to which I might add arrogance, same thing, and ignorance, in the original meaning, literally ignoring that which is obvious, not the least of which is the fact that we are alone here in the universe, each one of us individually, by design and definition, and all of us together, by lack of any other evidence, made manifest on a rock hurtling through space at many times the speed of sound, but far less than the speed of light, orbital velocity far more excited and exciting than the slow cool world in which organic life finds its being and us…
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