It's just life

Now, I just had a minor flash of insight while watching a dialogue between two of my heroes, Father Thomas Keating, a cistercian abbot and contemplative, and Ken Wilber, philosopher extraordinaire and integral Buddhist meditation practitioner. What suddenly became obvious to me was that the spirituality of Christian and Buddhist teachers take different perspectives to the same truths - or more like, the path is expressed in different ways. The Christian path, it seems to me now, is described by its immense presence of heart, while the Buddhist path is more characterised by its immense presence of mind.

Now as Buddhism will tell you, you need both wisdom and compassion to make the bird of enlightenment fly, but anyone who's ever come into proximity of Buddhist philosophy, including those that practice it (myself included) will, I believe, find that the philosophy, at least on the surface, puts more emphasis on mind than heart. The Buddha discovered Ultimate Truth through conquering Maya (illusion), thus breaking through into the ego-shattering light on the other side. It's epitomized in his battle and ultimate victory against Mara, the symbolic demon that makes the world of Samsara (suffering) turn, keeping us all as perpetual prisoners of attachment, aversion and ignorance. In the Christian teachings on the other hand, the story is a little different - Jesus' ultimate sacrifice was His love for humanity - He had so much love for the lost souls He saw around him that He willingly gave up His life as a symbol of the path they were to follow. Undoubtedly, He had a lot of presence of mind, but the wisdom aspect of Christian teaching is rarely touched upon, it's all about loooove.

Now this comes out in the teachers of these religions as well. The deeply realized Christian teachers have a sort of fragility to them, a sort of suffering that they've taken on for all humanity, full of love, full of compassion, and with an air of what to me seems like melancholy. These are the people who are so intimate with God that they will happily take on whatever suffering life brings only to transform it into bright and shimmering love for the rest to soak up. They're like a refinery, with suffering as the raw material and love as the end product.

Buddhist teachers on the other hand have a presence of mind that is unparalelled. Just being in the presence of a highly realized Buddhist practitioner is like having ten lightning bolts of awareness shoot sober you up and get your act together. You will be brought kicking and screaming into the present moment and there find the peace that you seek. They cut through all the bullshit like a laser beam and lets you get away with nothing. Being intimate with such a person is like standing in the fires of purgatory, coming in as a diamond in the rough, and being pushed out on the other side as a shimmering beacon of truth, of diamond awareness.

Genuine Christian teachers, like Father Thomas Keating, fidget, sometimes appear restless and frustrated. And at the same time they shine with immense beauty; you know right away that this is someone you could tell anything, confide your deepest secrets to and be embraced by a heart beating for the presence of God that resides in you both.

Buddhist teachers, in this case somewhat inaccurately presented by Ken Wilber (inaccurate as it would not be fair to consider him a Buddhist teacher, but he has done most of his practice in the tradition), tend to be much more stable, with a different sort of cutting presence, speaking with extreme accuracy and never hesitating about anything. They've got it so together that it's almost annoying (yet leaves you in awe).

I'm painting with broad strokes here, but I believe they're reasonably accurate. Now the interesting part of course is that Christian teachers have wisdom in spades, and Buddhist teachers have love in spades. But this is my take: Christian teachers use wisdom as a vehicle for love, whereas Buddhist teachers use love as a vehicle for wisdom.

And now it gets really interesting. If the religion of the West is based on the heart and the religion of the East is based on the mind, howcome Western culture is primarily mind and Eastern culture primarily heart? I propose it is because mind and heart must always exist in harmony - they're like universal principles, like yin and yang. And if there's too much focus on one in religion, it will be emphasized in culture. There is no other way to maintain balance.

And this my friends is why the meeting of Christianity of Buddhism was I think correctly described by someone as the most significant event of the 20th century. This meeting is in fact, I believe, the lifeline of the human race, the coming together of yin and yang - harmony at last. What has come and keeps coming out of this ecstatic friction is a source of tremendous excitement. Ooh, hey hey, very good indeed!

Now, I thought these were kick-arse thoughts, thoughts that I'm very happy with as they're clearing up some confusion for me.

I hope it can help others too. Tada

Love and blessings,
Eivind

Inspired by the book I'm currently reading, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, I got to thinking a little about the number 0. The story of this all-important digit is incredibly interesting and is closely linked with philosophy and Eastern spirituality.

There are many worldviews out there, and they are largely grouped in the religious/spiritual and scientific camps. A religious person of lower cognitive capability and spirituality sees a scientific person as a blasphemer that will go to hell and a naive scientist sees a religious person as an idiot who believes in the equivalent of ghosts and goblins, a big bearded cop in the sky, a white Santa Claus.

Now, what's worth noticing here is that the religion that science condemns is of the naive, dogmatic, fundamentalist variety whereas developmental studies show that religion in the form of spirituality is rediscovered in a post-scientific worldview (it transcends and includes a worldview that considers matter the building block of everything). The problem with science of course is that it cannot differentiate between the pre-rational from the trans-rational (rationality being science), as everything that cannot be studied with scientific instruments (e.g our mind) is subjective and therefore not trustworthy, a pie in the sky.

But as I read Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, it becomes very clear to me that science has some trouble with the history of this mysterious number 0. This number did not exist in Greek and Roman thought as the Greek thinkers asked themselves how nothing could be something. This was a philosophical dilemma, not a mathematical one. So where did the number come from? It in fact originates from Eastern esoterica, from Hindu thinkers.

The sanskrit name of the number is shunya. In the Buddhist system (which developed out of Hinduism) we find the similar-sounding concept of shunyata. This is the idea that at its most fundamental level, in the world of manifestation, nothing substantial is really going on. The system punctures the idea that we have a lot of fixed objects crashing into each other (here's a rock and here's a tree) and that they are all fundamentally, at their core, just ever-changing phenomena that only appear as static as our cognition is trapped in time and space. What the concept of shunyata suggests is that all manifestation are one. Yet at the same time, this oneness displays in numerous ways as identifiable objects. It's nothing (the 0 standing on its own) and everything (the trailing 0s as in 1000) at the same time.

Now, science seems to be moving in this direction too, what with later developments suggesting that matter is indeed a whole lot of nothing (a material whole load of nothing of course), but science is still, for the most part dismissing the spiritual/subjective realms as wishful thinking. But hang on; science could not have became a potent system of thought and investigation without the number 0. Which is a problem, as the number grew out of metaphysics. Leave it to metaphysicians to create an entity that is nothing at all, that cannot be proven by any instrument other than our inquiring mind. The Greeks found it too ridiculous.

Zero, nil, nada, zilch - not real, just a figment of our imagination. Yet our technology, science, which effectively dismisses imagination and subjective experience as unreal, is depending on it. That seems wrong to me. Or maybe I'm reading this entire situation wrong. Just more wishful thinking? I don't know, but it's a fascinating topic nevertheless.