Sunday, January 27, 2013

If you are out in nature you find yourself closer to Buddha nature, the reality of all things.  Sitting by a stream, thinking of nothing, you find yourself in harmony with something larger.  Sitting there you know basically what is right and what is wrong.  Sounds clichéd, perhaps.  But there is a connection to be made.

And then you go back to the world of competition for resources and cleverness and rules, which too often is not just work, work being perfectly acceptable, but a matter of egotism.  So quickly, around the world, before you know it, everyone has an ego.  People fight.  Mine against yours.  My way is right, your way is wrong.  Take the Taliban as an example.  It doesn't help matters that other nationalist egos gave rise to the Taliban, enabled them, let them flourish, and then became surprised when the Taliban could not be controlled, and then soon enough was a combatant.  Against an egotistical act, another act of egotism will arise, quite like the physical law.

But out in the woods, taking a walk, or down watching the water run in the stream underneath some ice in a meditative mood with little more than healthy air and a pleasant scene in mind, and you are not adding to the world's troubles and conflicts.  Perhaps in some way you are helping diffuse strife and conflict by your own small example.

Religion, organized, in childish forms, can be egotistical in certain ways, undercutting itself as it makes its points when it delineates the chosen and the unchosen.  And so organized, it must keep a gentler message within, almost as a higher esoteric point.  It takes the old organized bombastic type a long time, a gradual transition to get to, let's say through Jesus Christ's teachings, the basic underlying perennial wisdom that Buddhism, in its own poetry, is often harboring.  God's own people finally come around to realizing the basic illusion of Self, at which point it's just a matter of right living as any non crazy human being is capable of, taking care first to realize the illusion individually (as it were.)

Truth does not so much need 'a religion,' but that 'religion' seems to help us along with way, making a transition to the basic wisdom behind reality.

So does Jesus teach us about the goodness within that Samaritan over there, about the blessedness of other, those poor, those seek, those meek ones over there.  So are the peacemakers blessed.




It seems that the more refuge you take, or realize, in the Tao, in the Dharma, the more it makes sense to you, and so you take increasingly to seeing it as refuge.  The first steps, as the Buddha says, mean you are already on the path.  Who doesn't find being in nature soothing?  The thing is to make the connection to the intellect, the faith, the mindfulness of Buddhist thought.  And I think this is the thing that really saves artists from certain plights.  If you are inclined to see the picture, half of it, go the full way to realization.  Art is about establishing a personal connection, a situation created by the artist, for the viewer to achieve a connection outside of his or her self, thereby opening up to another experience. The artist has, perhaps, gone about it blindly, on gut instinct, trying to tell a story that comes from a deeper level and one that seeks expression.  That another being comes along and is able to get something, a sympathetic response, makes it a mystical endeavor.

As a footnote, I wonder if it wouldn't have saved Hemingway to have understood, to read the Tao, to read up on Buddhism, so as to finally not drive yourself mad with the craft, but to let it flow, and know what it all means as far as reaching toward enlightenment, one justified in placing faith in, logically, intellectually, with the heart, instinctively.

And perhaps in ways that author did achieve something akin to Theosophical, Buddhist what-have-you, Christian spirituality.  No doubt.  Much within him about the interconnectedness of life, of the naturalist that he was.  The greater you assume the connection to be, the greater the connection will indeed be, oddly enough.

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