But I also like my job a lot because it helps to remind me of the reasons why I'm not a Buddhist. Mostly, it seems to come down to the problem of organized religion always equating spiritual truths with belief systems. There is so much talk around the office about the beliefs espoused by different strains of Buddhism, or by the religion as a whole, that it sometimes gets, well, unbelievable.
I'm all for contemplative, meditative practice of any kind, or any other personal method people may discover for becoming more aware of their own (unconscious, culturally constructed, insane) mental processes and coming to see reality more clearly. And that direct perception can get pretty weird and even supernatural-seeming relative to our usual (unconscious, culturally constructed, insane) worldview; I'm fine with that. But regular readers will know (from many previous posts) that I also see beliefs as one subset of the problematic mental processes such practices seek to uncover — a subset that is particularly good at preventing us from the clear perception that is their aim.
To accept beliefs about the nature of reality based on someone else's spiritual experience is, to my mind, misguided. Even if the person handing them down seems to have reached a state of extraordinary perception, to take on their beliefs as a way of augmenting your own spiritual progress is to put the cart in a dangerously pre-horse position.
Of course, the party line is that there is no belief required in Buddhism, which distinguishes it from other religions. But believe me (or at least maintain a skeptical attitude toward my naysayers), there's plenty of stuff snuck in there that you're expected to take on faith first, and then find a way of perceiving directly.
Karma is a good example. It may be that seeing a complex moral cause-and-effect system at work in our universe is beneficial to one's sense of belonging and equanimity. It could even be a stage on the way to experiencing oneself as an expression of that entire universe, through which it can observe itself, i.e. a perfectly integrated, compassionate being, aware and accepting of all truth.
But believing in it because someone says it's so is not going to get you to the state where you might perceive things that way. If anything, observing the relative world of time and causation through that belief lens is going to prevent you from experiencing the timelessness that is the only reality from which such a mystical stance makes sense.
Maybe that's too abstract. Here's a better example. My boss marches into my office today and announces that he has thought about it, and there is no difference between death and enlightenment. He's not trying to describe a new way of experiencing the world he's suddenly discovered phenomenologically, mind you. He has THOUGHT ABOUT IT, and this is the conclusion he's reached.
Well, that's just crazy, on the face of it. His point is that to become enlightened, our self as we know it must be surrendered each moment, i.e. it must die. Therefore, once you have become truly enlightened, to the point that your self has been given up entirely, never to return, you are exactly the same as physically dead.
"If you become enlightened," I say by way of testing the waters, "I could still talk to you." This is a particularly important distinction right now, because a very greatly loved young woman from the Halifax Buddhist community was killed by a drunk driver last week. Many people wish they could still talk to her. There was a funeral yesterday for her, widely attended by Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. But mostly by Buddhists, all of whom are still grieving their tragic loss, and some of whom work in the very offices where this ridiculous discussion was taking place.
His answer to my apparently airtight rebuttal is that I wouldn't actually be talking to him in that case, but to the forces of the universe finding a way of expressing themselves. I just stare after him as he walks smugly out the door.
If I wanted to get into a real argument with him about it, I'd point out that those universal forces were what he was all along, and that enlightenment would merely be the recognition of that fact by the forces themselves, as expressed through him. Inasmuch as you can be said to exist in the first place, you will presumably still exist after attaining enlightenment.
And I'd probably then observe that if he really believes what he's claiming to believe, he should be locked up in a nice cell where he can't hurt anybody. Because if enlightenment = death, then death = enlightenment. And anyone who thinks he'd be doing his fellow human beings a religious favour by killing them is no less dangerous than the craziest of suicide-cult leaders.
But really, the root problem here is that he just shouldn't be making any claims about enlightenment, not being enlightened himself. How could he possibly know anything about what the experience is like? From reading what enlightened people have said about it? Those writings are just attempts at describing ways of being that we have no direct access to until we are able to experience them ourselves. The descriptions may encourage us to keep observing ourselves and our own experiences as carefully and open-mindedly as we can, knowing that other angles are possible. But taken as expressions of truth, they will necessarily be misunderstood by those who are not apprehending those truths directly.
Of course, this is all just my opinion based on my own experiences. I happily preach to the choir, and all others should feel free to walk out on the sermon. Please don't quote my words to unbelievers. Amen.
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