From your first breath to your last

From your first breath to your last you will vie with the complexities of living; the multi-role-playing, many faceted torrent of each day pouring through you, like it or not. Staring blankly at a wall will not free you from this, nor from the obligations that it will trust upon you. But it was this torrent of meaning suffused life that brought you to the threshold of Zen, even for those born into traditional Buddhist societies.

It is in the dynamic tension between intelligent engagement with the everyday and meditative detachment that the path of growth lies. Each should inform the other; a dialogue between meaning and silence in which neither has the last word. Empty headed wall-staring is, ultimately, nothing more than self-indulgence - I would take a stick to anybody so obsessed.

Now get dressed again!

Although, in Western terms, ultimately Heraclitan, the no-self of Buddhism points to the impermanence and transience of all that may be experienced - even the qualia of your sense experience can vary depending on your state of health, or as an effect of taking psycho-active substances; or, for that matter, the impermanence of conciousness it self, which can be turned on or off by accident, as in coma, or by the use of anaesthesia; or can be fractured into the unintelligible kaleidoscope and meaninglessness of dementia.

But it may also get you to dig deeper, to see the whole “you” package as no more than a temporary phase that is to be passed through, perhaps to be replaced by another “you” at some other time or place. This is in part a mind-trick that in Buddhism lends plausibility to the doctrine of re-incarnation - but beware, it is a mind trick. 

So, strip away everything until your Buddha-nature stands naked – but then know that Buddha-nature is also an illusion.

No-mind is in itself just as phantasmal as mind.

Now, having totally undressed yourself and discovered that you are not your cloths, get dressed again.

Some Buddhist Scatterings

How can we be compassionate if we have never known suffering?
How can we help others if we have not known joy?

If we do not radiate joy others do not take light. We are the light in their darkness as they are the light in ours.

Your time is meditation is not an end in itself. Nor is it there just to enrich you.

The tranquillity of detachment is only meaningful in the context of passionate engagement. Passionate engagement is only meaningful against the background of the tranquillity of detachment. Each feeds the other in a virtuous spiral.

Realms of rebirth? Reincarnations? Who's fantasies are these?

Are Prayer and Meditation the same?

Mostly we are caught in the web of the now, neither looking inwards nor outwards, but only at our everyday, our nexus of survival and coping that we take to be the all that there is. However, there are two vast traditions both of which call us away from our addiction with being us, from being obsessed  with being ourselves, being obsessed with our locus operandi, with the stuff of our day-to-day. 

Prayer looks outwards. It is address to something incomprehensibility greater, stronger and more permanent than the frail, mortal, leaf in the wind that we are.To pray is to submit to that oceanic vastness and its forces that encompasses everything we shall ever know and everything that lies beyond what we can ever know. To pray is to know that you are but the smallest dot on the smallest sheet of paper blown across a dessert of unimaginable vastness. To pray it to yield to the all. 

Prayer is often more easy for those who have been broken by life, who, being full of wishes to open their heart and wounds to that ineffableness, to that vastness, find its all encompassing embrace a powerful source to draw what succour they can from; or who, seeking no remission, abandon themselves within it or, at times, seek no more than to know their insignificance and frailty by contrast to its implacableness. 

Meditation looks inwards. It address nothing. It is the turning down of the volume of the self until a point of no-motion is reached and the self and its cares and worries dissolve. There, in the peace that passes all understanding, refuge is found.

Zen in the art of feeling

Emotions are strong, powerful beings; they are bigger than us; they extend out beyond us and fold us into the world; they are the ropes that hold us in place, the glues that bond us together, the thermostats and gauges by which we experience our well-being, or lack of it. Without them we would only be half alive soliptical zombies, or even automatons. What point would there be in life if you never wished to dance with joy? Never knew excitement, anticipation, longing, love, grief, loss or any and all of the other pantheon of emotions? They very much are just such a stuff as life is made out of.

The point is to know them for what they are. To let them be an honest part of your life. To let them flow through you like the natural streams that they are, not to dam them up, divert them, trap them or let them become foetid and stagnant. It is the psycho-dramas that we play that diverts them and which can make them so destructive. (At this point think of R D Lang or of CBT, and such like.)

Imagine your emotions as a wild horse upon which you must ride. You can just cling on, suffer and be carried where they will take you, or master the horse, tame it, make a friend of it, harness its energies and develop a harmonious relationship with it. You care for and nurture your emotions much as you would any other animal which you have. It is a life long companion that will carry you well, even through the heat of battle or on long and perilous journeys. Your emotions are your allies - let them not be your masters.

The point of much meditation is to observe yourself as a rider. This you can only do when you learn to quieten the incessant head chatter, the fleeting psychodramas, the pseudo images of self. Then you can let go of all of that and simply be. Only when you can sit, purposeless and quiet, that can you begin to learn. It is like developing a good seat in ridding so that you sit naturally and balanced and in a harmonious way with your horse. In this case the horse happens to be yourself.

A good rider is a good companion to ride with. A poor rider is a liability, or even a danger, to themselves and to others. They are not fun to ride with. They would be disastrous to undertake a journey with.

Zazen, or Zen style meditation, sometime call whole-hearted sitting, is a counterbalance to action. It is where one learns to sit well on one's own being, so that when faced with action you do not become unseated. It is the schooling ring where you master the seat that will enable you to ride through anything.

Traditionally many Samurai warriors would practice Zen because it gave them the supper clear mind with which they could face whatever their bonds of duty demanded of them. Likewise the taiko drummers practice zazen to give them the clarity of mind needed to perform. Good zazen lead to clear minded, and therefore more effective, living. It is no accident that great art, music, drama, sporting achievement or intellectual attainment all require a clear mind.

More about Penal Substitution

The doctrinal emphasis on the idea of penal substitution that so typifies Western Christianity may date from about 1100 – 1200 CE, that is following the Great Schism of 1054 CE. That schism allowed Western Christianity to develop along different theological lines to the Eastern traditions. The idea of penal substitution does occur before, but is is not doctrinally central. In the Eastern traditions it has never gained much adherence. The schism provided extra impetus for an overhaul of the Western traditions, an impetus that may have started with the Cluniac reforms. Church beliefs and practices were de-Paganised (the period 500 – 1000 CE can be thought as one of Paganistic-Christianity in Western Europe), Marianism was fostered and a much more penitential, lapsarian doctrine espoused.

The Reformation developed the emphasis on penal substitution further, especially in the light of 'original sin' and its lapsarian consequences. This is particularly clear in the works of John Calvin. Modern fundamentalist beliefs seem to be more in tune with Calvin's developments than with the beliefs of the early church or of the traditions of Eastern Christianity.

Traditionally Unitarian thinking (both post-Reformation and Early Christian) denied the divinity of Jesus, seeing him as fully human. The resurrection often being seen as metaphorical and spiritual, not physical. The story of Jesus being seen as a metaphor for all human suffering and its spiritual transcendence, something only fully possible if Jesus was purely human. For Unitarians it was Jesus's humanity, not his substitution, that gave the Passion its special relevance.

Is Unitarianism a somewhat Islamic view of Jesus? Why not? It would not alter one word of the Gospels, simply the way in which you see them. Perhaps it is no accident that modern Unitarianism arose first in Transylvania, an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire and subject to considerable Islamic influence and thought.

Messiahs, canons, penal substitution & the formation of orthodoxies.

Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of the Gospels, may have lived and died sometime during the period 10 BCE to 20 or 30 CE. It was not until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, three centuries later, that an agreed creed confirming the triune interpretation was established, and not until the Synod of Hippo in 393 CE that the biblical cannon of the New Testament was agreed - some three and a half centuries after the events that they purport to record. (Not exactly contemporaneous recording!) During the intervening period many differing interpretations and versions of “the life of Jesus” and its significance competed with each other, ranging from those that identified Jesus as fully divine to those that identified him as fully human, from those who saw the teachings in the light of lapsarian and eschatological thought and those who took them to be more immanentist or gnostic.

It should also be born in mind that the loosing sides in the many disagreements and debates during this formative age would run the risk of being declared 'heretical' and would be in considerable danger. A fact which may have lead to the destruction of many alternative gospels and other writings. In these theological battles of the early church the winner took all and and all evidence of the loser's thought was expurgated.

The writers and subsequent editors and translators of the competing gospels and other writings went to some lengths to tie in the stories they were telling with the Jewish belief in a messiah. There was a need in marrying the two halves of the evolving bible, the Jewish written Old Testament and the new writings of the New Testament – to make the new mesh in with the old. The messiah was the bridge that allowed that linkage to be made.

With regard to the doctrine of penal substitution, it might be interesting and informative to consider the influence of both Zoroastrian and of Pagan belief on its development; Zoroastrian belief being millennial and dualistic and Pagan being sacrificial and resurrectional (the enactment of death to create re-birth and regeneration, often the death and subsequent resurrection of a god or demi-god, or of their human incarnations or substitutes).

Judaism may well be the father of Christianity, but Paganism is the mother and Zoroastrianism its great uncle.