[Before I get into the subject of this blog post, a note about keeping to the subject in comments on my blog posts. I just had to unpublish a comment on my previous post about the need to choose a religion, as the comment was related 100% to a defense of an outrageous action by the Trump administration that I wrote about last night on my Salem Political Snark blog. I'm fine with some mildly off-topic comments, but not those completely unrelated to the subject of a blog post, as that is highly confusing to anyone reading such a comment. What the heck does that have to do with this post?]
To me it's obvious that Buddhism not only doesn't require a belief in God, but is opposed to theism. Yes, there's a religious side to Buddhism. Some Buddhists view the Buddha as possessing miraculous supernatural powers. The Pure Land sect considers that a sort of heaven awaits after a believer dies.
But on the whole, Buddhism is pleasingly God-free. Rarely do I come across references to God in books I've read about Buddhism. This is true of a book by Zen master Henry Shukman, Original Love, that I'm currently reading. However, Shukman fairly frequently refers to soul, which is uncomfortably close to God-talk.
That made me wonder a bit about Shukman's view of the supernatural, given that Zen is so down to earth and here-and-now oriented. Thankfully, I've come across some passages that reassure me about Shukman's non-godly credentials.
This is pretty damn direct.
And the levels of practice -- all they are, in fact, is levels of love. If this whole path of practice were not about love, then it wouldn't be worth it. But at the same time, love has no levels. Once we taste the love, on no matter which level -- mindfulness, support, or absorption -- we are well. We are okay, we are home.
And yet we can abandon ourselves more and more to love. So in another sense, there really are levels. But why love? Does that word indicate that this avowed "atheist" believes in some kind of universal love, also known as "God"?
On the contrary, the discovery of universal interconnectedness as an experience, not an idea, and of an all-inclusive dimension that makes us and all things one -- this is some kind of ultimate love, without any "supreme being" needed. Unless our connection to this love is the supreme being itself.
Now, that last sentence does seem to open the door to God, albeit just a crack. But Shukman goes on to say on the next page:
So, yes, different faces of love. All we have to do is keep opening to them. And a time can come when we cross some kind of hump, turn a corner, or go over a steep slope -- something can happen where the center of gravity of our life tips from being located in the separate, anxious, lonely sense of me, to being more centered in the nameless love whose true face is always this moment just as it is.
Coffee cup. Morning light. Yellow pad. Pen getting a little sluggish, just one shade fainter, just one micrometer thinner in its line, as its reservoir of ink gets a little closer to being used up.
This is it. If you want to meet ultimate reality, encounter the supreme being, here it is. Right here. Right now. Staring you in the face, flooding into your ears, nudging you on every side -- table edge under your elbow, hard bench under your buttocks, warm barrel of pen in your fingers, and the whole spectrum of experience flooding in -- and there is nowhere to flood in from, and nowhere to flood in to.
Instead, there is just this. Boundless. Perfect. Fully realized, fulfilled. Totally accomplished already. You. Your yourself. Forever this.
And Shukman views the non-historical Buddha as inhabiting an imaginal realm that exists within human consciousness, not somewhere in a supernatural dimension of reality.
Religions clearly have archetypal figures -- entities who are said to inhabit an immaterial world, and come forth into intimate consciousness to guide and support their followers. That realm may be thought of as a supernatural place, a "heaven," where holy beings dwell, for example, but can also be construed as finding its home within a zone of the human unconscious that is both personal and transpersonal.
The word Buddha, for example, applies both to a historical figure who taught in northern India twenty-four hundred years ago, and also, especially in traditional Asian contexts, to a figure who dwells in an intermediate imaginal realm, real to its devotees but not flesh and blood, ready to be invoked as an agent of succor at any time or place.
In Christianity there is not only Christ but also Mary, and many saints besides, who occupy a zone equivalent to the mundus imaginalis. The very notion of a "heaven," where the saints, angels, and other divinities dwell, might be another term for the imaginal zone of consciousness.
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