Sometimes I like to try to bring things together, to find out just where I stand. But looking at most of what I ramble on about I begin to see that just maybe that is a virtually pointless exercise. What is it that is "coming together" and just who is "standing" there?
The "journey as home" mantra suggests that stopping places are fictions of little consequence. The "teachings of a whole lifetime" ( "lessons" rather than "teachings"?) as an appropriate statement in the moment - for that moment only - has little to say about finding a home to bring it all back to! Everything changes.
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| Andy Warhol |
Yet reading bits and pieces about the likes of Andy Walhol (was anyone else ever like him?) I get this slightly disturbing sense of a life of just one dimension, superficial and totally ethemeral in an unsatisfying way. What is the "ground" that I seem to need? What "base" to leave and return to as and when the days pass?
The zens advise leaping from 100ft poles without a safety net, thus "settling the matter". Well, if the ground below is hard cement it would certainly "settle" something! And so I presume I am not ready. I need that "Hidden Ground of Love", solid, beyond the shifting phenomena. And think again of the parable of the raft, for "crossing over not for grasping" - which suggests a halfway house. Hold tight but not too tight. Live lightly, stay open, don't grasp at anything or identify with it - which is to seek "justification". Reality alone justifies.
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| A leap more to Dookie's liking |
And so onto "God". I have drifted "east", away from personal Gods. Transcendent Beings laying down the Law. When belief in such is considered, the possibility of their "existence", they bring not only the debris of past dogmas and creeds but the baggage of expectation and assumptions, the implication that they offer certainty, happy endings, that they will look after you and that you will come to no harm.
But then, looking around at this often terrible world, there arise more questions than answers. And some of the "answers" offered - of the "fall" of "man", of incarnating Saviours, all "realities" of "time/space" history - no longer seem credible. Not now, in our vast infinite Universe with all its implications.
So rather than "God" I think more of significance. Is there meaning to existence? And do we live in a Chaos or a Cosmos?
Trusting in "significance" sets out no conditions or assumptions, no guarantees, at least not for me. Suffering, evil, do not threaten it. It calls for questions rather than "answers" and offers virtually infinite interest in the world around me.
The word "Love" in the Hidden Ground of Love" makes no suggestion that "all will be well" in any superficial, immediate sense. The word, its reality, can enfold all we can know and experience of this world. In Pure Land Buddhism Amida personifies infinite compassion, infinite wisdom, infinite potential. Which we are asked to share, with Him/Her and all others. Which, as I see it, is not a task, but a gift.
How joyous I am, my heart and mind being rooted in the Buddhaground of the universal Vow, and my thoughts and feelings flowing within the dharma-ocean, which is beyond comprehension! (Shinran)
I remember once on some Forum where another poster spoke of the heart of Reality being "relationship" . Not being too enamoured by my own "eastern" ways of non-dualism and the like, he asked a few questions. I think I waffled on about how as I understood it non-dualism is that "all" is "not two" and not that "all is one". That it is more that the shining sea slips into the dewdrop, rather than that the dewdrop slips into the shining sea. Not sure if he was too impressed but now I just think that true relationship is not between ourselves and a "personal" God, or ourselves and an external Reality, but is between ourselves and others.
This, for me, all involved at that time the "Contact of two liberties" (the heart of true mysticism according to Thomas Merton, the two being our "self" and God) and my own reservations about certain "teachings". Anyway, now I see the "liberties" all around me. Why only "two"? The ten thousand things.
Before I go, a few lines of one of my old poems has begun to jog about. Maybe the talk of suffering. Not sure. But the words were written during the Falklands War. There were newscasts every day. Of new casualties, deaths. Argentinians and British. Some of the newscasts were uplifting, of our own servicemen returning home, landing at the RAF base at Brize Norton, where their families were waiting on the tarmac to greet them. Other newscasts not so much, Argentinian airmen (the "enemy") who had died, of their funeral cortege, their mothers following behind the coffins.
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