As I see it, there really is no dividing line. Given the uniqueness of each, we are all on some sort of spectrum of Reality. Labels are good as far as they go, but they can deceive us into thinking that some people are totally distinct from others - right into the awful absurdity of the "sheep" and the "goats", the "lost" and "saved" - this then projected onto Eternity, a perpetual division.
I tend to see things from the Buddhist perspective of the Turning Wheel - samsara. Forever turning. There are ups and downs, but fundamentally the wheel keeps turning, even revolution is only that i.e. the revolving of the wheel, but with new winners and new losers. So many Buddhist masters speak of a sideways step - this rather than just treading on the wheel, making it go faster and faster!
In my own Pure Land way, Shinran spoke of the sideways step, but with emphasis on the step "out" being also the step back. The "going forth" is itself the return. This in the Mahayana tradition of samsara = nirvana. Its not a matter of going anywhere, more a seeing with new eyes, a new mind/heart.
Strangely, one beautiful insight into this I found in the writings of David Bentley Hart, an American Christian Eastern Orthodox theologian, when speaking of his knowledge of Buddhist bodhisattvas........
I had even come by then to know quite a lot about the Mahayana Buddhist understanding of bodhisattvas: those fully enlightened saviors who could, if they chose, enter finally into the unconditioned bliss of Nirvana, but who have instead vowed not to do so until all other beings have been gathered in before them, and who therefore, solely out of their superabounding compassion, strive age upon age for the liberation of all from Samsara, the great sea of suffering and ignorance. They even vow to pass through and, if need be, endure the pains of all the many narakas, those horridly numerous and ingeniously terrifying Buddhist hells, in pursuit of the lost. But then, in fact, in a marvelous and radiant inversion of all expectations, it turns out that such compassion is itself already the highest liberation and beatitude, and that, seen in its light, the difference between Samsara and Nirvana simply vanishes.
This is good. I often reflect upon it. Meanwhile the wheel keeps turning.
One quite well known poem keeps coming to mind, this "The Second Coming" by W.B.Yeats. Particularly over the past few days with quite a few posts about "End Times" and "Last Days" and "Doomsday Clocks". Some seem to revel in such themes, apparently rejoicing in the prospect of destruction and despair - this just so long as their own arse is spared........
Anyway, the poem:-
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
So in the turning wheel, samsara, does it matter what the nature of the "rough beast" will be? Whatever it is, will it not be simply another variation on the same sad theme? "Us" and "them", "me" and then the rest.
Well, as usual I am waffling. Conjuring up thoughts as I sit with my coffee in McDonalds.
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