From a dialogue:
"There is one master, the Lord Jesus Christ, the one leader who died, but you find his bones, 'cause he is alive again and is still alive to receive as many as who want to come to him."
I assume you mean you won't find his bones because he is walking around still. If so could you be talking to him now? Would he say the nice pat easy things you want to hear or challenge you to think, to break through surface thinking to deeper wisdom, to reach the state of awareness of the unity of all things, of the truth of what is called God by Christians and Samadhi by Buddhists?
Having done a lifelong study of this religious teaching with it's legendary elements, it's mythic elements, the history of their development and the reality of what they have meant through the ages. I've come to understand that most believers in these things don't really know what they are talking about and their teachers are often worse. They are taught to have faith first and to never think about what that faith actually means or is about. As a result their faith in things they don't have the slightest understanding of leads them to actually have "incorrigable disbelief." That is a kind of death while living. To believe in lies is the worst sin of all. And to believe secretly, inwardly, that one's belief is founded on what others believe -- and oneself might in the dead of night suspect -- are lies -- is to sin grandly. To pretend belief when in fact what one has is unbelief. Better to be "observant" and keep one's promises.
Hmmm, If a person is dead in sin, then how can they be living.
Do you know what it means to be "dead in sin" or to be born again? No I'm not talking about the visceral experience of conversion. I'm talking about the deep thought and psychological insights behind that experience, the universality of it, the reason that true mystics, saints and awakened people have no trouble walking among the varying paths of religion. While those who have turned themselves into zombies, the ones who think they are more alive than others but have a faith that is dead; dead to growth, dead to reason, dead to logic; Those people know the "words" of their faith but they have no heart for spirituality. Their "kindness" is tainted with intolerance. Their belief is counterfeit and thus is in reality unbelief -- anti-belief.
I've been born again several times, though not in the sense you mean it since I was a child. To be a "child again" -- to be open to faith - - is to suspend disbelief, to open the mind, to be open to possibilities. What it is not is to clamp the mind shut with some pre- digested dogma. Breaking that dogma leads to awesome and awful moments when one sees the reality of life in all it's grand incomprehensible drama.
There is awe in punishment too. You can't break "God's Law" -- called by Buddhists dharmas. It is written in time. It operates through what we perceive as time. And we have all the choices in the world -- and pay for every one of them. To sin is to "miss the mark." To not follow the guidances of elders and those who came before them. Those elders sin as well and so we are the blind or half-blind leading the blind until we each wake up a little. Born again, one can challenge the prejudices and stuck attitudes of one's parent's generations, but one had better understand them first.
But you tell me if you understand the general principles of your faith or not. There is only "one master" but many humans who can guide and teach us; wake up to some portion of that master's teachings, channel some portion of that masters message, in effect "incarnate" or "reincarnate" that spiritual message in his flesh. And we are all "incarnations" (in carnal flesh) of something that is complex, grand, and as complex as the universe around us. Thus there are great people who try to help us. These people should be respected as masters and taught from. But that teaching is not complete until we ourselves become the masters of our own minds. And that is the mission of Buddhism.
Jesus did not make himself "God" that was the error of the church hierarchy that reinvented and rewrote Christianity as it passed from mouth to mouth and hand to hand. The church you know is the creation of Constantine, for whom Jesus was synonymous with Apollo and complex God heads were the rule of the day. In that ultimate deification of a teacher, Jesus becomes part of God and is no longer human. Not just because he is defined so, but because he is turned to myth. And once he is turned to myth he is abstract and no longer the same person who might have walked the earth. All this requires reinterpretation and misinterpretation of the Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures -- because for God to become incarnate in human flesh is not a one-time occurance. We all have a drop of the divine in our own fleshly bodies. But to turn a man into a God, is to break the most common of all the laws of the Judeo-Christian/Moslem orbit.
The man "Salvation" died so that others could be saved through his name -- which literally means Salvation (Jeshua means salvation in hebrew). Confusing the figurative meaning of these things with some actual thing that happened in the actual mundane world is to confuse the matter -- he is not of "this world." But of the world to come. If one is saved in one's heart, then one is already mentally and figuratively in that world to come. But if one gets stuck on a superficial understanding or a light-duty faith in the matter, then one is not really saved but just mouthing the words.
Salvation is simply a first step in life. It is an initial enlightenment/awakening. From there the work of making the world really a place where humans can live in peace begins. We have to live awake lives and not simply go back to sleep thinking we've done a good thing when we in fact have done nothing. The teachers all teach that their way is the only way. And it is -- for them.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Hannukah
Posted by cholte at December 10, 2004 06:33 AM