Thirty-one years ago, today, I received the Gohonzon. It was late on a cold and windy afternoon when I finally made the decision. The snow was knee deep. Burned out from acid, poverty, and empty from the insipid trials of my occult practice, I walked five miles down an abandoned railroad track and over a steep hill to the next town to the district house. Each step reconfirmed how screwed up my life was. It was time to emerge from the abyss.
Several days earlier, I had received a letter from my defacto mentor, Dr. Israel Regardie, urging me to receive the Gohonzon. That evening, my new district chief drove 50 miles to Chicago for the conferral ceremony. It was the final days of the traditional February shakubuku campaign. The kaikan was packed with hundreds of young people bursting with energy. The daimoku was electrifying. Looking up at the Joju Gohonzon, I saw a tiger-like power in its image. At that moment, I felt the Buddha’s spirit for the very first time. It is with nostalgia that I recall the feel of the black, plastic beads, the grounding aroma of sandalwood incense, and the hum of the mantra. Caught up in the moment, I vowed to learn all about the practice and take it to the limit. Ripe for the plucking was I.
Now thirty-one years have passed. Life events have not been what I expected. I thought that I would be in love with my spiritual saviors and promoting the SGI way until I dropped dead on my mission like Nichimoku Shonin on his way to remonstrate with the authorities. It was all so dramatic then – like a spiritual soap opera with myriad campaign ups and downs. I never figured that I would become an independent Buddhist, no longer willing to kiss sanctified senior leader ass or be a puppet on a string. Since my departure, no one has been able to answer my questions about core doctrine contradictions. Even though I left the movement, there is abundant appreciation and respect for my friends, peers, and the practice. My feelings about the religious corporation are different, as I’m still trying to pull the knife out of my back.
The milestone of finishing thirty years of practice and the ensuing events has caused me to reflect on the different stages of life we go through in samsara – mostly, not what we expected. We’re born helpless. Our childhood is in many ways the lessons of dominance and submission. As young adults, the fiery sex instinct emerges and we test authority. By our thirties, we seem to be climbing a mountain. Life seems long, yet we don’t realize just how painfully short it is. As successful as our peers might seem, beneath the surface, they are teeming with insecurities and flaws. When the next decade dawns, there is a glimmer of trepidation about the future and our embellished past loses its luster.
When our honest self-reflection becomes too painful, we sometimes turn a blind eye to the Golden Rule. We dismiss karmic cause and effect, figuring that we can handle the effects. Our clouded judgment justifies our actions and the ends we seek. As our senior years begin, it is like the new moon rising over the mountains. We can see the end and we can now better understand what we were. Passing into the twilight of life, we wear our wisdom on our weathered face, our knurled hands, and in the experience of our words.
There is a Japanese saying known as the five stages of man (human growth.) Although harsh to ponder, it has that sardonic ring of truth to it.
At ten, an animal
At twenty, a lunatic
At thirty, a failure
At forty, a fraud
At fifty, a criminal
At sixty, one begins advising friends
At seventy, realizing that everything said has been misunderstood, one keeps quiet and is taken for a sage
At eighty, Confucius said, “I knew my ground and stood firm.”
At 54, I’m a criminal - a thought criminal. On deep reflection, I’m able to see the animal, the lunatic, the failure, the fraud, and the criminal in me although less clearly in others. If it’s a crime to interpret Buddhism as an individuated being and writer, then I’m guilty.
Ghosts? Poppy cock. Horse hockey. Humbug. BS. Nonsense. Childishness. Hallucinations. Illusions of the mind. No such thing. I ain’t afraid of no ghost!
Who doesn’t enjoy a good ghost story? Apparently, there’s been an upsurge of ghost stories making the rounds in the aftermath of the deadly tsunami that struck Asia last December.
Ghost Stories Haunt Disaster Area: Spirits Said to Lurk Along Beaches Where Tsunami StruckRungrawee C. Pinyorat
“Phuket, Thailand – Since the tsunami, taxi driver Wiwat Sakuldee is afraid of the dark and won’t go near the beach. Like many Thais on this resort island, he believes many of the disaster’s victims have become restless spirits who haunt the streets after sunset.
Traditional beliefs and spooky gossip are fueling ghost stories along the Asian coastlines where thousands were swept away. In Indonesia, a student saw a shadowy human shape enter a house, only to find the door locked and no one around. Villiagers in Sri Lanka hear cries for help from the ocean.
Ghost sightings are the talk of the town in the beach resorts of southern Thailand, where some 5,300 people are listed as dead – a third of them foreigners – and 3,144 others are missing.
Wiwat shudders in retelling a story making the rounds about a Phuket driver who recently picked up Western tourists in his tuk-tuk, one of Thailand’s trademark three-wheeled open-air taxis.
“Ten of them got in when the ride started, but there were only two left when it ended at Kata beach,” Wiwat said. “The driver was so scared he ran away.”
Thais don’t necessarily consider ghosts malevolent, but more an unpleasant reminder of death and the possibility that unsettled spirits could lead to bad luck.
In keeping with local Buddhist and Chinese traditions, monks are holding rituals to lay wandering spirits of tsunami victims to rest.” AP
This story interests me on a number of different levels. First, are the people experiencing a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder replete with visual and auditory hallucinations? Secondly, just what are ghosts? Sightings of ghosts abound. They are both ancient and common. What exactly are people experiencing? Thirdly, (please forgive my suspicious mind) has this disaster handed some unscrupulous priests a financial windfall?
I suppose the first question to address is whether ghosts are real or imagined. Skeptics will be quick to deny the existence of ghosts. According to Richard Causton, Nichiren Buddhism does as well – more on that later. From the standpoint of modern physics, the possible existence of ghosts is supported by the first law of thermodynamics in the principle that ordinarily, energy is neither created nor destroyed.
“The first law of thermodynamics states that energy is conserved: it is neither created nor destroyed under normal circumstances. It can be transferred or transformed, but the total amount of energy remains the same.
The second law of thermodynamics states that, with each successive energy transfer or transformation in a system, less energy is available to do the work. Even though the total amount of energy remains the same, the energy’s intensity and usefulness deteriorate. The second law recognizes that the principle of entropy, the tendency of all natural systems to go from a state of order (for example, intense, high quality energy) toward a state of increasing disorder (for example, highly dispersed, low quality energy).
How does the second law of thermodynamics apply to organisms and biological systems? Organisms are highly organized, both structurally and metabolically. Maintaining this organization requires constant care and maintenance and a constant energy supply. Every time a cell loses some energy to do work, some of that energy dissipates or is lost as heat and movement. Thus, in Lindeman’s study, only a portion of the energy in each trophic level is available to create biomass in the next level. If cellular energy supplies are interrupted or depleted, the result - sooner or later - is death.” (Cunningham, W.P. & Cunningham, M.A. (2002). Principles of environmental science: Inquiry and applications, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, p. 25.)
If death is a termination of active energy, what happens to the residual energy from the physical body, the senses, and consciousness? If we accept that all matter is comprised of energy in the form of particles and waves, vibrating at a particular frequency, we must then ask the question of where that residual or transformed energy goes. Life, that mysterious yet very real force that animates the physical body is energy. It has been described as chi, kundalini, prana, and the Holy Spirit to name a few. Religions and all types of spirituality have tried to shake that particular fruit from the Tree of Knowledge for a long time. Two popular ideas are the soul and ghosts. These two ideas are actually rejected by Nichiren Buddhism. The idea of an individual soul is rejected because the individual ceases to exist upon death. Instead, the true entity of life, stripped of ego yet manifesting the dominant life condition created while alive, melts back into the universe. What then, experiences the bardo of the light and the bardo of becoming if there is no self? Such paradoxical contradictions are not easily reconciled with our dualistic thinking. I have addressed this very subject in my book, Modern Buddhist Healing, and will go even further in my new book coming out this September.
When a person dies of old age, their life energy is as weak as battery drained of power. One would not necessarily suspect that the faint, residual energy of their body and being could do much more than fade into the universe to recharge. However, what of vital people, fully charged with life energy, emotion, and attachment that is turned off by sudden death? So-called experts in the paranormal believe that ghosts are the energy remnants of people whose lives were cut short or that had surges of unrequited, negative emotional energy. Others speculate that ghosts are life energies – ghouls of desire, if you will - with powerful attachments to the physical plane that become trapped, wandering aimlessly, unfulfilled, and sometimes not even realizing that they are dead. I am reasonably certain that ghosts are the residual energies of consciousness disbursed at death, like sparks from the main current and the true entity of Alaya Vijnana and Amala Vijnana (karma repository) directly make their sojourn into the light, becoming, and subsequent rebirth.
Of course, this whole subject is in contrast to a statement in the book by Richard Causton, The Buddha in Daily Life. When explaining the Five Components of form, perception, conception, volition and consciousness, he states, “This is one reason why Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism denies the existence of gods, ghosts, and spirits as illusions of the mind, as these beings are supposed to possess consciousness without form.” (p. 140). Somehow, I suspect there are many people with direct- first hand experience that would emphatically disagree.
Based on my own knowledge and experience, Richard Causton’s conclusion is in error. For starters, Buddha never denied or really discussed the existence of gods, he taught people to rely on the dharma. Gods are as real as people who exhibit both ketai physicality and kutai non-substantiality – we just don’t know all the rarified forms of life possible in the universe. Life is very opportunistic. As for the existence of spirits, the occult sciences, shamanism, and especially the hermetic disciplines of ceremonial magick invoke and communicate with ethereal beings as part of their ritual. To state that their practice of working with beings of the astral plane is sheer illusion of the mind is an awful bold statement for someone promoting an invisible Law. Refutation of ghosts as an illusion of the mind seems narrow minded and materialistic considering all the strange occurrences that have been documented. If it is a fact that life can only exist with a physical form as seems to be implied here, what makes Mr. Causton think that the physical form must exist as coarse matter and not some subtle kind? Quantum physics has shown us that elementary particles can take the form of both wave and particle in a seemingly random manner. We’ve learned that something can be in two places simultaneously, and that prayer intention has an energy imprint.
The idea that gods, spirits, and ghosts are figments of the imagination denies the possibility of other dimensions, realms beyond our conception of space-time, and to my reckoning, even consciousness after death. If the self doesn’t survive, what then experiences all the fun or horror we’re supposed to experience. I believe that Mr. Causton is wrong on this one. I guess we’ll all have to wait to know the real truth.
The reason that I so strongly refute such literal – and I might add inept interpretation of the outright denial of such possibilities is millennia of anecdotal testimony, esoteric knowledge, and personal experience. At some point, I will put into writing my occult experiences prior to embracing Buddhism, which frequently put me in the position of communicating with elemental spirits, various deities, and beings on the astral plane. Was it all just an illusion of the mind? Their objective existence was all too real. Some schools of Buddhism propose that this life is all just an illusion like in The Matrix. When Shakyamuni said in the Lotus Sutra, “this three-fold world is not what it appears to be,” he wasn’t kidding.
Never one to bury a good ghost story, I had two experiences with ghosts of note. The first one occurred in 1972 when I was living in the top flat of a large old farmhouse called the Pyott House in Lake-in-the-Hills, Illinois. Several friends and I were on the balcony porch relaxing one hot summer night when we noticed several orbs of light above an entryway below us. They seemed to float in a gravity-defying dance. These balls of luminosity expanded, swirled around, disappeared, reappeared, rose up to the metal banister before us and spread out like a spider web across the length of the porch, and then disappeared. In a moment, the soccer ball sized bubble-like orbs of soft white-golden light would repeat this cycle. Other people dropped in and sat down to watch these strange but beautiful phenomena. In total, about six people witnessed this event. Two people who had lived in the apartment for longer than I had mentioned that they had seen ghost-like figures on numerous occasions. The next day I asked our neighbor if she had ever seen ghosts in her apartment. Both her and her five-year-old daughter had seen ghostly forms on numerous occasions. To them, it wasn’t a big deal because they seemed to be friendly, going about whatever ghosts do, not paying them any heed. The other ghost story, I’ll have to save as I’ve written about it in a new novel.
My prayers go out to those who lost loved ones in the great tsunami. I don’t doubt for a moment that the sudden loss of life created a great dispersal of desperate, fearful energy. My conviction is that the true entity of the deceased are well gone on their spiritual journey toward rebirth and the energy of ghostly remnants will in time fully dissipate into the main stream of life.