There’s a Buddhist saying: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”
It sounds pretty violent and un-Buddhist, but it means if, in your search for enlightenment, you think you’ve found the Truth, you must kill it, and keep searching. Anyone who claims to know all the answers is not a Buddha. Keep meditating.
As I’ve walked down that road, I’ve gone through phases of strident atheism, secular humanism, mild Buddhism, Unitarian Universalism, spiritual-but-not-religious-ism…. And I’m still seeking. I’m still questioning. {I wrote this post a few months ago about my spiritual journey if you want to catch up. I’ll wait….}
I love words and thinking. Part of why I named this blog “Left Brain Buddha” is because my preferred approach to all things, including all things spiritual, is analytical. Read, think, put it into words {preferably typed, hole-punched, and in a binder} = done!
But it’s so hard to use words when it comes to spirituality. Words are just words, not the actual things they represent. We can’t confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon itself.
Strangely enough, the words I find most comforting right now are the ones that tell me it’s okay if I can’t put this all into words. That, in fact, if I could put it into words, it would be too easy. It’s okay if this is a part of my life where words fail.
To paraphrase an ancient Hindu scripture, I will ask your forgiveness for using the human limitation of language to address THE BIG QUESTIONS {miracles, faith, religion, and the divine} … with more language. The words below are the ones that reassure me that those who seek are not lost.
Kill the Buddha. Keep meditating.
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“All the proofs [for the existence of God] have achieved is to show us that there is nothing in our experience that can tell us what ‘God’ means…. We have simply demonstrated the existence of a mystery.”
Karen Armstrong, The Case for God
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“Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives.”
Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
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“Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts where neither sin nor knowledge could reach, the core of reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the divine. If only they could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more need for war, for hatred, for greed, for cruelty. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”
Christian mystic Thomas Merton
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“There is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.”
Author Storm Jameson
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“I looked in Temples, Churches, and Mosques. I found the Divine in my heart.”
Rumi
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“Faith does not require a belief system, and is not necessarily connected to a deity or God, though it doesn’t deny one…. No matter what we encounter in life, it is faith that enables us to try again, to trust again, to love again. Even in times of immense suffering, it is faith that enables us to relate to the present moment in such a way that we can go on, we can move forward, instead of becoming lost in resignation or despair. Faith links our present-day experience, whether wonderful or terrible, to the underlying pulse of life itself.”
Sharon Salzberg, Faith
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“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science…. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world.”
Albert Einstein
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“The spiritual path is the process of fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life and relaxing our mental and emotional grip on our own place within it…. This kind of spirituality makes it marvelously OK to long for something that we do not fully understand; to be aware of its presence, even if we cannot describe what it is….”
Elizabeth Lesser, The Seeker’s Guide
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“Spirituality is the human search for eternal wisdom. It is not the wisdom itself.”
Elizabeth Lesser, The Seeker’s Guide
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“We are far more than we have ever realized…. [T]he true religious act is to become aware of the stories we are living and to shape those stories through attention…. For we, as conscious beings, are the universe…. We are the divine beings we have been searching to meet.”
Edwin Clark Johnson, The Myth of the Great Secret
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“If an unbeliever could experience the same kind of ecstasy as a Christian mystic, it seemed that transcendence was just something that human beings experienced and that there was nothing supernatural about it.”
Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase
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“The insights of science have enriched many aspects of my own Buddhist worldview…. The extraordinarily detailed picture of the behavior of subatomic particles at the minutest levels imaginable brings home the Buddha’s teaching on the dynamically transient nature of all things. The discovery of the genome all of us share throws into sharp relief the Buddhist view of the fundamental equality of all human beings.”
His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom
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“This earth on which we stand is the promised Lotus Land,
And this very body is the body of the Buddha.”
Hakuin’s “Song in Praise of Zazen”
- A Mindful Approach to New Year’s Resolutions - January 13, 2020
- Just This Next Step - December 16, 2019
- WAIT: A Mindfulness Practice for Waiting in Line - December 9, 2019
