Quote:
Originally Posted by Martina
I do not think anyone would disagree that religious leaders who abuse their students/parishioners are not authentic in their religious practice.
I assume you revere the Buddha. Well, he put the Dharma and the Sangha above all else. The Dharma is fairly intellectual. There are texts. There are arguments, which you say you eschew. The Sangha is community, which you said you reject completely. There is no Buddhist philosophy or tradition not based in these three. If you deny the Dharma and the Sangha, what is your path to enlightenment? Do you personally commune with an incarnation of the Buddha? Do you claim to be one?
You don't sound like any kind of Buddhist I've encountered. You can't hate everything and hope for enlightenment.
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LOL@ communing with an incarnation of the Buddha,
I HOPE NOT! lol Nor, god forbid for me to claim anything but being a human
being.
I never said I hated anything or everything. Negation is not about hatred/acceptance. BTW, reincarnation is a just a belief, right? Interior memories could be just genetic memories. Think about that! (grins)
Well, I have the greatest respect for what the Buddha actually said, but no, I am not a Buddhist. Actually, there are accounts that there were 2 of his "followers", perhaps "friends" would be a better word, who listened carefully to what he said and
"went" with him. These accounts also state that they died physically before he did, which is an interesting fact, isn't it?
Regarding Sangha, it is true that, in a way, I have turned my back on what society stands for - the greed, the cruelty, the malice, the violence, the hypocrisy and all the lying, the constant wars that are ongoing even as we speak, all the horrors and the abuse, aggression, the vanity, etc. In modern terms, I have turned my back on the fact of GDP or GNP. I feel that as long as society uses people as a means to an end, that itself is just cause to turn one's back on such a society - for one simple reason: a lack of a sense of the meaningfulness of one's life. And, without a sense of the meaningfulness of one's life, life itself becomes meaningless. (As an aside, do you know, that in Bhutan, they measure life in terms of GNH -
Gross National Happiness? - wonderful, eh?) But that does not mean that I have turned my back on society
per se. There is a big difference between what people think that society "should" stand for, what they attribute to society and that of people just living together. I would not bother to respond here had I turned my back on society.
You asked:
"what is your path to enlightenment?" I think there is no path to enlightenment, in the same way that there is no path to truth - path being a method/technique. You see (or perhaps you don't, Martina), the "I" is the path, and that is
the problem. Everyone has glimpses about truth now and then, especially artists.
I have no hopes (apart from a vague thought that it would be nice to win a lottery - laughs). All hopes always lead to disappointment, despair, and deception. They are opposite sides of the same coin, do you see that? The idea of opposites are an interesting thing to explore...
There is one thing I might add, love has no opposite.