Always a Full Moon
If one seeks understanding with a vacant mind, the moon seems full each and every moment. |
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A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
If one seeks understanding with a vacant mind, the moon seems full each and every moment. |
There's a tension between the part of us that wants to move along at speed, infatuated with our ever-proliferating array of screens and gadgets, and the part of us that deeply hates them, too. There's the part that doesn't want to be bothered with other people's lives and is therefore comfortable with the false proximity that social media affords. But there's also the part that is heartbroken at the loneliness and isolation of the life we are living—the part that requires medication and constant distraction just to endure it. |
Rebirth as a myth or metaphor, which is part of a larger architecture of the mind, asks us to resist the pressure to believe that the future will deliver or redeem us. It reminds us that we are bound to everyone, and that by helping others we discover an unacknowledged, undervalued part of ourselves. |
Just
as our search for an original set of Buddha’s definitive words failed,
and all we were left with were provisional versions, in the same way a
search for the Buddha’s definitive meaning fails too. What we have are
traditions of interpretation. But that’s not the kind of authority we
imagine when we claim sectarian primacy. Sectarian authority claims
assume solid essentialist ground. That type of ground is just not there.
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Most
human beings spend their lives battling with opposing inner forces:
what they think they should do versus what they are doing; how they feel
about themselves versus how they are; whether they think they’re right
and worthy or wrong and unworthy. The separate self is just the
conglomeration of these opposing forces. When the self drops away, inner
division drops away with it.
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