I apologize for my lack of blog production during the last couple months. I sincerely appreciate the push from some of you to get back to it. Focusing on one subject has been a little difficult for me these days. I’ve been thinking about Buddhism, Hinduism, the Crucifixion and some follow on things to do with Revelation.
After a discussion with my 15 year old yesterday, I think I finally have some resolution with Buddhism, so I am going to share some thoughts on that. As you know if you’ve read my previous blogs, I believe that Word of God encompasses much more than the incarnation of the Word we see in the birth of Jesus. I believe that God reveals Himself in the expansion of thought, not in the limiting of the Word to what was written 2000 years ago.
So, with this more inclusive outlook, I can easily fit Hinduism into a form of belief that has been touched by the Word of God. Gandhi pulled off a peaceful revolution through his faith and, in my view, is a huge example of God at work through the belief of a people.
I thought I would find more of this in Buddhism, but it was more of a serious struggle to find the God of my understanding there. I’m going to go off on what appears to be a tangent, but I will tie these next few lines back to this struggle. My daughter told me that sometimes it feels like you can think about some things to the point where you question your own existence. She’s following in some of my own footsteps. Of course, about an hour later, we showed her that we got her a bean bag chair (she’s been wanting one for a while), and she jumped into the big empty box. Yes, still more of my footsteps. Anyway, I told her that philosophers have struggled with this same line of thought for centuries. So, when Descartes came out with the statement, “I think therefore I am,” some found that he had finally pointed out where the foundation for all following thought could stand upon.
Now, as I mentioned to a couple of you, I started the book, Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani, which was written near the beginning of the 20th century, trying to find some common ground between my views and Buddhism. Not very far in, Nishitani criticizes seeing things through the thoughts of the self and blames this viewpoint on Descartes and “I think therefore I am.” He believed that the truth lie in seeing things by way of the Nothingness.
As a member of the Western world, my response was to think that this was ridiculous. A baby cannot look at Nothingness as its worldview. The baby has to figure out how its body works, then how it interacts with things and people. By necessity, humans have to process things through their thoughts. To choose to see things through the Nothingness, you would have to go through an active thought process to make this choice.
Anyway, through some links in conversation I can’t recall, my daughter and I began to discuss heaven. From what she’s heard on the subject, it sounded really boring. I had to agree. I heard one description of heaven as we all sing before the throne of God forever. It sounded more like hell to me. But I told her that there really isn’t a good description of heaven in the Bible. Actually, there is very little said about heaven. The Old Testament says basically nothing on the concept as the Hebrews didn’t actually believe in heaven. The New Testament says very little on the matter and says much more about wanting to avoid hell.
I told her that I believe that we are the bottom of the spiritual universe. Based on our limited knowledge of the physical universe and its complexities, I believe that heaven would be much more complex than our limited physical world. She said that descriptions made heaven sound small. I said that the universe’s size is beyond our actual comprehension and that heaven may expand across it. I said that it would probably be absolutely fascinating to meet creatures from other worlds that are in heaven, because the odds of there being more life out in the universe are almost absolute. Even if only one percent of other star systems had intelligent life, there would still be billions of planets with intelligent life.
And that’s when I finally found a link between my viewpoint and Buddhism. I told you we’d make it back. From what I understand, the Nothingness is something like seeing the vastness of it all. To the Buddhist, the universe is a much colder place and much more impersonal.
So, to me, Buddhism starts with the vastness of the spiritual universe and how insignificant we seem to be in light of this vastness that we cannot truly comprehend while the Western world begins with the thoughts of the individual human and builds from there. We are really at the extreme opposite sides of the same spiritual universe.
Thank you for taking the time to read through my little thought journey. I hope you found something useful in it.
God bless.
Treasure In Heaven 