The Gospel According to Thomas Sheehan

“Simon Peter missed the boat he should have taken and instead signed on as captain of the Titanic. That is, rather than leaving Jesus dead and then going on to live the Kingdom that Jesus had proclaimed, Simon hoped him out of the tomb and identified the Kingdom of God with the prophet who preached it.” That overemphasis on the person of Jesus, he argued, colored everything that came after.(See here)

Sheehan dropped the other shoe in 1986, with the publication of his book The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity. In it he elaborated on what he had sketched out in the New York Review of Books and made explicit his call for a radical shift from believing the right things about Jesus (orthodoxy) to doing the just and merciful things Jesus commanded (orthopraxis).(See here) At the same time he revealed he was no God-is-dead theologian.

The Gospel According to Thomas Sheehan

Did Jesus think he was God? Is the Resurrection a made-up story? A conversation with Loyola’s controversial Christologist.

by Robert McClory

April 20, 1989, Chicago Reader 

Owed and owing nothing

Owed and owing nothing 

. . . . . Last verse only 

In the fresh present

there is only freedom and miracle,

wonder and gratitude,

receiving and giving with joy.

~ ~ Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light is a daily reflection rooted in a contemplative, Creation-centered spirituality, often inspired by my daily walk in the woods. In poems, parables, psalms, thoughts and the odd weather report I hope to invite readers into a spirit of presence, compassion, justice and delight. Though these writings are rooted in the Christian story you’ll hear in them melodies of many traditions. Unfolding Light is for anyone who wants to be a part of God’s healing of the world.

I’m a retired United Methodist pastor. I am trying to be here now.

Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy

Zen aims at the perfection of personhood. To this end, sitting meditation called “za-zen” is employed as a foundational method of prāxis across the different schools of this Buddha-Way—which is not an ideology, but a way of living. Through za-zen the Zen practitioner attempts to embody non-discriminatory wisdom vis-à-vis the meditational experience known as “satori” (enlightenment). A process of discovering wisdom culminates, among other things, in the experiential apprehension of the equality of all thing-events.

Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Navigating My Interfaith Journey

I sometimes think about how I am navigating my participation in the local faith community. I realize that I don't feel a conflict between my faith and my participation in the faith community though I think about it during Sunday morning services. As I listen more and more to the wisdom of Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, in particular Ordinary Mind, it seems that modern Buddhists do not have to reject the essential teachings of Buddhism but refine and do discard some of the unessential trappings. There has been a successful progression up until the modern era. I just don't get that feeling about Christianity. We have this odd collection of books that we treat all the same rather than quoting them in context and with understanding. There seems little agreement on distilling the essential truths or continuing to agree on additional spiritual writings that are worth reading. Faith also became to emphasize believing certain things. Early Christians lived in community and shared all things. They were trying to follow what Jesus had taught them. Gradually Christianity became more organized, hierarchical and institutionalized. Over the years, various groups, monks and nuns especially ,have tried to live out the Christian life that Jesus taught. I haven't found much satisfaction in modern, progressive Christianity in that it seemed they had to really strain to find acceptable elements to form a cohesive religion. I liked what they said but I didn't find a firm foundation. The writers I enjoy the most are the ones that quote Thich Nhat Hanh and other Buddhists or quote some of my favorites Christian authors like Thomas Merton (who had a relationship with Zen Buddhism). So I really don't have a close friend on the same path that I can talk to. It doesn't come up at church either. I've said elsewhere, I'm able to navigate helping people spiritually in the Christian community while actually having quite different fundamental beliefs. I don't want to create doubt for anyone but help people on their spiritual journey. I guess, like some of the Christian writers that I enjoy, one can use the practices of Buddhism to help people. I also like that the Dalai Lama says, "I always recommend that it’s best to keep the religion you were born into." I jokingly think about being on my deathbed and when being assured that I'm going to heaven, replying "I'm not going anywhere." Then trying to explain the zen concepts such as no fixed self.

Suffering and the Personal Need for Religion

In the Buddhist tradition there's this idea that it's important to understand that life is fundamentally about suffering. And once you accept that core truth about life, it opens up the possibility for you to attain specific virtues, like compassion that would enable you to lead a good life. Similarly, in the Christian tradition, one lesson that suffering can provide us is that we are vulnerable creatures, that we need other people, that we're fundamentally interdependent. That insight is a valuable lesson that suffering can teach you.

Healing 2.0: What We Gain from Pain - Hidden Brain 

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But as I read some of the criticism, it struck me that the Hirsi Ali path as she described it is actually unusually legible to atheists, in the sense that it matches well with how a lot of smart secular analysts assume that religions take shape and sustain themselves.

In these assumptions, the personal need for religion reflects the fear of death or the desire for cosmic meaning, while the rise of organized religion mostly reflects the societal need for a unifying moral-metaphysical structure, a shared narrative, a glue to bind a complex society together. 

Where Does Religion Come From? 

By Ross Douthat

New York Times, Nov. 15, 2023

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From its 18th- and 19th-century origins, the project of skeptically deconstructing the New Testament, in search of a “Historical Jesus” distinct from the Christ of faith, has often combined two distinct arguments. First, it has attacked the pious assumption that the Gospels must be factually inerrant, perfectly historical, accurate in every detail and pellucid in the doctrines they imply. Second, it has moved from identifying specific problems in the texts, tensions and apparent contradictions and arguable mistakes, to arguing that all the problems are evidence that the Gospels must have been mostly composed long after the fact, as theological texts rather than historical records, with relatively thin connections to the events that they describe.

A Naïve Reading of the Gospels May Be Just What Christianity Needs

By Ross Douthat

New York Times, April 6, 2023

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In her 2009 book “Enfleshing Freedom,” the theologian M. Shawn Copeland traces Western Christianity’s entanglement with colonization, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Native genocide and other societal evils that find justification in “compromised Christian thinking about the meaning of human being.” Distortions of Scripture aid and abet these sins against our fellow human beings. In Genesis, after Ham sees Noah naked, Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan — falsely identified by later interpreters as a progenitor of Egyptians and other dark-skinned people: “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” The curse of Ham was used for centuries in defenses of slavery — enslavement, so the argument went, was the lot and inheritance of Black people.

Why Do Evil and Suffering Exist? Religion Has One Answer, Literature Another

By Ayana Mathis, Nov. 19, 2023, New York Times

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To have a perspective of practice, where you really just really deeply accept yourself as you are. As a flawed human being. Like the rest of us, like all of us.

The Paradoxical Nature of Suffering talk by Geoff Dawson, December 1, 2022, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

On Not Taking Oneself So Seriously

On Not Taking Oneself So Seriously talk by Geoff Dawson, October 31, 2023, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

Live transcript, not proofed yet

You're throwing all of your energy. Into activity. Whatever it is you're doing in your life, that's playful. And it's contrasted when you do things, you know, resentfully or heart-heartedly. So this this sense of putting oneself completely into whatever it is we do work or play whatever. 

And enthusiastically engaging with other living beings things. Situations, in other words, not Withdrawing. From things out of the sense of fear. 

Um, Willingly thinking and facing challenge as part of the process. Rather than approaching things defensively always aggression. 

Immersing ourselves in activities, unconditionally. 

Um, and not being sort of To participating contingent on the success of the outcome. That's a thing in the process rather than i'm only going to do this if it turns out. Okay. 

Doing it since feeling which means enjoying the whole process, for its own sake. In other words, doing session, doing something each moment of sizing for its own sake. That's the 

Spiritually. She cantazah, not sitting to becoming lighted. 

We're not sitting with any goal in mind which are sitting and that's a sincerity of sitting. And bringing that to everything that we do in our life. 

The body sat for also practiced, you know, approaches life in a relaxed manner. You know, rather than A stress, man. 

Attentive and curious. And in paying attentive and curious, it's like begin his mind, it's not fixated on goals or outcomes. 

Moving forward. To meet everyone. 

Sorry. Moving forward to meeting engage the world. Not holding ourselves back. Um, Because we can't see any self-reward for it in ourselves. 

And embracing whatever it is we encounter pleasant or unpleasant? As part of the journey. These are really all good point in terms of how we Um, 

Apply our practice, not just in session formally. But outside of session informally, which is really the rest of our most of our life. In a way where we we commit to those serious body such for in the preset fails. At the spirit in which we do, it is one of playfulness. To thousand. Did seriousness. 

Let me just finish up. 

My legacy --

What will it be?

Flowers in spring,

The cuckoo in summer,

And the crimson maples

Of autumn...

 

Taigu Ryokan

(1758-1831)

Equanimity

Live transcript, not proofed yet

The title of tonight's talk is equanimity. It follows on from the trilogy I was talking about: greed, hatred, ignorance, or grasping, aversion, and apathy. Basically, equanimity is the absence of grasping, aversion and apathy. That's what it is. People have the idea that you attain something or you gain something through doing practice. But nirvana itself means the absence grasping, aversion, and ignorance. When that's not their aggravating you, then that's a peaceful experience people have. 

It's the whole four-level truths as a medical metaphor. It's like if there's a sickness. Then there's the cause of the sickness which is grasping, aversion and ignorance. Then when you get rid the cause of the illness, you're healthy again. I think Joko actually uses the words in her book, its the enlightenment, its not the gaining of something, it's the absence of something. But this is what it is, the absence of.

Some people have the idea that equanimity is a state of mind. And then they're trying to hold on to the state of mind. So there's times when we have a peaceful state of mind and might be  a particular meditations we have or retreats we have, where we have a state of mind. And that's fine, but then your circumstances change and you come out of meditation. You come home and your adolescent daughter is angry at you, you know, whatever it might be. And then you've got to deal with a crisis so where's your piece of mind? Damn it up, I've created this piece of mind now i've gone on home and it's gone, you know, and we're angry about it. 

So clinging to states of mind is not what what it is and people neurobiologically think it's the creation of these endorphins which calm you. Well, yes, you do create those when the meditate and particularly on the retreat, you do. It lends  itself to a state of samadhi, right? But samadhi in itself is not equanimity, if you're holding on to it. 

Equanimity is that dissolving of the grasping, aversion and apathy dynamic in the mind.

Equanimity talk by Geoff Dawson, October 31, 2023, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

By Bowing We Are Giving Up Ourselves

After zazen we bow to the floor nine times. By bowing we are giving up ourselves. To give up ourselves means to give up our dualistic ideas. So there is no difference between zazen practice and bowing. Usually to bow means to pay our respects to something which is more worthy of respect than ourselves. But when you bow to Buddha you should have no idea of Buddha, you just become one with Buddha, you are already Buddha himself. When you become one with Buddha, one with everything that exists, you find the true meaning of being. When you forget all your dualistic ideas, everything becomes your teacher, and everything can be the object of worship.

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If you do not have a firm conviction of big mind in your practice, your bow will be dualistic. When you are just yourself, you bow to yourself in its true sense, and you are one with everything. Only when you are you yourself can you bow to everything in its true sense. Bowing is a very serious practice. You should be prepared to bow even in your last moment; when you cannot do anything except bow, you should do it. This kind of conviction is necessary. Bow with this spirit and all the precepts, all the teachings are yours, and you will posess everything within your big mind.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, “Bowing” passage from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

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Some Buddhists bow more than others; I happen to bow a lot. It’s a central part of practice, a way to embody respect, humility and love — a way of saying “yes” — even as we face the mysteries of existence. The Zen teacher Dogen said that “As long as there is true bowing, the Way of the Buddha will not deteriorate.”

Every morning before I do anything else, and every evening before I retire, I bow before the Butsudan, or altar. It is a way to take refuge and remind myself that no matter how well or how badly the day goes or has gone, the ground of my being in this transient life is a source of compassion, creativity, and connection. It reminds me that my self-worth is not based on what happens or doesn’t happen, what I do or don’t do, what I have or don’t have.

Bowing is a mindful movement that brings physicality into our practice. In my ministry, bowing before people is a way to embody the fact that we are interconnected and reminds me to see the face of the Buddha in those that I serve, moving me beyond the boundaries of my personal limitations.

“Why do Buddhists bow so much?”

By Tony Stultz| July 10, 2017, Lion's Roar

Remaining in Community

My theology has not moved me away from the Christian congregation that I am part of. I realized how important this is as I continually think about how different my understanding of reality is from mainstream Christianity.  I see parts of Christianity moving towards an understanding of the world similar to modern American Buddhism. (While other segments are regressing.) Yesterday the pastor said something like everyone is deserving is the heart of Christianity in her sermon. In the Confirmation class she said how difficult it is to talk about hell and what it means. The negative aspects of Christianity theology are difficult. With the positive, it is easy to call it a "mystery" which also doesn't answer the issue straight on. While I still have an interest in Christian theology, I am inspired and find guidance for my life from Buddhist authors.

Community is important in Buddhism. "...mindfulness can offer more than [a tool for self-betterment], 'giving people the chance to 'look outside themselves,' deepening their sense of place within nature and interconnectedness with their community.'" While I have had limited and brief experiences with sanghas, my main community continues to be the church I have attended for years. I am not anti-christianity as much of it is about community and faith, not theology. In a journal entry, I have the Dali Lama roughly quoted as "Stick with the religion we were born. Share but implement within your own tradition - egotism when you switch is worse. Just because you didn't find it, doesn't mean it isn't there. Stay with one tradition if you are able." 

Leading an adult Bible study was interesting a while ago as I learned about Buddhism while studying for the study each week. I just served as a mentor for a confirmand who appreciated what I shared so my faith was compatible even if my underlying understanding of reality different. I like the organization of Buddhist Path with reflections, meditations, and spiritual exercises. Even with underlying differences, Buddhists share many practices and some things are just a matter of emphasis. I found it interesting in Confirmation class how Methodism has similar organization with three simple rules, types of grace and the quadrilateral.

The self is a centre of narrative gravity

Dennett describes the latter as “mysterians” – that is, people who believe that beyond scientific explanation there are something called “qualia”, namely, introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.

We are not brains in vats but essentially embodied.

But there is no cinema, no screen and no self for Dennett: rather our brains and bodies are machines that process information and the self is not a locatable entity but what he calls “a centre of narrative gravity”, a story we tell ourselves about our experiences. Or rather, stories: we continually revise our narratives about our experiences as more data is processed.

I’ve Been Thinking by Daniel C Dennett – an engaging, vexing memoir with a humility bypass

The veteran US philosopher renowned for his theories of consciousness is an intriguing figure but too prone to ‘professorial preening’

Review by Stuart Jeffries

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They struggle with different versions of it and they end up with something like a theory, not of consciousness but of television, where there's a little screen in the head where the movie plays and they're quite content that that's going to be all material. But it's the place in your brain where it all comes together and all the content is displayed for an inner witness of sorts. I call that the Cartesian theater. And its material, they're very clear they don't want to be dualists. But they still think they can have the theater and that's a mistake too and it has lots of further implications that tie people in knots like qualia, the so-called intrinsic properties, Qualia are the intrinsic properties of what you see in the Cartesian theater. No, no, no. There's no Cartesian theater and since there's no Cartesian theater, there's no room for qualia. You just think there's room for qualia. That is you think that you are directly apprehending special ineffable properties. The smell of the rose, the pain in your leg, and that these are very special things that defy science and functionalism in particular, and we may have to have a revolution in physics to make sense of it and that's just an advanced case of still wanting to have the ghost in the machine. 

But amazingly to me, I was just thinking about this today. Somebody who unlocked the door on this many, many years ago was Jack Smart, JJC Smart, Australian philosopher of mind. He pointed out that it's easy, relatively, to make a machine, a mechanism that will say, sort oranges or sort things that are shaped like a cube or you can make automatic sorters that key on some factor. 

And the point is, the machine doesn't have to know what it's sorting or why. It's just has to be a good sorter. And what we have in our brains is lots and lots and lots of good sorters. And we think we know, what they're sorting. All the blue things, all red things, all the painful things. All the things that smell like coffee. But we don't know what's actually going on in those sorters to put it sort of comically, we have underprivileged access to the properties of our own mental states. We know their content but we don't know their properties. We have no privilege access to where all of this has happened. If some evil scientist were to remove your brain and put it in your chest and stuff your heart and your kidneys up in your between your ears. Still think you were thinking with your mind, which is up behind your eyes and between your ears. You don't know where your brain is except by hearsay. You don't know where your thoughts are. So we're remarkably unknowledgeable about the machinery that makes our consciousness possible. But that doesn't stop us from being bold theorists about what's going on. And boy, do people make mistakes. They think they have much more direct and irrefutable knowledge of what's going on in their heads than they do. They know what they think. But they don't know what that thinking is constituted of. They aren't even completely authoritative about what they think. Descartes was wrong about that too. 

Free will, consciousness and AI: a conversation with Daniel Dennett: Radio national at the ABC. You're in the philosopher zone where we have a discussion this week between journalist, Dan Faulk, and philosopher. Daniel Dennett, who's the author of a long string of books including his latest, which is a memoir titled, I've Been Thinking.

“Christianity has also proven to be more pliant than principled.”

One of Jones’s boldest suggestions is to locate the “roots” of American racism not in 1619 or other defining moments in the history of American slavery, but much further back, within religious practices developed in the aftermath of the Columbian Encounter. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued an edict praising Columbus for extending European dominion to lands “not previously possessed by any Christian owner.” The declaration was part of what became known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” an enduring if amorphously defined set of proclamations and legalistic rituals created in the late 15th century to validate European appropriation of the territories of the Western Hemisphere and justify colonization...

Tracing the Origins of American Racism as a Path to Healing

In “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy,” Robert P. Jones explores the harmful legacy of a 15th-century Christian doctrine used to justify expansion and colonization in the New World.

Ned Blackhawk, September 2023, New York Times 

(Author of THE REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.)

Jesus as a Teacher of Wisdom

After nearly ten years of work, the results of their efforts are soon to be published as the Critical Edition of Q. The "recovery" of the Q gospel has stimulated a debate about the nature early Christian communities, and by extension, the origins of Christianity itself. One scholar, Burton Mack, has advanced a radical thesis: that at least some Christian communities did not see Jesus as a Messiah; they saw him as a teacher of wisdom, a man who tried to teach others how to live. For them, Jesus was not divine, but fully human. These first followers of Jesus differed from other Christians whose ritual and practice was centered on the death and the resurrection of Jesus. Their did not emerge as the "winners" of history; perhaps because the maintaining the faith required the existence of a story that included not only the life of Jesus but also his Passion.

More About Q and the Gospel of Thomas

An accidental discovery in Egypt seems to confirm the existence of the 'lost' gospel of Q.

by Marilyn Mellowes, 

Frontline, From Jesus to Christ 

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The Lost Gospel, a collection of sayings known only as Q which stands for "Quelle," the German word for source. Many scholars are convinced that such a document once circulated in early Christian communities. There are about 235 verses in Matthew that are paralleled in Luke but not in Mark or John. The most popular view among biblical scholars is that Matthew and Luke both drew upon two main sources in writing their Gospels—Mark and Q. This is known as the “two-source hypothesis.”

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I find it quite interesting that very early on the sayings of Jesus were considered important enough to collect. We have a sampling in the canonical gospels and other books such as the gospel of Thomas. Further, Peter did not claim that Jesus of Nazareth was God. He "was a man commended to you by God by the miracles and portents and signs that God worked through him when he was among you." The belief that Christianity was compatible with what we now call paganism helped Christianity spread through the Roman Empire. Although some Christians argued there was only one god and Christians shouldn’t worship any others, this wasn't how many people in the Roman Empire understood Christianity at the time, says Edward Watts, a history professor at the University of California San Diego and author of The Final Pagan Generation: Rome's Unexpected Path to Christianity. After awhile, the view that Christians ritual and practice should be centered on the death and the resurrection of Jesus won out.

Last Sunday, we ended a prayer with the words "Inspire us to be the kind and compassionate presence needed in this world." It seems that this has not been incorporated into our rituals. It seems almost entirely absent from the creeds and the Lord's prayer. We sing so many hymns with questionable theology. My understanding is that theologians tried to keep the worst of them out of our hymnal. Our pastor was preaching on a particular popular hymn and talked about she struggles with the words of many hymns. Even though she has conflicted feelings, she respects the history of how this was meaningful and came about in the life of that particular person. She went on to say how as a young pastor, she has so many friends that are no longer believers because it's common to talk about how its God's fault, when these terrible things happen in our lives. She said well God doesn't choose who will die but that "God suffered is key to me." She tells them "they should immerse themselves in God and be embraced rather than blaming God." We don't know why the world around us is suffering, but we should "be more gracious and exude kindness. We should lean in rather than run away." This is where God talk really fails me so I would rather just not talk about God. This is also where I find Buddhism to be so practical. Rather than having mysteries as the explanation for what happens in life, Buddhism has "a way of knowledge that leads to liberation from suffering. The awakening in which it culminates is both a wisdom based on an accurate understanding of reality and a freedom from the disturbing emotions and obscurations caused by ignorance." 

Meditation is more than either stress relief or enlightenment

....meditation is about deep transformations in the ordinary ways that consciousness operates, developing altered traits rather than merely altered states.....

If the ordinary egoic sense of consciousness evolved for environments where a constant hum of fight or flight mentality helped keep us alive, advanced meditation may offer a way of reprogramming some of these inherited tendencies that no longer serve us in our comparatively new evolutionary environments, like discarding clothes that no longer fit.

“There was this initial focus on meditation as attention and emotional regulation practices,” said Ruben Laukkonen, an assistant professor at Southern Cross University. “But over time, there’s been a recognition that in contemplative traditions, that’s not really the goal. These are side effects. When you talk to people who really take this stuff seriously, you find that there’s these layers of experience that unfold that are much deeper.”

In a 2021 paper, Laukkonen and his colleague Heleen Slagter suggested that one way to think about the depth of meditation is the degree to which the mind is engaged in abstractions or conceptual thought. They describe meditation as a process of deconstructing engrained habits of mind “until all conceptual processing falls away, unveiling a state of pure awareness.”

The idea of meditation as a means of awakening flared up and then began fading out along with the counterculture itself. The hippies’ rejection of the soulless, sexless mainstream failed to build an alternative that could last, leaving their gusto for higher levels of consciousness adrift, sailing out to the cultural fringes

Kabat-Zinn authored a few studies on MBSR in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that mindfulness research really took off. At the 2005 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, the Dalai Lama told a crowd of 14,000 conference participants that Buddhism and cognitive science share deep similarities. “I believe a close cooperation between these two investigative traditions can truly contribute toward expanding the human understanding of the complex world of inner subjective experience that we call the mind,” he said.

Daniel Ingram, a former emergency room physician and author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, cautioned, “there’s basically a long, slow trainwreck happening between people getting into these experiences and the clinical mainstream just not understanding them.”

While very rare, these can range from anxiety spikes to psychotic breaks. Young told a meditation student about “falling into the Pit of the Void,” one of the ways Buddhist tradition describes how intense experiences can go wrong. Until the professor of psychiatry Willoughby Britton’s research on adverse meditation experiences, or “dark nights of the soul” (later rebranded as the varieties of contemplative experience study), there was little clinical support for those suffering from negative meditation experiences.

Meditation is more than either stress relief or enlightenment

Exploring the wider range of meditation is no longer reserved for the monasteries. The new science of meditation is just getting started.

By Oshan Jarow Aug 22, 2023 Vox

Christian Theology and Reverence for the Body

Barbara Brown Taylor:

When I compare the teaching of World Religions, which was full of practices, dance and music, and body decoration and mandalas, and going from that to Intro to Christian Theology, it was like going from a festival to a cemetery, in terms of where the body just vanished. It all went up into the head to figure out whether our ontology fit with our eschatology and whether our doxologies were adequate. It was a big challenge for me to either stop using the language or find a way to put skin and flesh on the language. And I’ve kept that through the years. I’m a champion of body language when speaking of the holy, which for some people is counterintuitive, because they’ve been taught the body has nothing to do with what is holy. But I beg to differ.

Tippett:

Yes, you wrote about the Christian reverence for the body: “the neighbor’s body, the leper’s body, the orphan’s body, the Christ’s body — the clear charge to care for the incarnate soul.”

Taylor:

And these days, more and more for the body of the tree and the body of the mountain and the body of the river.

On Being with Krista Tippett - April 26, 2023

Barbara Brown Taylor

“This Hunger for Holiness”

Mindfulness Without Community Isn't Enough

According to the researchers, mindfulness can actually be a powerful tool for the crises we collectively face in the world: climate change, the rising cost of living, and violence, just to name a few. And the benefits of mindfulness, they add, have never been more important, "in terms of reducing suffering, increasing connection, and cultivating compassion."

Mindfulness Without Community Isn't Enough, New Research Suggests

Author: Sarah Regan August 17, 2023

Closure, Acceptance, and Letting Go.

You may remember Thich Nhat Hanh words from that sutra we recite, Please Call Me by My True Names. I can't remember the exact words, but something about my joy is overflowing and my suffering is like a river of tears. So it's the nature of life, if we've developed an empathic connection with everything, then our life has a kind of joy to it but it doesn't ignore and it doesn't lose an empathy for the experience of suffering, that either we experience or other people experience in life. But it's kind of like it's okay; that's just the rich experience of being a human being. 

Closure, Acceptance, and Letting Go (Grief), by Geoff Dawson, August 10, 2023, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

Matthieu Ricard: Three Rules for Life

“Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?” I said: “First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.” I’m happy to feel I am on the right track. I cannot imagine feeling hate or wanting someone to suffer.

The ‘World’s Happiest Man’ Shares His Three Rules for Life By David Marchese, August 11, 2023, New York Times Magazine 

See Sacredness in the Everyday

Rachel Martin: To see sacredness in the everyday means purging yourself of cynicism, doesn't it? Which is sort of the social currency of the moment, it seems.

Rainn Wilson: Yeah. I was fortunate as an actor to study with the great acting teacher, André Gregory, the focus of the movie, My Dinner With André, and he would meet with the students. And I had tea with him once, and he said, "How are you doing, Rainn?" And I said, "You know, André, I'm just feeling so cynical. I'm feeling pessimistic. The world is a pile of crap, and it's getting worse." And I'll never forget this experience. He grabbed my arm like a vise, and he looked into my eyes and he said, "Stop it. Don't do it. Don't be cynical. Everything wants you to be cynical. Everything out there in the world wants you to be pessimistic. If you're cynical, they win. You have to keep hope alive."

And that was transformative. And I walked out into the West Village, out of his apartment, and I really saw the world in a different way and realized that fostering hope and fostering joy in others is maybe our highest spiritual calling that we can do. We have to keep hope alive that we can transform ourselves, that we can transform the planet. And that is a key pillar to the spiritual revolution.

Why 'the guy' from The Office wants a spiritual revolution

August 13, 2023

Rachel Martin, NPR

Love, not Atonement

Today I was reminded what it means to be a Christian. I was looking through my Pocket account that I had a long time ago and that have recently started to use again rather than Evernote to save interesting articles. I found a 2015 article by Marcus Borg, Why Be Christian?  It is a great read and also reminded me about how to simply explain the Christianity that I practice. Just this last January, 2023, I saved a reflection by Richard Rohr called Love, not Atonement which I blogged about here. I did a web search and found a talk called Transaction or Transformation? and linked it in the blog post also. Recently, I transcribed Geoff Dawson on  Attachment, Detachment, Non-attachment in which he concludes ...you cultivate love and compassion and joy and equanimity. A sermon of Jane Johnson I copied along with Richard Rohr has a similar conclusion.

I often think about what I would say about myself as a Christian when asked in detail. Lately I was having trouble explaining to myself why I practice Zen Buddhism and consider myself a Christian. The discovery I have described reminded me what it means in both the view of Jesus's life and the community that we can be a part of. I sometimes feel very alone in my belief, but I'm determined to consider myself and remain a member of the Christian community, specifically my local church. Marcus Borg is especially helpful here when he says, Even though I think one can be an individual seeker, that's like going out and hunting for food when there's a banquet set right in front of you.  I am convinced also that my two seemingly different faith communities are consistent in the modern form that attracts me: love, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

Restoring Nature

Historian Steven Ambrose once said: “In the 19th century, we devoted our best minds to exploring nature. In the 20th century, we devoted ourselves to controlling and harnessing it. In the 21st century, we must devote ourselves to restoring it.”

Early Christians Idea of Hell

That’s not exactly how early Christians used the idea of hell, said Meghan Henning, an associate professor of Christian origins at the University of Dayton. Those early Christians — inspired by the horror of Roman jails — created images of hell and punishment to motivate people to do the right thing in this life.

Fear of hell, she said, was used to motivate people to care for the poor or to live out the virtues of the Sermon on the Mount. That’s distinctly different from how the fear of hell is used today, she said — where failing to care for the poor is not one of the prime sins Americans care about.

Meghan Henning, the author of “Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature,”  looks at early Christian ideas about the afterlife,

As organized religion falters, the devil falls on hard times

As faith in God fails, so does belief in the devil. And that may have consequences.

By Bob Smietana

July 31, 2023 Washington Post

Attachment, Detachment, Non-attachment

The theme I'd like to speak about tonight is about attachment, detachment, and non-attachment; and sometimes its misunderstandings around what these words mean and what the nature of practice is. But as many of you probably read or/and experienced; in Buddhism, attachment is seen as being the source of our dissatisfaction and suffering in life. So we grasp after the things we want and we avoid the things we don't like and we hold on to the things that we think are going to make us happy in life. And it's the actual holding on that creates the problem, it's a kind of resistance to life because life (don't have to read it in a book, you just have to experience it) life is changing all the time, life is impermanent transient, everything is in flux. So if we try to hold on to something and make it a thing and make it your possession, whether it's a thought, or an idea, or a thing, or a person, try to hold on to it, you're out of step with the nature of life. 

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What we need to keep in mind is the whole point of doing this practice, where you you break out of being caught in the self-centered dream, is that you cultivate love and compassion and joy and equanimity.

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So, remember that your practice is about forgetting the self and throwing yourself into life. You know, throwing yourself into the stream of life and into the relationship of life. It is not about keeping yourself separate from them.

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Attachment, Detachment, Non-attachment, talk by Geoff Dawson, June 20, 2023, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

No Fixed States of Mind

It was a turning point which came when I read one of Alan Watts books called the wisdom of insecurity. And there was a certain point in the book where he quoted a popular Christian Sunday school song which said, build your house upon the rock and not upon the sand. But he said there's no Rock to build on, life is not like a rock, it's like a stream or it's like sand. There's nothing solid to build on. Everythings in flux all of the time. And when I read those words, it was a turning point. That's when I look back on it is led to me taking up zen as practice.

No Fixed States of Mind, talk by Geoff Dawson, June 13, 2023, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

The Endowment Effect

Chimpanzees also display some of the same quirks that humans do. Behavioral economists have long found that humans, quite irrationally, tend to value an object more after they have gained possession of it. For example, we might think a coffee mug is worth only $5 when we buy it at the store. Then, after we buy it, we value it more. Someone could offer us like $8 or $9 for it. But, we're like, "No way! This is my precious mug!" From a purely rational economic perspective, this behavior doesn't make sense.

Richard Thaler, a founder of behavioral economics, called this tendency to value things in our possession more "the endowment effect." He connected it to a broader human quirk, which is called loss aversion. The basic idea is that we experience more pain from losing something than pleasure from gaining that exact same thing. We see this behavior everywhere, whether it's our romantic relationships or our consumer decisions. You may sort of like getting something, but you'll really hate losing it!

Chimp Empire and the economics of chimpanzees

June 6, 2023 NPR.

Greg Rosalsky

Mindfulness meditation definition

Mindfulness meditation is a non-religious mental practice rooted in Buddhism that teaches individuals to focus their attention on the present moment, using curiosity, acceptance, and openness. Mindfulness is the quality of being self-aware of the current experience, including thoughts, emotions, and sensations, without judgment, filters, or expectations. It involves two key components: orientation to experience and self-regulation of attention.

Engaging in mindfulness meditation for as little as 10 minutes may boost cognitive capacity

by Laura Staloch April 10, 2023 Psypost

First Practice Principle

Caught in the self centered dream

Only suffering.

Holding to self-centered thoughts

Exactly the dream.

Each moment, life as it is,

The only teacher.

Being just this moment

Compassion's way.

Caught in the self centered dream, only suffering. Holding to self-centered thoughts, exactly the dream. You see, these are the words that we use in the Ordinary Mind Center and you'll find other words in Zen and Buddhism which reflect the same view. Those practice principles really follow the four noble truths. They're just a sort of modern way of rewording them. There's suffering. There's a cause of suffering. There's an end of suffering. There's a path that leads to the end of suffering.

Melting the frozen block of emotion thought, talk by Geoff Dawson, March 22, 2023, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

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In his first teaching, the Buddha spoke of what is known as the "four noble truths": the truth of suffering that inexorably permeates the world conditioned by ignorance; the truth of the cause of suffering - mental confusion, negative emotions and actions with their inevitable results (or karma); the truth of cessation, which is the possibility of putting an end to suffering; and the truth of the path that leads to that cessation. "Suffering" is a broad term that includes all forms of dissatisfaction and painful experiences such as birth, aging, sickness, and death, being confronted with enemies, losing loved ones, and so on. 

Chapter 4, The Inherent Unsatisfactoryness of the World Conditioned by Ignorance from On the Path to Enlightenment: Heart Advice from the Great Tibetan Masters by Matthieu Ricard

God as the ground of being

Thich Nhat Hanh equates “nirvana” and “God” and “ground of being” when he says: 

God as the ground of being cannot be conceived of. Nirvana also cannot be conceived of. If we are aware when we use the word ‘nirvana’ or the word ‘God’ that we are talking about the ground of being there is no danger in using these words.  

For Thich Nhat Hanh, “ground of being” is the deepest expression of the reality of divinity.

Eckhart, Thich Nhat Hanh, Hildegard on God as Ground of Being

BY MATTHEW FOX

MARCH 22, 2023

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The phrase ‘the Ground of Being’ came to the attention of a number of people owing to the fact that John Robinson, then the Bishop of Woolwich, used it in his Honest to God (London, 1964) as a way of speaking of a God who is not ‘up there’ or ‘out there’. ‘Ground’ in ordinary speech certainly suggests something ‘down there’, though ‘down’ is of course as much a spatial metaphor as ‘up’. But the metaphor also seems to offer a way of talking about ‘Being’ as something in which we are somehow ‘grounded’ without having to imagine ‘a Being’ apart from the world. Paul Tillich was the philosophical theologian to whom Robinson was indebted for this way of thinking.

Emmet, D. (1998). ‘The Ground Of Being’. In: Outward Forms, Inner Springs. Palgrave Macmillan, London.

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For Tillich, God is being-itself, not a being among other beings. To describe the relationship between being-itself and finite beings, Tillich takes the word, "ground."

Being and God in Paul Tillich (1886-1965): Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology

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I find the common understanding of God to be problematic. Christian theology has to go through all kinds of contortions to explain evil in the world. With God not being a basis of their worldview, Buddhists don't have as much of a problem. A friend said offhandedly in a group that Buddhists says life is suffering. I find that a distortion as the noble truth acknowledges that there is suffering and how to resolve it. That is so much better than original sin and thinking there is a division of good and evil rather than that we are all capable of evil.

Awakened I hear the one true thing

This slowly drifting cloud is pitiful;

What dream-walkers people become.

Awakened I hear the one true thing--

Black rain on the roof of Fukakusa Temple

Dogen (1200-1253)

I think many of you are familiar by now with Dogen's declaration and again Joko on that to study the Buddha way is to study the self again. How. The word study in Japanese Benkyō language is no real, which means to become intimate with Become intimate with like how the household chores that are done mindfully, you know, when we make cookies or clean, garden repair a fence or sit quietly. Studying the self is not studying some idea of yourself as an object, its to become intimate with yourself through all of your actions throughout the day. The more we become intimate with ourselves, the more we become intimate with the most fundamental of our afflictions. The Affliction of ignorance by which we split the world into a billion pieces, me and everything else.

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Buddhism's three essentials: 

meditation and serenity that is cultivated (dhyana), 

wisdom or insight (prajna), and 

morality or precepts or ethics (shila)

This the three-legged stool of practice as found in the eight-fold path

Description of Buddhism by Mattieu Ricard

Buddhism is essentially a way of knowledge that leads to liberation from suffering. The awakening in which it culminates is both a wisdom based on an accurate understanding of reality and a freedom from the disturbing emotions and obscurations caused by ignorance. The practice of Buddhism does not require us to give up what is good in our life, but to abandon the causes of suffering, to which we are often attached to the point of addiction. So studying the Buddhist teachings does not mean overloading the mind with a lot of information. We just need to master the specific knowledge that will enable us to get free from samsara, the cycle of lies conditioned by ignorance and pain. 

The Buddhist path is structured so that it takes into account the gradual process of inner transformation. Each step leads naturally to the next. ... Certain factors will help this transformation. The most important is to realize that one already possesses the potential for transformation, would Buddhism calls "buddha-nature" or literally "the embryo of buddhahood." Then comes the inspiration aroused by meeting on authentic spiritual master, followed by an enthusiastic determination to cultivate altruism, compassion, and the other essential qualities that the master exemplifies, and finally the perseverance that is indispensable to achieve any real change. Page 1

.......

The answer that Buddhism provides is that our human life is extremely precious; the disillusionment that comes over us at times does not mean that life is not worth living. However, we have not yet clearly identified what it is that makes life meaningful. 

"The question is not whether life has meaning, but how each of us can give it one," says the Dalai Lama. Our extremely precious existence is even more so when we enjoy all our physical and mental faculties, have the freedom to choose what we do, and use those conditions to release the potential for transformation that is within us. Time is running out. Accidents, sickness, and, inevitably, death can occur without warning. Hence there is an emphasis on diligence. Page 2

Introduction to On the Path to Enlightenment by Mattieu Ricard

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Altruistic love and compassion are the heart of Buddhist practice. They are considered to be the "essence of the great vehicle," the "path traveled by all the Buddhas of past and present, and which will be traveled by all Buddhas of the future," the method "which alone is sufficient, and without which nothing can be accomplished." In the Buddhist sense, altruistic love is defined as "the wish that all beings may find happiness and the causes of happiness," and compassion as "the wish that all beings may be free from suffering and the causes of suffering."

Chapter 7, Altruistic Love and Compassion

Page 77

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Focusing on all sentient beings, practice the four boundless qualities: love, which is the wish that they be happy; compassion, the wish they be free from suffering; sympathetic joy, which is to feel happy when they are happy; and impartiality, which is to treat them impartially as equals, without attachment or aversion.

By Kangyur Rinpoche

Chapter 7, Altruistic Love and Compassion

Page 85

If we compare the altruistic desire to attain enlightenment for the good of all to the wish to go on a journey, the journey itself would be the practice of the six transcendent virtues - generosity, discipline, patience, joyous effort, concentration, and wisdom - that will perfectly accomplish the double acquisition of merit and wisdom. Those virtues can only really be called "transcendent" if they are practiced with the understanding that the three aspects of whatever one does - the subject, object, and the action itself - are empty of intrinsic reality. In other words, the first five virtues become truly transcendent in so far as they are impregnated with the sixth, wisdom. Transcendent generosity, for example, is not just the act of giving, but a natural expression of freedom from the notions of "I" and "mine". It then performs the dual function of relieving the immediate suffering of those in need and contributing to the enlightenment of those who practice it. That enlightenment is the ultimate remedy for suffering. 

The Six Perfections or Transcendent Virtues chapter 8, page 105

Transaction or Transformation?

Paul is the bridge in interpreting Jesus. Good Jew so knew of scapegoat. Start fresh, ritual, often bloodshed as blood represented life. Thousand years old theology, every religion is unfinished. All predicated on transaction, quid pro quo; transformation is above and beyond. Grace, God does more than we know or earn.

Quick notes listening to a sermon. A search found the following:

The common Christian reading of the Bible is that Jesus “died for our sins”—either to pay a debt to the devil (common in the first millennium) or to pay a debt to God the Father (proposed by Anselm of Canterbury, 1033-1109). Theologians later developed a “substitutionary atonement theory”—the strange idea that before God could love us God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to ”atone” for our sin. As a result, our theology became more transactional than transformational.

Love, Not Atonement

Thursday, May 4th, 2017, Richard Rohr

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Since the 11th century, one understanding, or theory of this quote, is called the substitutionary atonement theory, or penal atonement theory.  You may not know the name, but you know the theory: God was angry with humanity; we owed a debt to God for our sin, someone had to be punished for our wickedness, and no human could really pay that debt, so Jesus, as both human and the Son of God, paid it for us.

This understanding of a God who is angry with humanity so Jesus is punished to right our wrong and pay our debt, this theory requires us to understand God as transactional. That God requires a payment and consumerism is how God works, much like how humanity works: there is a price to be paid for every commodity, every good deed, every necessity. If you want this, then you must do, or pay, that. This is how our entire economy works, right? There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And we see this understanding echoed throughout the Old Testament because this is how humanity has worked for centuries, maybe forever. We are a transactional people. You want this then you have to pay that.

But here’s the problem, while we can understand God acting that way since it is how we act, it isn’t actually the God we see in Jesus. God’s economy is not our economy. Beloved, if God’s nature is transactional then God’s love is conditional. If God’s nature is transactional, then this isn’t about grace. It’s about payment. Someone has to pay. But thanks to God, not us: Jesus! If Jesus has paid the price, then we are off the hook.

But our two denominations, the ELCA Lutheran and the Episcopal church, we have moved away from this theory because of its destructive outcomes. Because it changes God’s love from unconditional to conditional. Because it leaves no room for grace. Because it means that God’s nature is one of angry feudal lord who demands a payment from his people who have done wrong. This is a God who is willing to subject the innocent to torture and death.

Franciscan Duns Scotus said: “Jesus didn’t come into the world to change God’s mind about us; God so loves the world. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.”

So, let’s not forget the other part of today’s verse: Jesus came as a mediator. A mediator is one who attempts to make two sides see the situation in the same way. Jesus came to help us see as God sees because in Jesus God’s nature is revealed. And yes, Jesus got angry at least once and overturned the tables. Jesus showed righteous anger because the poor and the disadvantaged were being manipulated and used by the system in order to make the rich richer. Because in Jesus we see God’s nature is love, compassion, mercy (not a angry Master who demands punishment and payment). We see that God doesn’t create divisions of who is in and who is out: God sits with the sinner at the dinner table; God touches the lepers and the dead; God speaks with the woman who has been slut-shamed and outcast. God doesn’t cast out; God invites in. In Jesus, we see God crossing boundaries, breaking down barriers, turning the exclusive into the inclusive and demanding a bigger table instead of a wall because God believes all are worthy of having enough food, water, shelter, healthcare and safety.

Knowing that God so loves the world and God has called all of Creation very good, that this is a God of grace who is not transactional but who is transformational, I know it can’t be ransom as just “a debt to pay.” I know our freedom doesn’t come from a military battle that only creates winners and losers. So I dig deeper. 

The word for ransom, antilutron, has many layers. This is a compound word, antilutron: Anti in Greek: meaning because or on account of + lutron: redeem, deliver, release, liberate.

Jesus lives and dies because we need to be redeemed, delivered, released. This isn’t about a debt; this is about a life sentence from which we need to be liberated. Liberated from the life of transaction into the life of transformational love, the life of sacrificial love we see in Jesus. And sacrifice, in the Temple of the Old Testament, wasn’t about payment for sin but, as theologian Marcus Borg explains, sacrifice was about making something sacred or holy by giving it as a gift to God. Sacrifice in the Old Testament was not a transaction, but an offering for transformation. 

The Gospels of Matthew and Mark are the only other places in Scripture that also tell us Jesus gave his life as a ransom---but in these Gospel verses we are first told that Jesus came to serve and not be served. So before we jump to our natural way of hearing ransom as a debt to be paid---an appeasement of an angry God---let’s remember the words of Jesus. Jesus tells us he is a Way to walk, a Truth to know, a Life to live. Not a simple transaction, but living a life of serving one another. Jesus as the way and truth is an offering of a life---with all its struggles, pain, joy, living and death---an offering of our lives as a gift to God in order to be made holy. Jesus is not a transaction, but a model to follow so that we, as a disciple and not a consumer, can be released from our prisons of resentment and conflict, worry and fear, by seeing and living in a whole new way.

TRANSACTION OR TRANSFORMATION? 

Are you there God? ​It's me, Jane Margaret.

Thoughts and reflections of a pastor......

How Jesus Became God

Jesus was a lower-class Jewish preacher from the backwaters of rural Galilee who was condemned for illegal activities and crucified for crimes against the state. Yet not long after his death, his followers were claiming that he was a divine being. Eventually they went even further, declaring that he was none other than God, Lord of heaven and earth. And so the question: how did a crucified peasant come to be thought of as the Lord who created all things? How did Jesus become God?

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The idea that Jesus is God is not an invention of modern times, of course. As I will show in my discussion, it was the view of the very earliest Christians soon after Jesus's death. One of our driving questions throughout this study will always be what these Christians meant by saying "Jesus is God." As we will see, different Christians meant different things by it. Moreover, to understand this claim in any sense at all will require us to know what people in ancient world generally meant when they thought that a particular human was a God - or that a God had become human. This claim was not unique to Christians. Even though Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God that we know about in our world, numerous people in antiquity, among both pagans and Jews, were thought to have been both human and divine.

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One of my theses will be that a Christian text such as the Gospel of Mark understands Jesus in the first way, as a human who came to be made divine. The Gospel of John understands him in the second way, as a divine being who became human. Both of them see Jesus as divine, but in different ways.

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In the discussion of chapter 2 I show that analogous understandings existed even within the world of ancient Judaism. This will be a particular importance since Jesus and his earliest followers were thoroughly Jewish in every way. And as it turns out, many ancient Jews, too, believed not only that divine beings (such as angels) could become human, but that human beings could become divine. Some humans were actually called God. This is true not only in the documents from outside the Bible, but also - even more surprising - in documents within it.

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At every point we'll be intent on our one leading question for this chapter, how did Jesus understand and describe himself? Did he talk about himself as being divine? I will argue that he did not. These first three chapters can be seen as the backdrop to our ultimate concern: how Jesus came to be considered God. The short answer is that it all had to do with his followers' belief that he had been raised from the dead.

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In chapter 5 I turn to what I think we almost certainly can know. Here I argue that the evidence is unambiguous and compelling: some of Jesus's disciples claim that they saw him alive after he had died. My overarching contention is that belief in the resurrection - based on visionary experiences - is what initially led the followers of Jesus to believe that Jesus had been exalted to heaven and made to sit at the right hand of God as his unique Son. These beliefs were the first Christologies - the first understandings that Jesus was a divine being. I explore these "exaltation" views of our earliest surviving sources in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7 I moved to a different set of Christianogical views that developed later and thay maintain that Jesus was not simply a human who had been exalted to the level of divinity, but a pre-existent divine being with God before he came to earth as a human. I show the key similarities and differences between this "incarnation" view of Christ (in which he "became flesh" - the literal meaning of the word incarnation) with the earlier exaltation Christologies. Moreover I explore key passages that embody understandings of the incarnation in such books as the gospel of John, the last of the canonical The last of the canonical Gospels to be written.

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The debates over the nature of Christ were not resolved by the end of the 3rd century but came to a head in the early 4th century after the conversion of the emperor Constantine to the Christian faith. By then, the vast majority of Christians firmly believe that Jesus was God, but the question remained, "in what sense?" It is in this early 4th-century context that battles were waged in the "Arius controversy," which I explore in Chapter 9. The controversy is named after Arius, an influential Christian teacher of Alexandria, Egypt, who held to a "subordinationist" view of Christ - that is, Jesus was God but he was a subordinate deity who is not at the same level of glory as God the Father; moreover, he had not always existed with the Father. The alternative point of view was exposed by Arius's own bishop, Alexander, who maintain that Christ was a being who had always existed with God and that he was, by nature, equal with God. The ultimate denunciation of Arius's view led to the formation of the Nicene Creed, which is still recited in churches today.

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How Jesus Became God, The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee by Bart D. Ehrman

Here’s what the Buddhist idea of anattā teaches about letting go

THINKING — JANUARY 23, 2023

Can’t move on? Here’s what the Buddhist idea of anattā teaches about letting go

Give yourself (and others) a break.

by Jonny Thomson, Big Think, January 23, 2023

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A life is never complete. Like a constantly flowing river, you cannot stop it to measure it or judge it. A key difference between Buddhism and Hinduism is the idea of anattā — or "no soul" Using this Buddhist philosophy, we can learn to let things go and be more forgiving.

Jonny Thomson

Since you woke up this morning, you’ll have changed. Physically, billions of cells will have been replaced in a Sisyphean cycle of death and rebirth. Mentally, you’ll have more memories, more experiences, and more knowledge about the world (however narrow or insignificant it might seem). Time is measured by change — it’s the transfer of energy into different forms. When we talk about time, we’re really just documenting the ways in which the world has changed.

Daoists like to compare life to that of a river flowing: We are moving ever on, eddying and weaving our way to whatever estuary we end up at. And like a river, we cannot stop a human life to judge it in its entirety. You cannot pause existence to say, “Right, this is what this person is and this is how we must value them.” Like some sentient Heisenberg principle, we can never measure a life, because it’s always in motion.

It’s a fact and wisdom that’s very old indeed.

The breath of life

Buddhism took form within the culture and theology of Hinduism. Many key aspects of Buddhism overlap or resemble those of Hinduism. For example, both believe in karma (where actions have far-reaching, reactionary consequences), as well as dharma (cosmic laws to the universe). Both agree that the end goal of all existence is moksha — a liberation from the earthly cycle of rebirth.

One of the key differences, though, is about the nature of a human. In Hinduism, we have ātman — often translated as “the soul.” People reading this may have biases regarding Judeo-Christian ideas of “the soul.” But in Vedic traditions, ātman means something subtly different.

.........

In this way, ātman is more like the ancient Greek idea of pneuma than a Judeo-Christian “soul.” Pneuma means the “spirit of life” or creative force. It was imagined to be the breath of the divine that gives humans our unique humanity. It’s about a force that invigorates and gives intelligent purpose to all that you do.

Anatta

Buddhists, though, do not believe in ātman. For Buddhists, there is no “self” at all: a concept called anattā. The idea that we have some unified identity is more the result of illusion and conditioning than fact. That thing we call “me” is in such a state of flux that it cannot be grasped at all. You are, today, a very different person than who you were last year. Things in life are in a near constant swirl. Your beliefs, values, relationships, wealth, and health will come and they will go. The self is ultimately a construct.

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We are each different subjects of our being, encountering the world in our own unique way. What anattā suggests, though, is that there doesn’t need to be some essence or filament to our experiences. Of course, we have experiences (phenomenological content), but it’s just that there is no substance underpinning it (ontological entity).

We are all made of stars

Nature also has a way of recycling the building blocks to create new life. A nuclear physicist named Paul Aebersold found that "we swap out half of our carbon atoms every one to two months, and we replace a full 98 percent of all our atoms every year," Levitt writes.

Like a house constantly under renovation, we are ever-changing and replacing old parts with new ones: our water, proteins and even cells, most of which we apparently replace every decade.

Eventually, our own cells will grow quiet, but their parts will reassemble into other forms of life. "Although we may die, our atoms don't," Levitt writes. "They revolve through life, soil, oceans, and sky in a chemical merry-go-round."

Just like the death of stars, in other words, our own destruction opens up another remarkable world of possibility.

We are all made of stars: The long trip from the big bang to the human body

By Bryn Nelson, CNN, January 22, 2023

The Truth Woven into Other Faith Traditions.

In the sermon excerpted below, the pastor also mentioned the truth woven into other faith traditions. I like that phrase as that is one of the reasons I remain in my local church. I see and hear the truth though with a much different emphasis than is traditional. But as he says, "most adults are stalled at a junior high level of their understanding of the Bible, theology, their faith traditions." I may be in an unusual spiritual journey but I am an active seeker.

"To be human is to seek meaning, to be a spiritual seeker, which is what Jesus was."

"We are soon tempted towards stability, safety and predictability. Again, we have to ask that question, what are we looking for?"

"This is so typical of the spiritual journey. This shift from seeking to stasis, to certainty, which too soon becomes stuckness. Tell me you've never heard or read anybody say, The Bible says that, I believe it, therefore that settles it. That is the opposite of being in spiritual motion, of seeking, of being open to discovery which is necessary for spiritual vitality."

"And yet research has shown that most adults are stalled at a junior high level of their understanding of the Bible, theology, their faith traditions. We're parked. Many are the pastors I can tell you who lament to one another, that their church leaders have a slim to none grasp of the basics that we ask of our youth in their confirmation classes."

"Are you still praying? Because if you are praying, you better also be listening. I believe God is still speaking, but we have to ask, Are we listening? Listening to better hear, understand and practice what the spirit is calling us to. Whether we're fresh and starting or old and stuck spiritually, listening is how we keep rolling and in balance spiritually. It may be that the best spiritual practice is, if I can be very blunt, is to shut up and listen. Which is to say to pray."

"May you find that momentum and that balance that feeds you spiritually and carries you into this community of faith, service in the world, and closeness with God. Amen."

Veiling Muslim women

Unfortunately, as in Christianity, the religion was later hijacked by the men, who interpreted text in a way that was negative for Muslim women. The Quran does not prescribe the veil for all women but only for Muhammad's wives, as a mark of their status. Once Islam had taken its place in the civilized world, however, Muslims adopted those customs of the Oikumene which relegated women to second-class status. They adopted the customs veiling women and secluding them in harems from Persia and Christian Byzantium, where women had long been marginalized in this way. By the time of the Abbasid caliphate (750 - 1258) the position of Muslim women was as bad as that of their sisters in Jewish and Christian society. Today Muslim feminist urge their men folk to return to the original spirit of the Quran.

Unity: The God of Islam page 158, from The History of God by Karen Armstrong 

Extreme asceticism

Archaeologists recently found the remains of a 1,500-year-old monk, who was buried in a cist grave next to two small niche-like closed cells in the central apse of the church. Around the neck, hands and feet of the monk are a series of iron rings weighing tens of kilograms, which the researchers suggest are symbolic of living an ascetic lifestyle, wearing the chains to prove his devotion.

Monks that followed asceticism lived a lifestyle characterised by abstinence from sensual pleasures in the pursuit of salvation, redemption from sin, or spirituality.

More extreme asceticism included the practice of chaining the body to rocks or within a cell, praying seated on a pillar in the elements, solitary confinement, abandoning personal hygiene, or self -inflicted pain and voluntary suffering.

The monk found at Khirbat el-Masani likely lived in or near the church compound, placing himself in seclusion while chained inside a secluded closed cell. The practice originates in Syria in the 4th or 5th century AD, however, the discovery of the burial shows that this form of extreme asceticism spread as far south as the Jerusalem region during the Byzantine period.

Another example was previously discovered by archaeologists during excavations at Giv’at HaMatos near the Mar Elias Monastery, located between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Archaeologists at the time found the burial of a man wearing iron chains around the upper body in a subterranean cave consisting of two cubicles.

BYZANTINE MONK CHAINED WITH IRON RINGS UNCOVERED

January 3, 2023

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Markus Milligan 

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Ascetism as a way of life for attaining salvation or redemption from sin for self and others was greatly emphasized in traditional Christianity. It involved fasting and abstinence from sensual pleasure. The earliest Christian hermits and ascetics lived mostly in the desert of Scetes in Roman Egypt. They migrated there from cities to escape the pagan persecution of Christians. They came to be known as the Desert Fathers.

In time, more extreme forms of ascetism developed in eastern Christianity, particularly in Syria around the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as recorded in historical sources. It included practices such as solitary confinement, chaining the body to a rock or inside a cell, subsisting only on grass, inflicting pain on one’s body, abandoning personal hygiene and voluntary suffering. There is archaeological evidence of the spread of these drastic practices of self-abnegation and self-punishment as far south at least as Jerusalem during Byzantine rule which lasted from 313 to 636 AD.

Christianity became widely practiced in ancient Israel during this time and churches were built in Jerusalem, Nazareth and Galilee. The territory was divided into three provinces: Palestina Prima, Palestina Secunda and Palestina Tertia, which were all part of the Diocese of the East.

Remains of a Byzantine-era Monk in Chains Excavated in West Bank, January 3, 2023 By Sahir Pandey, Ancient Origins