What, then, is the actual reality? Do words apply? No, it is beyond terminology. No conceptual idea is able to capture the absolute reality. You cannot say it is something, you cannot say it is nothing. The key is mind alone, but the treasure is beyond mind. Mind implies a self, an entity. Awareness is the unconfused source of mind, beyond the self. And it is called awareness-emptiness, the originally undivided essence. Called awareness because it perceives, called emptiness because it cannot be found. It cannot be found, yet it appears. In the Buddha’s words, ‘Like a dream, like an illusion, like a gathering of spirits, that’s how birth, that’s how living, that’s how dying, are taught to be.’
The meditative argument is to find the thing itself, God, if you wish. Place your mind upon it and hold it there for hours, days even. Learning to stably rest the mind on a chosen object is the first legitimate meditative practice. Without this aspect, it is not yet meditation. One should be careful, however. The skill must be attained gradually, or you will come to dislike it. Heroic persistence in that can damage the mind. To meditate skillfully is to work with mind directly, and, to hold a single aspect unwavering, no matter how profound or elusive. The experience is distinctly unlike ordinary activity. When this is informed by compassion, it becomes indestructible.
To understand the essence of anything, which is to say, of everything, ask yourself, ‘What is it, absolutely?’ Mind, as the seed of all experience, is the ideal object. Find it if you can. Deny it if you can. It is experience without experiencer. No thing called mind exists, yet it creates the world. Truly realizing this is said to be amazing, as if all life were a magical display. While not existing, the phenomena of the realms of being appear. These realms are called samsara, the wheel of conditioned existence and are the counterpoint of nirvana, liberation from suffering by unwavering perception of the pristine reality.
This understanding that things are neither nothing nor something, nor both nor neither, is central to the wisdom angle of the jewel. It is the great Middle Way, on which thousands of texts have been written, and two millennia of sharp monastic debate waged. The arguments are incisive, creative, and widely varied, tested for two thousand years in the only meaningful laboratory of truth, the mind itself.
There are fundamental high level points of consensus. Not-self, the primacy of mind, and compassion are three. The first two have been addressed, if briefly. Compassion, to my thinking, is universally regarded as a necessary virtue. If a doctrine dismisses the primal role of compassion, it is not Buddhism, and definitely not the higher paths. Compassion is seeking a release from suffering for all that lives. That goal is unattainable, but the goal of stabilizing the desire for it is not. It is, however, very ambitious and takes many lifetimes.
Reincarnation, of course, is handy here. Does the Buddha say that reincarnation exists? No, but, again, it cannot be denied. To say that it exists would give it a reality which nothing possesses. A genuine discussion of reincarnation, or the karmic cycle, is far beyond the scope of this article, but a few points might be helpful. Karma is said to be the most difficult of the Buddha’s teachings to truly understand, but briefly put, it is the tendency of mind to propel itself, seeking external happiness, using the fundamental emotions of grasping, aggression, and bewilderment as strategies of attainment.
They cannot work. No fundamental, lasting happiness is possible in that way, so the mind continues, latching onto the next thing. This process affirms the inner identity, the self, as that which grasps or rejects or willfully ignores. Sophisticated emotional and conceptual layers, the idea of God, for example, dramatically empower the illusion of self. These layers exist provisionally as an oceanic volume of latent karma, all interconnected with all else in samsara. To free oneself, all karma must be eliminated without renewal of the karmic tendency. Because we have been wandering since beginningless time, the amount of karma is incalculable, hence the difficulty of attaining buddhahood.
From an absolute perspective, karma does not exist, and this is an excellent formulation of the pith of this philosophy: fundamental existence can never be proved. Any claim of it can be disproved. Nothing can be said about the ultimate nature. If it is something, what is that something? Love, compassion, wisdom, Buddha, God, these are only words. Where is their reality?
Yet to say that it is nothing is a mere statement. It can be disproved. If you say that it is nothing, then who are you and I, and what is all this that we perceive? It cannot be nothing, for we have the rich variety of illusion that appears as our world. All feeling, experience, people, places, events, thoughts, all that passes like a dream. Illusion is not nothingness; it is illusion. A dream happens in some way, though the objects in it do not exist.
But we experience the dream of waking life as real, until we attain sufficient insight. It makes no difference how many lives it takes, because rebirth is perpetual until the individual finds their way out of it. We believe we go on, therefore we go on. But that does not prove our fundamental existence. If we have a fundamental existence, where is it? What is in the baby who has no grasp of language that also is in the thriving adult, busy in their occupation, which yet exists in the old man, sagging toward death? Which is really to say, what continues after the body is gone? You may say there is something, but where and what is it? Do you see the soul? The Buddha never said no self exists. He said, ‘Can you find it? I cannot.’
Karma is relative truth. A flea values its existence as highly as you value your own. To anything that lives, its own life is paramount, thus it suffers. However, the object of clinging, the unchanging self, cannot be attained, because it does not exist. It is only an idea, a notion. If analyzed, it cannot be proved. Try it. Find your ‘self.’ What is its shape, or color, or smell? Where is it? The question is straightforward: can you prove you have a single, independent, immutable self? Can you even find a changing existent which could be called the self? Or is it merely an assumption, a mirage?
We are attached to self, much as many are attached to God. The notion of not-self is gut-wrenching. It has terrified many, and deeply so. I know one, and I hope he finds peace. I have felt this fear myself. It is why we reach for something to confirm us, God, money, TV, family, fame, Buddhism, Atheism, food, work, whatever. It is all the same.
God is merely one of numerous means of reinforcing the illusion of self. The ego defines itself by other. God is permanent, thus I can have a permanent thing called a soul. Here, the self is a stand-in for God, and vice-versa. Because God exists and I believe it, I exist, too. One is reminded of Descarte’s dubious proof : ‘I think therefore I am.’ But as Nietszche countered, ‘I think therefore I think.’
By denying the self, these arguments may go too far for Atheistic tastes, but it seems worth contemplating. Most Buddhists I know would find them irritating but agree. They probably wouldn’t even read them.
The Buddhist ideal is to know what is. Truth will not forsake you, that is why it is truth. You may feel your own pain for wandering from the genuine; reality does not care. It is neither for you nor against you. Any of those are statements. Any could be a substitute for God, in this approach. Solid belief is a vitamin for the ego. All belief, even hatred, is a means of defining oneself against something else.
If you are truly an Atheist, this is the means to reduce God to his proper level. You need not disprove God anymore, that is a simple matter. God, as an actuality, is irrelevant. But the manipulated and sincere belief in him is, of course, significant.
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