When you penetrate a mystery, it doesn't become less mysterious.
The way of the Buddha is a living response to a living question. Yet whenever it has become institutionalized, its vital response has become a well formulated answer. The seemingly important task of preserving a particular set of answers often causes the very questions which gave rise to the answers to be forgotten. Then the lucid answers Buddhism provides are cut off from the stammering voice that asks the questions.
Just as Christianity has struggled to account for how an essentially good and loving God could create a world with so much suffering, injustice and horror, so buddhism has struggled to account for the presence of joy, delight and enchantment in a world that is supposedly nothing but a veil of tears.
An individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I'm not accommodated. I don't accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I'm still surprised. That's why I'm against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society.
-- Abraham Joshua Heschel
Secular Buddhism is something to do, not something to believe in. It's creating the conditions whereby we can embark on a way of life that is not dictated by our instinctive reactivity, our habits, our fears, and so forth and so on, but stems from an openness, an inner openness, that is unconditioned by those forces, and that allows the freedom to think differently, to act differently, to respond more fully. And in doing so, to allow the human person to flourish. To realize more fully the potentials that each one of us has.
All the above is from an interview with Stephen Batchelor by Krista Tippett
The source of philosophy is wonder.
-- Socrates
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