The Nature of Reality

Quite a pretentious thread title but no matter. I simply sit down in McDonalds with my white coffee (no sugar) and begin to waffle to my hearts content. No control over what others think. Twat or whatever. Less and less interested. Sometimes, amid all the confusion the dustbin of my mind seems to gather a glimmer of light and clarity and a few things fall into order. Merely conceptual, of course, but order just the same.

As I see it it is simply the nature of Reality itself that gives enlightenment (or "salvation" or whatever else it has to be called......authenticity? Finding our own path, time and place? Finding our "true self" and all the rest of the jargon) It is the very nature of Reality itself that is the causal basis of enlightenment. The exact particulars, within our own experience, are obviously diverse, yet enlightenment is pure gift, grace. Realised, not attained. Found in all of our world's so called "Faith Traditions".

In Buddhism, the Dharma, it is "Original Enlightenment". More a negative path where the way unfolds more as losing the illusion that we are not already enlightened. And where Reality is "empty" - rather than being a "God" who is this, that and the other, wrote a book, gave commandments, etc etc etc etc whose followers often created conflicts and Inquisitions to protect the primacy of their own particular conceptual illusions. Reality is better seen as "empty" and therefore can more easily unfold as all things, each of us knowing according to our own unique personhood, in our own particular time and place.

Superficially, "emptiness" (sunyata) is deemed nihilism by many and then such superficiality projected upon the "languid East", this in contrast to the go-getting West. Yet what has the "west" gone and got? The nuclear bomb, and a walk on the moon - from where we can gain a picture of our fragile earth that will soon, all things considered, perhaps be no more - or at least, bereft of us humans.

Anyway, I am waffling as usual. But I do find that as I gradually step back Reality itself has more chance to be, that more compassion and acts born of it actually flower and come to be and pass. Which supports Faith, the trust that - despite so many appearances to the contrary - Reality itself is infinite compassion, infinite wisdom, infinite potential. Simply because such compassion it is not of "me", and therefore must have another Source.

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Graylight · 51-55, F

Or…think about this. Years ago, they were studying the monkeys that have interaction with tourists and villagers in other lands. And they found an amazing shift not just in behavior but in societal hierarchy and operation. The noticed that when food was scarce and the troop had to work together to survive because thriving meant keeping the mechanisms of society working. However, when the monkeys realized they would be constantly fed and cared for by humans and that food sources could be individually sought and kept, then the troops began to lose cohesion. In-fighting was more frequent, grooming decreased and ultimately the hierarchy protecting the survival chances of the animals was threatened.

Because…people and resources and glut. Man finds himself in just such a situation. Cities that once numbered a million are nor 20 times that size. Small towns have in some cases doubled in size. And we are utterly independent in the modern world.

So what happened to us? How many people can the average human provide for, look after, care for? It can be done – look at some Amish and similar communities – but nowadays our empathy doesn’t reach beyond our own grasp. It’s just too overwhelming. So while all kinds of philosophies are out there, I tend toward to simplest. We care for others when it benefits us, whether it’s spiritually, monetarily, physically or otherwise.

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sree251 · 41-45, M

@Graylight What relevance do astrophysical principles have on our lives? Granted, you and I can talk to each other from across the world on the internet supported by satellite transmission. It is not a bad thing in bringing humanity together provided we cooperate for the common good. However, it is also a means for fighting wars. Modern medicine has no value to those who live a healthy lifestyle free from the stresses and dangers of the unnecessary fast pace of modern life.

What are we, really? Beyond basic technology that makes life less labor intensive and more pleasant such as an electrical/water/sewer system, more technical knowledge is unnecessary.

Graylight · 51-55, F

@sree251

Modern medicine has no value to those who live a healthy lifestyle free from the stresses and dangers of the unnecessary fast pace of modern life.

Unless you’re hit by a car. Or fall from a ledge. Or have a hereditary genetic condition. Or are assaulted. Or become pregnant. Or any one of 100,00 unforeseen circumstances.

Sharing knowledge is essential; it’s how we progress and evolve. Misinformation is how we die. It’s not that we need for technological knowledge – we lived in the forests with the moon as our light once – it’s that promulgation of unproven theories and information hinders human growth. Debate and trial & error are necessary, if only to dispel the dark.

sree251 · 41-45, M

@Graylight Hit by a car? What about getting hurt and killed in a war, a regular occurrence these days? Is this part and parcel of human progress? Modern medicine could put Humpty together again but I would rather take my chances falling off a ledge living a good natural life without all that unnecessary knowledge.

Mankind is on a dangerous track. The drive to acquire evermore knowledge serves to deal with that danger. It is better to live in the forest with the moon as our light than to be driven by depression to commit violence and suicide.

SW-User

More on the nature of Reality. My heart is in inter-faith dialogue, frowned upon by many. From those who state that there can be no dialogue between "truth" (their own) and error, to what can be found on Buddhist Forums where I have been told to cut out "the inter-religious shit" - which would seem to suggest that some need to reread the Buddha's fine discourses on right speech...😀

So, in the "east" - very broadly speaking - we have "emptiness", an emptiness that allows all things to be. There is a fine book by Dan Leighton, "Visions of Awakening Space and Time", which relates to the works and thought of the 13th century zen master Dogen. Dogen is attracting a lot of interest from speculative philosophers of the West who are well into some of the theoretical physics being explained/explored as per many of today's so called "popular science" books. Such Dogenian (!) concepts as Uji or "being/time" , which suggests that time and being are intimately inter-related.

Mr Leighton - himself some sort of zen master in the West - writes of the underground bodhisattvas who "express the immanence of the liberative potential, or buddha nature, in the ground of the earth, as well as in the inner, psychological ground of being, ever ready to spring forth and benefit beings when called. The image represents the fertility of the earth itself and the wondrous, healing, natural power of creation, or the phenomenal world."

Dogen himself saw awakening itself as a function of the nature of reality, with his own multidimensional view of the movements of time/being.

As Dan Leighton sums up, contrary to some understandings and presentations, Zen Buddhism itself developed (historically) within a worldview that sees reality itself as a vital, ephemeral agent of awareness and healing, with faith/trust in the liberative qualities of spatiality and temporality.

So much for the non- theistic "east". Introducing that "inter-religious shit", here is Thomas Merton, the Catholic Trappist anti-monk, writing on the nature of Reality from his own theistic perspective this drawn from his book "Raids on the Unspeakable". Rather long, like this entire post, but worth a read:-

....the deeper question is the nature of reality itself.

Inexorable consistency. Is reality the same as consistency?

The "reality" of the world of many is of consistency, but the reality of the real world is not consistent.

The world of consistency is the world of justice, but justice is not the final word.

There is, above the consistent and logical world of justice, an inconsistent illogical world where nothing "hangs together," where justice no longer damns each to their own darkness. This inconsistent world is the realm of mercy.

The world can only be "consistent" without God.

His freedom will always threaten it with inconsistency - with unexpected gifts.

A god who is fitted into our world scheme in order to make it serious and consistent is not God.

Such a world is not to be taken seriously, such a god is not to be taken seriously. If such a god is "absent" then doubtless the absence is a blessing.

To take him seriously is to submit to obsession, to doubt, to magic, and then to escape these, or try to escape them, by willfulness, by the determination to stake all on an arbitrary selection of "things to be taken seriously" because they "save," because they are "his affairs."

(Note that even atheism takes seriously this god of consistency)

But mercy breaks into the world of magic and justice and overturns its apparent consistency. Mercy is inconsistent. It is therefore comic. It liberates us from the tragic seriousness of the obsessive world which we have "made up" for ourselves by yielding to our obsessions. Only mercy can liberate us from the madness of our determination to be consistent - from the awful pattern of lusts, greeds, angers and hatreds which mix us up altogether like a mass of dough and thrusts us all together into the oven.

Mercy cannot be contained in the web of obsessions.

Nor is it something one determines to think about - that one resolves to "take seriously," in the sense of becoming obsessed with it.

You cannot become obsessed with mercy!

This is the inner secret of mercy. It is totally incompatible with obsession, with compulsion. It liberates from all the rigid and deterministic structures which magic strives to impose on reality (or which science, the child of magic, tries to impose)

Mercy is not to be purchased by a set way of acting, by a formal determination to be consistent.

Law is consistent. Grace is "inconsistent."

The Cross is the sign of contradiction - destroying the seriousness of the Law, of the Empire, of the armies, of blood sacrifice, and of obsession.

But the magicians keep turning the Cross to their own purpose. Yes, it is for them too a sign of contradiction: the awful blasphemy of the religious magician who makes the Cross contradict mercy. This of course is the ultimate temptation of Christianity. To say that Christ has locked all doors, has given one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is seriousness and damnation, inside of which there is the intolerable flippancy of the saved - while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy which alone is truly serious, and worthy of being taken seriously.

Personally I find a certain clarity arises from what can be known as the "same thing" yet expressed in contrasting ways, each drawn from the mind/heart of unique human beings. Ultimately much is very simple, irrespective of varying degrees of verbiage.

Trust - faith - letting go.

Graylight · 51-55, F

@sree251 And therein is the flaw in your argument. You equate - falsely so - that technology is synonymous or somehow only leads to depression, violence and suicide. This simply isn't so. I'm not going to explain to you 10,000 years of human development and ingenuity...but I will mention you employ it freely through the internet. It's a lot to hate something you depend on, isn't it?