Peace Be With You?

The actions of my fellow humans are most perplexing at times. Tonight I chose to enter a Christian chatroom, the name of which shall be left out of this blog out of respect for those who were there.

I entered the chatroom under the name “Samsara” which, in the Buddhist tradition, means to wander without end and/or to pass through the cycle of existence (birth, death, and rebirth). Very quickly I was set upon by the members of the chat room, apparently someone who should immediately be taken for a Buddhist is not someone who is welcome in a Christian chatroom. I found this reaction to be entirely unpredicted as Buddhists do not have a record for being hostile, aggressive, disrespectful, or in anyway intolerant of other people or other religions. The simplest summation of the Buddhist belief system comes from His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama: “My religion is simple, my religion is kindness.” Nonetheless Buddhism was torn apart as if it were a piece of meat set upon by pirañas that had not tasted flesh for many moons.

I acted in only the kindest manner of a practicing Buddhist, not once did I show any lack of respect for their beliefs. When my questions were misunderstood (though the members of the chat made no suggestion that they had taken offense to that which I had said) I apologized sincerely for having not made myself clear. It would seem that a religion, who’s holy book I have read and studied, that preaches kindness and compassion towards all other people has no  ability to actually function as such. It would appear that there is no tolerance amongst the people to whom I spoke for other religious or philosophical opinions. A few people found me worth conversing with and were open, kind, and patient in answering my multitudes of questions. Yet it was still horrifying to see how completely close minded these people could be. No matter how tenderly I worded my questions about Christianity someone in that chatroom told me I was going to hell for not believing in God or Jesus. When I made a decent point about expressing kindness as Jesus instructs people to do in the Bible I was still smashed like a small insect on the underside of a shoe. I quoted the Bible to these people and still, as an established non-Christian, I was met with harsh words.

Christianity teaches that one should love their neighbor, no matter who they are. Yet these Christians I found demonstrated no ability to love someone who did not love their god. Somehow I was able to converse for nearly half an hour before I was permanently blocked from the chatroom. Come to find out that these Christians are so close minded that the rules of the chatroom state (in bold font) that “You may not promote any cult or false religions such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, Scientology, Wicca, etc… If you do there will be no warning and you will be removed from this chat.” Well I was removed from that chat with no warning so I guess I can say at least they followed that set of beliefs to the letter.

All-in-all people scare me. How is it that they can fanatically follow a religion that teaches peace, love, and compassion yet go around telling other people what to believe and that if they do not believe in what they’re being told to believe in they will spend all of eternity burning in the fires of hell?

Reader, please do not misunderstand. I have met many Christians, in fact most of my family is Christian (I myself gave it up years ago), and have found most of them to be the nicest of people but more often than one would expect I meet people who are like that entire chatroom. Why can’t we all just accept each other?

On Me, Myself, and God

From the beginning of my life, before I could understand even the simplest part of the world around me, my parents began my indoctrination into the worship of their god. To me this was a gradual process and an attempt to remove my individuality, to confiscate my beliefs and tell me what to believe. At first I believed, but at the tender young age of seven I began to ask myself the hard questions that old wise men prefer to discuss in the late afternoon over a cup of fresh tea.

I was young and yet I had decided that there couldn’t possibly be a god, or at least a god that loved us as that man in the funny robe claimed. Honestly how could there be? I didn’t understand it all, I was too young - the second grade I believe - and there was something terrible happening in the world. Turns out now that it was the Iraq disarmament crisis taking place and the president had ordered air strikes on Iraq. At the time, however, all I understood was that people’s lives were in danger. As I lay on the couch I prayed to God to watch over these soldiers and keep them safe, then I cried - in shame for what I had just done.

I was only seven but I had already decided not to believe in what I viewed as the made up story about a god who loved all humans. I was perhaps too smart for my own good; I understood that an incredibly large number of people didn’t believe in “our” god, that horrible things happened to good people, that people suffered from fear, starvation, thirst, and chronic pain every moment of every day. I looked around the world and not all of it made sense but the idea of there being an all-powerful being letting this happen to his children made no sense to me. I knew that my father would not let horrible things happen to me; he wouldn’t let me starve or live in any state of suffering. My father wasn’t all-powerful, he wasn’t a god, and he certainly wasn’t perfect and yet he was able to protect me from suffering. So how was it that what people called “our heavenly father” could let such things happen to his children?

My early entrance into the world of atheism continued for the next two years in a most uncomfortable fashion. I knew my mother would freak if her young son claimed ignorance towards her divine heavenly father and thus I had to keep my atheism between myself and my friends - some of them like me, most still corrupted by a belief in a lie. I was convinced already that the idea of some all-powerful deity having created everything and having control over our very lives was something that was, beyond doubt, a lie. Specifically I had no personal interest in the questions of what happened after we died (no one I knew had died, therefore I didn’t have to ask this hard question) and it wasn’t because of a childish innocence. To be truthful I must admit that as a young child I worried about death a lot, I was concerned that I would die and thus come to an end. I wanted to believe there was a life after this one but I just couldn’t bring myself to believe that there was, which made my childhood fear of death all the more terrifying.

Then, when I was nine years old and on the day before I was to go on holiday break from elementary school, my grandfather died. I was scared, terrified, and confused beyond all understanding. In life he was someone who teased me until I cried and then would ridicule me for crying, for being so weak. At times I hated him, at others I just didn’t like him but I kept that to myself. I bottled a lot of things up back then, and still do. But when I was told that my grandfather was dead, that the man who I had hated at times was gone forever I wept like a baby. I had always told him that I loved him, though with a personal level of resentment, and now he was gone. I was devastated, destroyed. It is a life ruining feeling to realize how much you loved someone after they have died, and be only nine years old at the time.

My thoughts raced, I had spent several years not believing in anything religious - I didn’t believe in heaven nor did I believe in hell. And yet here I was, trying to figure out what had happened to my grandfather. Was he simply gone, did he just cease to exist, or did he truly move on to “a better place?” I came to realize that, due to the fact that one cannot understand what one has no experience or knowledge of, I found it impossible to envision not existing. Logically this makes sense, if one cannot understand something due to the lack of experience then how could I possibly understand what it would be like to not exist? All I have ever experienced are different states of existence, but all in all I have only existed. The same logic can be used to explain trying to understand what it is to be dead, the state of not living. It is an impossibility because all any of us has ever done is live. This is where I believed, and where I rationalized, the thought of life after death came from. For pre-humans (and even modern humans) it was and is impossible to understand death without putting it in terms of living, in terms that could be understood. All of this was going through my mind, struggling to be understood, at nine years of age.

I continued my by-the-book existence as an atheist, even if I had to hide it from my mother through my last three years of elementary school and into middle school. But I was changing rapidly, my religious views - or lack there of - became stronger and stronger. My changes were in emotional detachment, I grew apart from everyone I had once considered close to me; friends, family, mentors, everyone. It was how I dealt with my grandfather’s death without having the comfort of a religious myth to make the pain less real. I felt the pain of his loss so strongly that I forced everyone away from me and cut all emotional ties.

It was subtle and subconscious but today I feel the power of what I have done. I can take off to college and not feel home sick, not miss my family, or my girlfriend of nearly four years who I love dearly. Despite my emotional attachment to these people and places I have developed the curse of being able to flick a switch in my mind and completely disengage. I fear how easy it might be for me to cope with the loss of another loved one and how much more it might mentally screw me up. If I can leave behind me someone who I am so emotionally interlocked with as my girlfriend and wind up wondering if I really do miss her when I say I do, how mentally stable could I possibly be? It is ironic that I sit here wondering if my rejection of religion may be the very thing that destroys what’s left of my morality, there isn’t much to destroy - unbound from confines of “do evil and go to hell” I’ve lost a lot of what people call morals. With my own views on life, my rejection of religion, and the mentally crippling effects my grandfather’s death had on me I am in a very strange place. I can forget my emotional involvement with people in a fraction of a heartbeat but love them enough to throw anything and everything away for them, should they ask, all at the same time. Is this what atheism has done to me?

Yes, I do believe that my entrance into the world of atheism at such a young age coupled with the loss of my grandfather left me torn and twisted - all childish innocence utterly destroyed and lost forever. But yet I lived on in this manner, consumed mostly by some sort of rage that’s origins had been long since forgotten. Maybe it was inherited, who knows, I was an angry child throughout my last three years of elementary school (the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades) and on into my sophomore year of high school.

Here, in my second year of high school, my life was struck by yet another change - this one not so subtle. It began in my freshman year with my picking up the book The Traveler but wasn’t fully realized until late into my sophomore year. The author of The Traveler is a practicing Buddhist and admits that, though he tries his best to be a good practicing Buddhist, he fails, fails, and fails again but wont stop trying. Naturally The Traveler contains a lot of hidden Buddhist views and ideas implanted by the author - writing about what he knows. Though the book contains a good deal of violence, the principles of Buddhism are there between the covers. This book implanted in me the first views of a religion I might have been able to believe in not to mention a way to remove the torn, twisted, enraged, and hateful manner in which my bottled up inner being existed. I read The Traveler over ten times, one book sealed the deal - this anonymous author was my favorite author. From his book and conversing with him I turned towards different mediums to try and find out more about this world he told me was Buddhism. I read an English translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which dates back to the beginnings of Buddhism with Sakyamuni (the Buddha, a human recorded by Buddhists to have reached nirvana).

This book asked me to believe in many deities (Bodhisattvas). If I couldn’t bring myself to believe in one god how did I expect myself to believe in many gods? Oddly enough, having my extensive background in atheism, I was able to find a way to explain them - as I read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and came across more and more Bodhisattvas I simply dismissed them and made them allegorical characters designed to describe a certain characteristic of death, passing through the “barriers” (as I called them) in the trials after death. For some reason I found it relatively easy to modify my beliefs to those of Buddhist ones, or at least for a short time. My damnation through my actions and personality brought about an end to my quest for a Buddhist life. My heart was too angry for me to follow such an enlightened path, I drowned in the wake of what I had wanted.

I read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and In My Own Words by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and felt a strong desire to belong to the ideals expressed - I wanted to not just believe but to exist as a Buddhist person. Through my experimentation with meditation I was able to achieve what I wanted - I could repress my angry heart and live passively and in a content manner. Though I must admit it did not last. Events unfolded that started pushing me back to my old ways, of being alone and pushing people away from me. In Buddhist terms my heart belonged to the first realm of the demons, to me I was my old self again and he was not a person I wanted to be acquainted with.

So I struggled with my sense of self, I struggled with my identity and personality. A conflict that once was about god became a conflict about my entire spiritual being. I was in a dilemma, uncertain whether to believe in a set base group of principles already established and recognized as a religion or to reject everything as I had become so accustomed to doing. The problem, I realized, with rejecting everything is that you live in a very closed-minded way which is precisely what you should desire to avoid (according to His Holiness the Dalai Lama). Despite my desire for a Buddhist life I knew that reality would one day take over and I wouldn’t be able to follow that religion as it has been laid down for the world to see. In me I do not posses the ability to be kind and loving without an expressed and convincing reason to do so. Compassion is an ideal to me, not something I can easily practice due to my existence as the most cynical of cynics. Though perhaps that is not the most accurate statement, at times I can be as compassionate as any true Buddhist, though I have to focus on doing so - I suppose I mean to say that compassion is not something I would consider part of my natural being.

In short my experimentation with Buddhism gave me a unique perspective on the world, even if I was never able to become a practicing Buddhist. Throughout my life many factors have influenced where I am today religiously, I have tried my best to explain every factor of my life that has brought me to the spiritual existence I endure today. I have admitted things here that I had priorly kept entirely to myself and am glad I finally have the chance to share them. But I suppose it is best I answer the key question: where am I religiously today?

Well, since my dabbling with Buddhism, I have come to believe in what my favorite author, and mysterious-friend, John Twelve Hawks described as “the Light.” In essence the Light is what society generally refers to as the soul. I fabricated my own beliefs from segments of John’s opinions and segments of what I have learned of Buddhist beliefs. I have decided that the Light, which resides in all of us and is what makes us who we truly are, exists here and now in our shell, or what we call our body. Trapped inside our shell our Light is forced to live as a caporal being, though naturally it is a nothingness of energy that, upon conception of a new life form, inhabits that shell to begin another corporeal existence. I believe in the Light, the essence of us, and I believe in a continual cycle of rebirth as our Light inhabits a new shell.

From Buddhism I accepted the idea of continual rebirth and the idea of an immortal soul. From my atheism I accepted the idea of there being no god or godlike being(s) and the terminal nature of life. I see life as the one life we have to live, once it is over with it is over with. There may be continual rebirth but it is not truly us, it is merely the same energy, the Light, that gives life to a package of chemicals in the mother’s womb.

Myself, as I exist now, will only ever exist once. The unique combination of atoms, molecules, and Light that creates me will, at some point (hopefully) in the distant future cease to exist and then that is it for me. The atoms that make me me will quietly shut me down and disassemble to go on and become different things - perhaps they have grown bored with being a caporal being who’s Light is in conflict with itself, or perhaps it is simply the order of things; the way things are. No matter what the reason I have accepted that I have a terminal existence and there is no way to cheat death, there is no life after this one for me personally - but the physical components that result in Light will carry on to create new forms of life. I may not be an outstanding person in this life, but perhaps I will be part of one in the future.

Essential for Human Existance

All the major religions of our world teach the same message: compassion for one's neighbor. The religions of the world that have survived the scientific awakening and modern philosophical and social development all share this message, those that did not have faded into nothingness. This core message of compassion found in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the many branches of these religions does not take into consideration an individual's race, gender, political affiliation, or their sexuality. In those religions that recognize a god the message of compassion is said to be the very words of YHWH, God, Alah. In those that choose not to recognize a god the idea that compassion is essential for human existence is acknowledged as a solid, irrefutable fact - as rigid as if it were spoken by a god.

I personally subscribe to Buddhism. As with most subscriptions I don't necessarily read or agree with every article but I give it my all to try. For a while several years ago I was a very good Buddhist, recently I have found I've become my self before Buddhism; hateful and lacking compassion. For this reason I've begun the journey that I set out upon years ago: to devote myself to a Buddhist system of beliefs. I must admit that I am a very picky person and even such a simple religion as Buddhism has its aspects I do not agree with (mostly the belief in divine entities, I chose to think of them more as just symbolic figures used when times and the human mind were simpler). On this journey I will be providing short blurbs of my experiences with other people and other religions, as stated above they all have the same basic principles…so we shall see how nicely we can play together.

A little background to my reader: I have studied and read the Bible. I have studied and read the Torrah. I have studied and recited the Qur'an. I have studied and read several sacred Buddhist texts (such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and several books written by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama). My parents tried their hardest to raise me a devout Christian and ever since I can honestly recall I lacked the ability to believe. This blog is my exploration of the human spirit.