Spirituality of the Modern World

Brandon Nobles
Spirituality in the Modern World, 2009 [journal entry name]

A speech on Modern Spirituality, Buddhism, and the concept of enlightenment. This is by no means finished. Anyone wishing to engage in discussion regarding the topic, I'd love to address.

Standing outside staggering just walked by a preacher, bishop man wants to crucify me, I think, for saying that the Buddha said the same thing Jesus did, although he never claimed to be divine. There’s a difference between enlightenment and awakening. Awakening is seeing the world as it is.

You wake up. You see the cogs. You see the systems. You see the schematics and the schemes. You see the elaborate patterns. You understand nature as it grows around you. But do you accept it, as it is? Tragedy after tragedy, do you accept it as it is? To see children die, from accidents, get choked to death by some machine? Do you see that world? Do you see the tsunamis and the earthquakes and the mass murderers? Do you see flowers and dead cats in the road, the world as it is and the tragedies? Do you see it?

You are awake.

The awakened one was called the Buddha. Just because he saw that world, that did not make him enlightened. He became enlightened when he looked at all the world and saw the bodies of the children that have died-when he saw it, he accepted it. He accepted the nature of existence and the impermanence of pain and suffering. That is enlightenment. To see it and look at it as though it is a rock, and to feel it in the same way; with reverence and love and understanding, understanding the impermanence of the world. That is how Buddha looked at the world: with the same eyes of calm, peace, reverence, and understanding: life, death, flowers, ants on the branches of the trees, human beings, bulls and leaves; all a part of the same organism of a living Earth.

Enlightenment is accepting the world as it is. The way that it has adapted and changed and grown and mutated; karmic consequence, one step a million years ago we turned to man over the centuries as our species adapted to new climates and environmental challenges. Our ancestors go into the deserts, then into the jungles, and we go into the jungles of the civilized world. It has grown and changed itself and adapted to different landscapes, to different areas of the world; the original tribe of man was one, and split, it splinters into different organisms, different expressions of the same life force-the same essence-culture, religion and mythology, an offshoot of what once was a collective mythology in the minds of all men before they fragmented, before they divided themselves by books and laws, though the collective myth they all hold as past is a remnant of an archaic understanding and culture, a culture of the Gods and their stories, the parables, symbols, and wisdom the holy laws.

Without them, where do we go? Do we rebuild the hierarchy of the Gods, the holy writ we abide by, whether it be science, or technology, whatever set of principles derived from the collective wisdom of the centuries of man, do we make myth of the idols of our generation? Where is the wisdom for our world? The light that promised not to leave? Are we a generation abandoned by the touch of God, with no one amongst holy enough to hear the syllables of God, no signal: there seems to be a severance, a channel that once was opened, one that remained for just a little while and whatever light came out we caught. And we painted it on the caves, and now the expression of the divinity of man is on the walls of the Louvre. We painted them as expression of our culture, of our essence and humanity. We wrote them in the religious and philosophical works of our world, the world in which we're born where we're lined up for beliefs and values premeditated.

Where is the voice of our generation? The voice that makes it cool to be lowdown, the voice that says it’s fine to live. It’s fine to live as you see fit. It is your life, all choices possible are before you. You have one, as far as we can prove, and there isn’t that much time. A time for us to find our diamond in the coal, the light of a generation lost, content and lost, content enough to never look, to never look for what the voices used to look for, a sanity that expressed an age, a voice that heard the age, astrologically there have been many ages. We move through them and, astrology or not, we go through a procession of the constellations, and gradually go from one age to another, and there’s always a voice in the silence that tells the truth, but how do we know what is true? How do we know the madmen from Messiahs? The madmen believe they are Messiahs. And the Messiahs believe they are madmen. And their voice is mute and takes years to grow stronger, through whatever words he can relate, words that can make it into your life, a voice that can illuminate yourself, to tell you that you control your life, not the sun, not the Gods. It is now in the hands of man, to feed during the famines, to provide for the poor; the bulls and their sacrifice won’t stop the rain, and the men in white lab coats can’t stop it either.

You can turn the other way. You can reduce the world outside the box beyond the walls as here-say through a screen, all locked in now, every voice in the world, and, as did they in the past, they argue over religion; they argue over philosophy. They are not arguing their philosophy, they are arguing the validation of a philosophy they found, a philosophy that was handed to them, a philosophy not adapted to the world according to the world you see. There are a million paths that lead to the same place and it doesn’t matter who you follow. The destination is the same. Enlightened, the Buddha died, and left behind him the wisdom for which he suffered in the forests of India, the knowledge of Mara, the Satanic devil, the personification of evil--the voice in your head that tells you how worthless you are, the voice that tells you that you’re a loser, that you’re ugly, the voice that agrees with it with the opinion is expressed by other. It’s the voice that tells you life is meaningless. There’s no meaning at the beginning, but you’ve got time to find it, how much ever time cause and chance will let you have. There are no ugly people. There are no beautiful people, just people. There are no wrong opinions, not ones that you believe, and the ones that are believed by others, even if you disagree; you are both right, and both wrong. There are no right and wrong opinions, just opinions. Good and evil works in much the same manner.

There is evil in the world as much as there is in a game of Chess. Both sides are evil to the other, but not one chess is just a game, when it’s just a game people can play together, and still compete, play together, one human verse another, no matter the skin, no matter the religion, no matter of form or height. If life is chess, we all have our kings and queens, our bishops, our rooks and knights and pawns. But if it’s just a game of chess played by God, then God controls both sides-then whence comes evil? From the wars, from the division of ideas and expression. If everything where black, there would be no white, and without white there could be no grey, which is where the compromise takes place, a place we all should live, instead of on the fringes by ourselves alone, but in the gray zone of the middle, the middle path, of belief and knowledge, the fence between good and evil, no sides to associate either with; thus evil is extinguished, the voice inside ones head, the voice that accuses, Mara, cannot punish you once he disappears.

That leaves you and the essence of a Saint; when Mara dies, the selfishness of division dissolves, and the essence of the Dharma permeates, as the view of Buddha becomes the look of all men, all mean a saint as Jesus, all God’s children, the atheists too, the son of their mother’s and father’s-that’s comfort in a different form. The world is big enough for every belief, the inner convictions never have to withdraw, as long as it does not advance on the belief of another. Then the equilibrium between man and nature and other men can be established, when Earth becomes not a hell to escape from, but a Heaven one would never wish to leave.