What About Religion?
One hundred and eight lives. A spectrum of perspectives and a cave of experience.
He believed in three worlds. In my mind:
First world… inside the bodies of all vegetable and animal on Earth (the world of tiny living things, studied by the quantum physicist). Perhaps what some people refer to as Hell…if you were reincarnated as a cell in a person’s liver then surely this is a lower form of consciousness than anything living in our ‘visible’ world and the worst punishment for immoral behavior.
Second world – the visible world in which we live.
Third world – the world in which the Universe lives. Some may refer to this world as Heaven. We cannot see this world. It exists on the outside of the universe. I imagine it to look something like an expanded nebula full of colour and light…but really it is impossible to imagine. But we can try to understand what the Universe may look like by looking at the Natural world of the Earth, its child. The Universe’s external body is made up of Earth, Fire, Water, Forest, Desert, Ocean…the Universe is an adult Earth and we live inside the Universal body…in the womb. It is easier to imagine if you relate the idea to the world you came from before you were in this life as a human. You were two cells living inside your mother’s body, one sperm and one egg and in death (rebirth) you joined to make one new body and consciousness. In the human body the follicle, which protects and nourishes the egg before ovulation contains a fluid, which has the same salt concentration as the ocean. Is this a mere coincidence? There are many similarities between organic structures (human bodies and animals) in our world and the organic structures found in the body of the growing Earth: trees=lungs…actually perform a similar function. The forests are lungs of the Earth and help clean the atmosphere. Rivers=veins…pump blood and water round the body through the central muscle (the heart…perhaps the heart resembles the ocean…the waves beating on the shore with pulsating energy)…
In this life as a human, when you die you will join with the Earth and a new life will be formed using all the spirits of the Earth. They will unite just as human conception occurs. Many sperms….one egg. Many spirits…one Earth.
Am I going too far with this reproductive metaphor? I don’t think so. All life relates to reproduction and decomposition. People talk about the Big Bang…similar to a conception through the act of love…between the Universe and a lover? It is difficult to think about the Universe as a being without in some way humanizing it. We humanize in order to understand but this tendency limits us to the bounds of our own imagination and in order to see beyond the universe we need to see beyond our own existence.
The Earth is a baby in the Universe’s womb. We will be reborn as the greater consciousness and no one religion is right; they all endeavor to understand and explain but can never do this for they are too rooted in their own cultural, political and social context… in their own humanity! Mindfulness in Buddhism tries to move away from rootedness. We are not yet trees and should not grow roots so deep into the Earth for life in this world is temporary.
He is truly worshipped.
I do not wish to be sacrilegious and I relate to most of the Buddhist ideals and consider the aesthetics of the religion extremely beautiful.
… but why do people not worship what Lord Buddha worshipped…the greater consciousness of Nature and the universe, rather than worshipping him? There is probably a reasonable answer to this question of which I am not aware.
Islam sees worship of idols as a sacrilegious act and I agree with this but I do not know if there is a way to prove that the name of the Universe is Allah. What’s in a name anyway? Nature is more important than name.