Before the start of mass today, I was sitting quietly and trying to meditate on the peace of God, i.e., the peace of the unconditioned. As I was doing this, the question arose, If we're conditioned beings, how can we experience something unconditioned? If our experience is characterized by impermanence, how can we experience that which is timeless?
Then the thought occurred to me that, even though our minds and bodies evolved out of a continually evolving universe, maybe the unconditioned can be an object of cognition, radically transforming our conscious experience. Or that maybe there's an aspect of consciousness or divine nature within us (call it a soul, buddha-nature, or what have you) that's simply obscured. Or perhaps consciousness itself is a quality that's present in some form in nature all the way down to the subatomic level, even the fabric of reality itself.
The idea isn't necessarily that crazy. I tend to agree with Bertrand Russell, for example, that the more we understand about matter (i.e., energy), the more it seems the word itself becomes "no more than a conventional shorthand for stating causal laws concerning events" (An Outline of Philosophy). One possibility arising out of this is that what we call 'mind' and 'matter,' or nama-rupa in Buddhism, may ultimately be groups or structures of events arising from a substance that's neither wholly mental nor material, but in between the two a la neutral monism, i.e., the distinction between the two might not be as rigid as it appears.
From this perspective, I find myself increasingly comparing God to the pure Mind of Zen, the substance of all phenomena, out of which all experience unfolds. And when thinking about awakening or spiritual union with God, I see it as simply Mind recognizing itself, Mind seeing Mind, divine nature partaking of divine nature. It made sense at the time, at least.
If you become a Roman Catholic in the end, it will be as if Buddha himself joined the Christian faith and, seeing it through different eyes, would interpret it from a hitherto unexplored direction. I have been able to follow your reasoning only partially, and I am not sure that your trajectory will allow you to enter into the Body of Christ, but as I said, if you do, your 'angle of the Throne' will be a very interesting one.
ReplyDeleteI can only partially follow my own reasoning half the time, as well. Sometimes I try to put all the pieces in my head together and come up with something good; and other times, not so much. I agree with you, though, that if I do 'enter into the Body of Christ,' my angle will be an interesting one.
ReplyDelete