Why Buddha Touched the Earth

Rough draft of a chapter, where we stick it to conventional religion....I think this will need some reworking, but the ideas are critically important.

Religion Is A Mess

Religion, as we commonly know and experience it in out culture, is a mess.

There are a couple of things that get mixed up. There's the desire for a certain experience, that experience of existence, of connection to the Universe, of the Godhead. There are ethical teachings - both in the 'Thou shall not...' and in the 'For your contentment, we suggest...' variations. There are myths and legends that give us role models. There are the superstitions born of fear, and the supernaturalism born out of ignorance. There's the preservation of the knowledge needed for the community to thrive. There's the deliberate hiding of knowledge that would threaten the priesthood's power.

For about 200 years, from Newton to Napoleon, we had the "Enlightenment". It was supposed to be the triumph of reason over superstition in Europe and, later, the United States; maybe leaving behind some sort of benign Deism, but ushering in a new age of rational behavior. But it all sort of fell apart in imperialism and war, the American revolution, the Napoleonic era, the War of 1812, eventually the American Civil War. And the Industrial Revolution, which was supposed to bring freedom, brought instead the "enclosure" which kicked small farmers off of their land, the sweatshop, the dehumanization of labor, and the "smoke" of the industrialization.

The problem, is that Man is not a rational animal. For all the wonderful uses of reason, in the end the frontal lobes that allow it are a recent addition, a clever evolutionary hack to the nervous system. And it's therefore irrational to think that reason alone can bring satisfaction to human lives. Logic's use is limited, not just by Godel's theorem, but by Darwin's; we are too much the inheritors of a long heritage of a more primal interpretation of the world. (Many of those who actually work with logic know this well; it's no coincidence that "crazy philosophies" - Zen, Taoism, Paganism, Discordianism - have had such resonance with scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.)

Thus, in reaction to the Enlightenment, we see the rise of the Romantic movement, first in Germany and then a little later in Britain. Turning for inspiration to the old gods, and to Nature.

Also, as the Industrial Revolution and the changes in land-ownership laws that made it possible started to eat away at the English farming communities, a certain nostalgia about that way of life was born. When we look at the "Nature" that the Romantics - and, later, the early British Pagans - were seeking, we must understand it not as the forest or the jungle, but as the same British countryside that inspired Tolkien's "Shire".

A somewhat different view of Nature could be found in the U.S, where the young nation's quest for a distinct social and spiritual identity gave birth to two movements: the Transcendentalists, inspired by the British Romantics and by Eastern philosophies, an openness to other times and places; and the Christian revival movement, a turn to religious fundamentalism, a closing to anything outside the Bible.

The influence of this later movement persists, comes perilously close to dominating American thought, today, and we need to take a stark look at it.

What is the problem with this strain of Christian vision? Its ethics rest on its metaphysics, and its metaphysics are nonsensical. Putting aside the issue of whether some creator deity even exists at all, the specific idea of god proposed here is ludicrous.

You must do right because otherwise you'll go to hell, condemned to eternal torment by a just and all-loving God. There's simply no way to justly earn eternal torment in a finite lifetime.

And this all-loving God couldn't let anyone into heaven, because the first people he made - in his omnipotence and omniscience - surprised him by disobeying him and eating an apple, so to somehow balance the books he had to assume human form and be murdered, and then that opened that way.

Poor Jeshua ben Joseph! To get saddled with this! Science fiction and comic-book fans often talk of "retcon", retroactive continuity, where the backstory of a character changes and earlier episodes or stories that gave a different version are ignored. Batman saves Commissioner Gordon's infant son James; years later Gordon's only child is a daughter named Barbara (who becomes Batgirl), and as far as the story is concerned it's always been that way. Movie special effects budgets make the Klingons in the first Star Trek movie look radically different than those in the TV series, but Kirk and Spock seem to take it all in stride. And obsessive fans try to paper over the plot holes with unlikely explanations: Barbara is adopted, the Klingons we saw before were a result of genetic engineering.

And a similar retcon can be found at the heart of Christianity. The Jewish people were looking for a leader, a Messiah, to come and throw off the Roman oppression. Along comes this Jeshua fellow, a descendant of the royal line of David, getting attention with his great wisdom teachings, making trouble for the powers-that-be. "Hey," think his followers, "he must be the Messiah! With him leading us, we'll get rid of the Romans for sure!"

Then Jeshua makes a little too much trouble and gets executed. So what do his desperate followers do, accept that he wasn't the Messiah they sought? Of course not. He was never there to save them from the Romans, no, he was there to save them from...sin, yes, that's it. And his murder was all part of the plan, a necessary human sacrifice.

That might not have been so bad. Except then Saul of Tarsus, St. Paul, comes into the picture. Never trust a converted fanatic. He probably would have done much less damage to Jeshua's teachings if had he kept on with persecuting and killing Christians, instead of converting and proselytizing his perverted versions of them.

Of course the message of the great teacher Jeshua couldn't be completely suppressed, and from time to time it's managed to pop back up. This criticism of Christianity must be understood to apply just to the twisted practice that sadly forms the mainstream; not to groups like the Quakers (maybe the closest thing to a Zen Christianity) who seek to understand the Christ within all of us, or to monastic or mystical traditions that seek to cultivate inner peace through the direct insight of meditation.

But we end up with two main alternatives in our culture. We have the mainstream religious movements, rejecting reason in favor or faith, putting forth metaphysical propositions that don't stand the test of logic; and what we might call the profanely materialist, the idea that we're just lumps of meat in an uncaring Universe, and the best we can hope for is to tickle our brain's pleasure centers as much as we can. This later might include understanding that there are deeper pleasures than just drinking and fucking, looking to the social sphere; but still look to dull the pain of existence by overwhelming it with pleasures.

But is there a better option, a way to remove the pain entirely? Not hiding it behind placebo illusions of gods, not with trying to anesthetize with pleasures, but to take out the thorn?

This would require changing our minds. We use the phrase "change my mind" so casually and inaccurately that we must take care here.

To change our mind means not merely to change a decision based on new information, or even just of a whim; it means to change our way of thinking about and responding to the world. It is a long training taking much effort. It may use such tools as myth and ritual and meditation and the cultivation of mindfulness; maybe even music and sex and drugs and extreme physical experiences. Anything that might bring about what Crowley called "the art and science of changing consciousness at will", what Wilson called "self-induced brain change"; the understanding of what the Buddha meant when he said "all things are made by mind".

In a handy label - Zen Paganism.