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Maybe a discussion about magic thinking is appropriate so you know what I mean when I say it. Magic is when your mind is fooled by confusing correlation and causation. We all do it, because our brains are hardwired to learn from cause and effect. You stick you hand in a fire, you get burned. You don't stare at your hand and wonder why you suddenly felt pain. Your brain immediately forms a connection between the fire and your injured hand. Repeated instances of getting injured when you touch something hot only confirms this connection.
But suppose your child is sick and you pray to Buddha or God or whatever for the child to be healed. And the child gets better. Did the prayer heal the child? Or you desperately need money so you leave an offering at the shrine and soon after that you win a lottery. Did the offering bring good luck? Your mind wants to form those connections because that's what it was designed to do. It forms connections where none actually exist. It's a natural thing, and what I call magical thinking.
My grandfather came from the Appalachian hills, and had a bag of beliefs that we would call superstitions if we felt enlightened about it. He planted his potatoes only on days when there was going to be a full moon, for instance. He claimed it made the crops grow better. Someone, sometime in the past, had made a connection between a big, full moon and a good crop, and that's all it took. The fact that people who cared enough to arrange their planting by the moon also cared enough to take good care of their crops as they grew, watering and pulling weeds, only reinforced the magical connection. If you asked that planter the secret to their abundant harvest, they'd honestly tell you plant by the full moon.
Or light a candle at the nearest shrine, or leave an offering to the forest spirits, or whatever connection between random act and desired outcome exists in your mind. Magical thinking.
I try to investigate stuff not just based on natural mechanics but just in what makes sense to, or works for, me. I have a pretty good "sense" about things and I trust it. I think the concern with focusing ONLY on what is scientifically proven or in what is truly understandable is that there is a whole lot of stuff not accounted for, at least yet, by science and studies and logical explanation. Not that long ago, yoga and meditation were new age foo foo to the general public, at least in the US. Now study after study is proving the effects and starting to come into the why. But had you been interested in it, say, 30 years ago and were looking for proof of the "natural mechanics" you wouldn't have found it. You would have had to experiment yourself and see what results you got based on how you felt and the effects on your life. So I still do that with things. Sometimes I find they work, and sometimes not. But that is my only true basis-what works for me in ways I can measure as far as how I feel and react and so on-because science can't prove it all. And perhaps never will be able to.
I always want to know the how and why of everything. So it is hard for me when it's not always there. But once I know something works, I start to look for the how and why, and increasingly, those answers are there.
@karasti said: @lobster the lady on that webpage you linked needs to settle down. Religions don't do anything. People who misinterpret and live out of their ignorance and delusions do. And her blaming Trungpa for Canada electing Trudeau? She clearly is a conservative woman who wants nothing to do with emerging political upheaval. She talks with disdain about "confusing gender-fluid times" and other nonsense. I don't trust a word she says, she should go meditate and stop ranting.
No doubt.
Magical thinking takes many forms. Devotees defend magical Rinpoches, conservatives think Trump is a political savour, lobsters think the only good fish is a dead fish, scientists think only objective experiences are valid and so on ...
In dharma we observe our reactions to our thoughts, our feelings, our assumptions, our experience. Well that is the plan ...
In one sense I don't trust a word said anywhere, even if it temporarily makes sense. For example when a child we believed in magic. In fact our sense of wonder was encouraged. Aspects of wonderment are useful, aspects of critical thinking are useful and sometimes even magic has its use ...
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
I would certainly expect the whole stream of western Buddhism to be quite strongly in favour of Buddhism as a science of mind, and canted against forms of magical thinking. In many ways the 17th century thinking of the Enlightenment period and the scientific method still lives quite strongly, and that was responsible for a strong decrease in magical thinking in Europe and other places.
I think that that aligns well with the Buddha's stance away from magical thinking and in favour of a deeper inquiry into suffering - what would have happened if on stepping out of his palace Prince Siddhartha Gautama had accepted that the diseased could be cured through a magical spell, or the dead brought back to life in a magical heaven? Instead he choose to pursue the cessation of suffering, through years of asceticism and eventually the Middle Way.
I'm not denying that there is a place for ritual. Ritual can be highly effective in focussing the subconscious mind, and can help in breaking down the ego or creating community or many other phenomena.
But I think the lesson of magic in Europe's dark ages and medieval periods is that it is ultimately a fiction, a form of insanity, an expectation of the world to function in illogical ways which cannot be sustained by evidence. So I think that monks espousing magical thought and traditions ought to know better, and have let their compassion drag them into an error in teaching.
There is countless phenomena out there that points out how little control we actually have over our existence. In the absence of a better understanding, I call that magic.
While the/identity/selfish self or the ego's dream would absolutely love to exert some control over any of this affecting phenomena,
my Zafu just yawns at the prospect.
The choice is one of priorities over
trying to gain control of the channel changer for your dream
or
just working on the waking up from that dream.
@Kerome said:
I'm not denying that there is a place for ritual. Ritual can be highly effective in focussing the subconscious mind, and can help in breaking down the ego or creating community or many other phenomena.
I feel that your whole post is well reasoned and pragmatic.
My reaction and use of magickal thinking makes use of very powerful inclinations of the mind. Not every mind just us deluded daka and dakini types ...
For example I still chant to symbolic personifications of qualities (yidams).
And unless we're giving the impression we are picking on places like Thailand and Indonesia, think of how bugnuts people here go over the latest image of Jesus on a wall stain or piece of toast at times. Lately there was the sort-of image of a cross in an ultrasound of a woman's womb that got passed around the internet.
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
@Kerome said:
I'm not denying that there is a place for ritual. Ritual can be highly effective in focussing the subconscious mind, and can help in breaking down the ego or creating community or many other phenomena.
I feel that your whole post is well reasoned and pragmatic.
My reaction and use of magickal thinking makes use of very powerful inclinations of the mind. Not every mind just us deluded daka and dakini types ...
For example I still chant to symbolic personifications of qualities (yidams).
I will take that as a compliment, although it probably also means my subconscious is stubborn and hard to harness with any subtle indications via mantras and chants
Pragmatism has its disadvantages, though I am pleased to say I am also sometimes partial to the odd flight of fancy, occasionally involving an irrational liking for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
@Cinorjer said:
Maybe a discussion about magic thinking is appropriate so you know what I mean when I say it. Magic is when your mind is fooled by confusing correlation and causation.
This very problem is at work in the research done by cognitive scientists on the brains of Buddhist masters, and its reception by promoters of "scientific" or "secular" iterations of Buddhist practice, or "mindfulness" as such. Example: Chade Meng-Tan, the mindfulness wallah of the world's largest defense contractor (Google), claims that mindfulness meditation as he presents it (which is the same as how Kabat-Zinn presents it) made the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard the "happiest man in the world." But Ricard doesn't practice mindfulness per MBSR, or as Kornfield or Levine teach it. He practices Buddhism, which includes a terrific number of practices that summon the ridicule of those who wish to divest Buddhism of its dreaded Asiatic "cultural trappings," these sorts of methods actually:
Or light a candle at the nearest shrine, or leave an offering to the forest spirits, or whatever connection between random act and desired outcome exists in your mind. Magical thinking.
Put differently, it's just as plausible to claim that what made Ricard the happiest man known to science is his practice of offering, "magical thinking" as you say," rather than the magical thinking of the cultural trapping now called "mindfulness."
This discussion reminded me of a short video I recently watched by Master Sheng-Yen. He comments that our prayer beads are used for concentration and should be treated with respect. In minute 4 of the clip he discusses the topic of people thinking there is something particularly efficacious about items that have been blessed. He illustrates that he gets sick and has bad luck so how can something ward off calamities just because he touches it.
The video is on Youtube. Master Sheng-Yen, 'Prayer beads and Buddha images aren't decoration or accessories.' (Published 29 Dec., 2012)
The use of ritual, symbolic empowerment can be and indeed should be skilful. I feel I was taught well that yidams were symbolic enactments, dismissed with a finger snap.
We may sweat, cheer and generally 'suspend disbelief' whilst watching and being inspired and maybe even empowered by a fictional character. If we think Buffy the Buddha Killer will save us from the vampires when hell surfaces in reality, we are going too far into the imagined.
If we treat ritual objects with respect, including monks and rinpoches, the respect is a skilful means ... Worth no more than a finger snap ...
In the words of my favourite pseudo-Buddha, 'Wake up!' ... or did I imagine that being proposed ...
1
DavidA human residing in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Ancestral territory of the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Mississauga and Neutral First NationsVeteran
It's hit and miss. Our brains want to find the connections, cycles and patterns even if they don't really work but it's a trade off because some of them actually do.
As a species we have carried magic (more appropriately, magical thinking) and ritual through tens of thousands of years. Such repetition may have genetically predisposed the species so that concepts like luck and karma (good and bad), fortune telling (astrology) and commanding the forces of nature and attempting to influence weather (Moses and the Red Sea or the famliar indigenous rain dance) are shared and well recognized ideosyncrasies of human perception of conventional reality. Shamanic practices may originate as early as the Paleolithic, predating all organized religions, and certainly as early as the Neolithic period. The earliest known undisputed burial of a shaman (and by extension the earliest undisputed evidence of shamans and shamanic practices) dates back to the early Upper Paleolithic era (c. 30,000 BP) in what is now the Czech Republic. So lighting that candle with intention (or any ritual for outcome) is really a very ancient tradition that has probably contributed more to dukkha through the millenia than is calculable due to magic's extremely high failure rate. Nevertheless, the perceived success of magic and ritual have persisted to the present. Abracadabra.
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
@lobster said:> The use of ritual, symbolic empowerment can be and indeed should be skilful.
I don't bother with all that anymore, it seems to detract from the present moment.
There is much to like about the clean, sparse aesthetic of Zen. However, I am human enough to realise that I have built up my own ritually-empowered world around me... In the middle of the night I drink tea because it calms me, I enjoy looking at the wooden figures from my woodcrafting days on the mantelpiece, I burn incense when I need a lift.
I have not as of yet followed a particular discipline of Buddhism. I tend to think of myself as a secular or post modern Buddhist. One of the things that drew me to Buddhism is that I didn't have to believe in an imaginary deity, or as I put it, "I don't have to believe in any imaginary B.S." That being said, I still like to believe that there's a little bit of mystery and magic left in the world. I don't want Buddhism to turn into just science and psychology. An example would be Pure Land Buddhism. I don't believe that by chanting Namu Amita Butsu, he'll guide me to a pure land when I die, however it's a nice thought and I find myself wanting to believe. Some beliefs are just comforting. I have Tibetan prayer flags around my house because it's a nice thought and they comfort me.
I have not as of yet followed a particular discipline of Buddhism. I tend to think of myself as a secular or post modern Buddhist. One of the things that drew me to Buddhism is that I didn't have to believe in an imaginary deity, or as I put it, "I don't have to believe in any imaginary B.S." That being said, I still like to believe that there's a little bit of mystery and magic left in the world. I don't want Buddhism to turn into just science and psychology. An example would be Pure Land Buddhism. I don't believe that by chanting Namu Amita Butsu, he'll guide me to a pure land when I die, however it's a nice thought and I find myself wanting to believe. Some beliefs are just comforting. I have Tibetan prayer flags around my house because it's a nice thought and they comfort me.
'Love is like Magic and it always will be,
For Love still remains Life's Sweet Mystery!
Love works in ways that are wondrous and strange
And there's Nothing in Life that Love cannot change!
Love can transform the most common place
Into beauty and splendor and sweetness and grace!
Love is unselfish, understanding and kind,
For it sees with its Heart and not with its Mind
Love gives and forgives, there is nothing too much
For Love to heal with its Magic Touch!
Love is the language that every heart speaks,
For Love is the one thing that every heart seeks!
I agree with @herberto . What a relief it was to finally identify with a faith without having to compromise my deep down belief that everything is "magical" without having to be inherently magic. I think ritual is nice, even beautiful and meaningful, but superstition is not going to get me (personally) anywhere closer to nivana. When I was a child I flounced about with Wiccan theology for a while, which as you may already know is deeply steeped in ritual and talismans (fancy religious knife! fancy religious candle! fancy religious bowl!). None of that got me to where I was going any better than my short traipse through Christianity. They were chapters in my life for which I am grateful, but they are too fancy for me. People with ADHD can't handle that much distraction, lol!
@RuddyDuck9 said:
When I was a child I flounced about with Wiccan theology for a while, which as you may already know is deeply steeped in ritual and talismans (fancy religious knife! fancy religious candle! fancy religious bowl!). None of that got me to where I was going any better than my short traipse through Christianity. They were chapters in my life for which I am grateful, but they are too fancy for me. People with ADHD can't handle that much distraction, lol!
Aaah I still have my athame and pentacles. They make me smile It was nice to put a feminine face to God for a while. I've still got my Wiccan friends, they are a great bunch of people, it just didn't meet all my spiritual needs - although I stuck at it for 15 years.
I was a Jewitch for a long time before becoming a JuBu
@dhammachick I still have all my things, too! I can't give them away for some reason. I think it's just another reminder of when I was young and wild and free. Plus they make pretty decor. :P I still have my collection of female mother goddesses from across the globe, too. As you said, it's lovely to be surrounded by a feminine power like that. Now I can relate to KuanYin. I keep a sculpture of her in my home, though I do not worship her. Really appreciate the idea of her though. The concept of airing out your frustrations, and then just letting them go off to a positive place. She teaches me the value of compassion.
@dhammachick said: I've still got my Wiccan friends, they are a great bunch of people, it just didn't meet all my spiritual needs - although I stuck at it for 15 years.
I didn't realise that. Could you say what you found lacking in Wicca in the end? I have a soft spot for Paganism but I can't get my head around believing in gods and stuff.
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
@dhammachick said: I've still got my Wiccan friends, they are a great bunch of people, it just didn't meet all my spiritual needs - although I stuck at it for 15 years.
I didn't realise that. Could you say what you found lacking in Wicca in the end? I have a soft spot for Paganism but I can't get my head around believing in gods and stuff.
This is the problem I have with most religions - gods and demons don't seem very in tune with the natural and scientific worlds, which are the two major domains I've always relied upon.
Even Buddhism has its odd niches which I have difficulty with, like the stories of the Buddha's past lives, chunks of the Tales of King Milinda with people just appearing on the slopes of a mountain, magical powers, prayers to Buddha's for various favours, the Buddhist cosmology.
It's rich and magical and perhaps on some level comforting, but I feel an effort should be made to keep it in tune with pragmatic common sense, or it should be made clear that it is illustrative, like poetry, but not real.
Could you say what you found lacking in Wicca in the end? I have a soft spot for Paganism but I can't get my head around believing in gods and stuff.
This is essentially how I felt, too. I felt like a little kid pretending to be in a movie. I wanted more sincerity than that. I'm okay with ritual as long as it actually means or represents something. What I was doing then was fairly shallow in meaning. I had the moves but not the music, if that makes sense.
One thing I still love about Paganism is the symbolism. I couldn't really jive with thinking there were in actuality a bunch of gods and goddesses floating around. As @Kerome mentioned... it's not very scientific at it's core, and I am pretty into science and informed knowledge. But the idea that we can be thankful of things in our world for what they are and what they represent is very cool. It's like the Bodhisattvas... KuanYin is not really a Goddess to me, but a very useful symbol to help guide my meditations and mindfulness. The same with chants. All good tools. The mythology is beautiful from a literature perspective, too. Didactic texts give a priceless look into the culture of the time and place the myths come from. ((You don't want to see my book shelves!))
I'm a bit of an amateur naturalist ( not naturist! ) and love being outside and looking closely, I've also worked with the traditional elements quite a bit. I looked at this kind of thing: https://humanisticpaganism.com/religious-naturalism/
but it didn't seem to add anything to what I was already dong.
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
@SpinyNorman said:
I'm a bit of an amateur naturalist ( not naturist! ) and love being outside and looking closely, I've also worked with the traditional elements quite a bit. I looked at this kind of thing: https://humanisticpaganism.com/religious-naturalism/
but it didn't seem to add anything to what I was already dong.
You might like biopantheism then. I came across it a while ago and it makes a certain kind of sense...
I've looked at quite a lot of ideas, the problem is that the ideas always seem to get in the way of directly connecting.
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited June 2016
That is certainly true... One of the things I took away from Osho's commune is how incredibly heartful people there were. The standard greeting was a hug and a smile, people worked very hard, and in the time they had to play they really connected heart-to-heart. It's a pity something like that is so hard to find these days.
But I think Buddhism does ok, in its emphasis on the sangha and on doing as well as learning. It is one of the things that attracted me to it, that there is a path for action. And streams like Bernie Glassman's socially-engaged Buddhism really appeal as well.
I think you have the medium working against you as well, the Internet is full of theorists, people who think and talk rather than do.
@dhammachick said: I've still got my Wiccan friends, they are a great bunch of people, it just didn't meet all my spiritual needs - although I stuck at it for 15 years.
I didn't realise that. Could you say what you found lacking in Wicca in the end? I have a soft spot for Paganism but I can't get my head around believing in gods and stuff.
Sorry for the delay in answering.
I found for me, it wasn't the God/dess that I found difficult. It was the growing, incessant "You can't tell me what to do" mentality which came with the birth of the internet. I became involved in Wicca pre Internet age (showing my own age here ) so you had to actually do the grunt work to find others, work at being invited to attend circles and self initiation was a completely foreign concept. Then the movie "The Craft" came out and suddenly EVERYONE was a Wiccan and/or Witch.
The real sense of spirituality and connection to the Divine was superseded by everyone wanting to change their hair colour, eye colour (although Revlon had a good range of hair dye at the time and hello, contact lenses!) and levitate. Once that connection was gone, it was very hard to find again. And those who WERE genuinely interested in the spiritual path of Wicca would argue amongst themselves over what was or wasn't right. It was and still IS to a large degree, pretty damn pathetic.
I confess the duality and wishy-washy interchanging of deities and their "roles" was a bit much for me. In contrast, I like the certainty of Buddhist practises. The 4 Noble Truths, the Eightfold Noble Path, they're constant. The texts are reliable. You have none of that in Wicca anymore and it's a real downfall of Wicca and also many Pagan paths where adherents are too PC to say when shit stinks.
Comments
Maybe a discussion about magic thinking is appropriate so you know what I mean when I say it. Magic is when your mind is fooled by confusing correlation and causation. We all do it, because our brains are hardwired to learn from cause and effect. You stick you hand in a fire, you get burned. You don't stare at your hand and wonder why you suddenly felt pain. Your brain immediately forms a connection between the fire and your injured hand. Repeated instances of getting injured when you touch something hot only confirms this connection.
But suppose your child is sick and you pray to Buddha or God or whatever for the child to be healed. And the child gets better. Did the prayer heal the child? Or you desperately need money so you leave an offering at the shrine and soon after that you win a lottery. Did the offering bring good luck? Your mind wants to form those connections because that's what it was designed to do. It forms connections where none actually exist. It's a natural thing, and what I call magical thinking.
My grandfather came from the Appalachian hills, and had a bag of beliefs that we would call superstitions if we felt enlightened about it. He planted his potatoes only on days when there was going to be a full moon, for instance. He claimed it made the crops grow better. Someone, sometime in the past, had made a connection between a big, full moon and a good crop, and that's all it took. The fact that people who cared enough to arrange their planting by the moon also cared enough to take good care of their crops as they grew, watering and pulling weeds, only reinforced the magical connection. If you asked that planter the secret to their abundant harvest, they'd honestly tell you plant by the full moon.
Or light a candle at the nearest shrine, or leave an offering to the forest spirits, or whatever connection between random act and desired outcome exists in your mind. Magical thinking.
I try to investigate stuff not just based on natural mechanics but just in what makes sense to, or works for, me. I have a pretty good "sense" about things and I trust it. I think the concern with focusing ONLY on what is scientifically proven or in what is truly understandable is that there is a whole lot of stuff not accounted for, at least yet, by science and studies and logical explanation. Not that long ago, yoga and meditation were new age foo foo to the general public, at least in the US. Now study after study is proving the effects and starting to come into the why. But had you been interested in it, say, 30 years ago and were looking for proof of the "natural mechanics" you wouldn't have found it. You would have had to experiment yourself and see what results you got based on how you felt and the effects on your life. So I still do that with things. Sometimes I find they work, and sometimes not. But that is my only true basis-what works for me in ways I can measure as far as how I feel and react and so on-because science can't prove it all. And perhaps never will be able to.
I always want to know the how and why of everything. So it is hard for me when it's not always there. But once I know something works, I start to look for the how and why, and increasingly, those answers are there.
No doubt.
Magical thinking takes many forms. Devotees defend magical Rinpoches, conservatives think Trump is a political savour, lobsters think the only good fish is a dead fish, scientists think only objective experiences are valid and so on ...
In dharma we observe our reactions to our thoughts, our feelings, our assumptions, our experience. Well that is the plan ...
In one sense I don't trust a word said anywhere, even if it temporarily makes sense. For example when a child we believed in magic. In fact our sense of wonder was encouraged. Aspects of wonderment are useful, aspects of critical thinking are useful and sometimes even magic has its use ...
oṃ amogha vairocana mahāmudrā maṇipadma jvāla pravarttaya hūṃ
I would certainly expect the whole stream of western Buddhism to be quite strongly in favour of Buddhism as a science of mind, and canted against forms of magical thinking. In many ways the 17th century thinking of the Enlightenment period and the scientific method still lives quite strongly, and that was responsible for a strong decrease in magical thinking in Europe and other places.
I think that that aligns well with the Buddha's stance away from magical thinking and in favour of a deeper inquiry into suffering - what would have happened if on stepping out of his palace Prince Siddhartha Gautama had accepted that the diseased could be cured through a magical spell, or the dead brought back to life in a magical heaven? Instead he choose to pursue the cessation of suffering, through years of asceticism and eventually the Middle Way.
I'm not denying that there is a place for ritual. Ritual can be highly effective in focussing the subconscious mind, and can help in breaking down the ego or creating community or many other phenomena.
But I think the lesson of magic in Europe's dark ages and medieval periods is that it is ultimately a fiction, a form of insanity, an expectation of the world to function in illogical ways which cannot be sustained by evidence. So I think that monks espousing magical thought and traditions ought to know better, and have let their compassion drag them into an error in teaching.
There is countless phenomena out there that points out how little control we actually have over our existence. In the absence of a better understanding, I call that magic.
While the/identity/selfish self or the ego's dream would absolutely love to exert some control over any of this affecting phenomena,
my Zafu just yawns at the prospect.
The choice is one of priorities over
trying to gain control of the channel changer for your dream
or
just working on the waking up from that dream.
I feel that your whole post is well reasoned and pragmatic.
My reaction and use of magickal thinking makes use of very powerful inclinations of the mind. Not every mind just us deluded daka and dakini types ...
For example I still chant to symbolic personifications of qualities (yidams).
There's no escaping the magic.
And unless we're giving the impression we are picking on places like Thailand and Indonesia, think of how bugnuts people here go over the latest image of Jesus on a wall stain or piece of toast at times. Lately there was the sort-of image of a cross in an ultrasound of a woman's womb that got passed around the internet.
I will take that as a compliment, although it probably also means my subconscious is stubborn and hard to harness with any subtle indications via mantras and chants
Pragmatism has its disadvantages, though I am pleased to say I am also sometimes partial to the odd flight of fancy, occasionally involving an irrational liking for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
This very problem is at work in the research done by cognitive scientists on the brains of Buddhist masters, and its reception by promoters of "scientific" or "secular" iterations of Buddhist practice, or "mindfulness" as such. Example: Chade Meng-Tan, the mindfulness wallah of the world's largest defense contractor (Google), claims that mindfulness meditation as he presents it (which is the same as how Kabat-Zinn presents it) made the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard the "happiest man in the world." But Ricard doesn't practice mindfulness per MBSR, or as Kornfield or Levine teach it. He practices Buddhism, which includes a terrific number of practices that summon the ridicule of those who wish to divest Buddhism of its dreaded Asiatic "cultural trappings," these sorts of methods actually:
Put differently, it's just as plausible to claim that what made Ricard the happiest man known to science is his practice of offering, "magical thinking" as you say," rather than the magical thinking of the cultural trapping now called "mindfulness."
Related: Thread.
This discussion reminded me of a short video I recently watched by Master Sheng-Yen. He comments that our prayer beads are used for concentration and should be treated with respect. In minute 4 of the clip he discusses the topic of people thinking there is something particularly efficacious about items that have been blessed. He illustrates that he gets sick and has bad luck so how can something ward off calamities just because he touches it.
The video is on Youtube. Master Sheng-Yen, 'Prayer beads and Buddha images aren't decoration or accessories.' (Published 29 Dec., 2012)
The use of ritual, symbolic empowerment can be and indeed should be skilful. I feel I was taught well that yidams were symbolic enactments, dismissed with a finger snap.
We may sweat, cheer and generally 'suspend disbelief' whilst watching and being inspired and maybe even empowered by a fictional character. If we think Buffy the Buddha Killer will save us from the vampires when hell surfaces in reality, we are going too far into the imagined.
If we treat ritual objects with respect, including monks and rinpoches, the respect is a skilful means ... Worth no more than a finger snap ...
In the words of my favourite pseudo-Buddha, 'Wake up!' ... or did I imagine that being proposed ...
It's hit and miss. Our brains want to find the connections, cycles and patterns even if they don't really work but it's a trade off because some of them actually do.
I don't bother with all that anymore, it seems to detract from the present moment.
As a species we have carried magic (more appropriately, magical thinking) and ritual through tens of thousands of years. Such repetition may have genetically predisposed the species so that concepts like luck and karma (good and bad), fortune telling (astrology) and commanding the forces of nature and attempting to influence weather (Moses and the Red Sea or the famliar indigenous rain dance) are shared and well recognized ideosyncrasies of human perception of conventional reality. Shamanic practices may originate as early as the Paleolithic, predating all organized religions, and certainly as early as the Neolithic period. The earliest known undisputed burial of a shaman (and by extension the earliest undisputed evidence of shamans and shamanic practices) dates back to the early Upper Paleolithic era (c. 30,000 BP) in what is now the Czech Republic. So lighting that candle with intention (or any ritual for outcome) is really a very ancient tradition that has probably contributed more to dukkha through the millenia than is calculable due to magic's extremely high failure rate. Nevertheless, the perceived success of magic and ritual have persisted to the present. Abracadabra.
There is much to like about the clean, sparse aesthetic of Zen. However, I am human enough to realise that I have built up my own ritually-empowered world around me... In the middle of the night I drink tea because it calms me, I enjoy looking at the wooden figures from my woodcrafting days on the mantelpiece, I burn incense when I need a lift.
I have not as of yet followed a particular discipline of Buddhism. I tend to think of myself as a secular or post modern Buddhist. One of the things that drew me to Buddhism is that I didn't have to believe in an imaginary deity, or as I put it, "I don't have to believe in any imaginary B.S." That being said, I still like to believe that there's a little bit of mystery and magic left in the world. I don't want Buddhism to turn into just science and psychology. An example would be Pure Land Buddhism. I don't believe that by chanting Namu Amita Butsu, he'll guide me to a pure land when I die, however it's a nice thought and I find myself wanting to believe. Some beliefs are just comforting. I have Tibetan prayer flags around my house because it's a nice thought and they comfort me.
I have not as of yet followed a particular discipline of Buddhism. I tend to think of myself as a secular or post modern Buddhist. One of the things that drew me to Buddhism is that I didn't have to believe in an imaginary deity, or as I put it, "I don't have to believe in any imaginary B.S." That being said, I still like to believe that there's a little bit of mystery and magic left in the world. I don't want Buddhism to turn into just science and psychology. An example would be Pure Land Buddhism. I don't believe that by chanting Namu Amita Butsu, he'll guide me to a pure land when I die, however it's a nice thought and I find myself wanting to believe. Some beliefs are just comforting. I have Tibetan prayer flags around my house because it's a nice thought and they comfort me.
Here is the magic plan:
Magic Of Love - Poem by Helen Steiner Rice
'Love is like Magic and it always will be,
For Love still remains Life's Sweet Mystery!
Love works in ways that are wondrous and strange
And there's Nothing in Life that Love cannot change!
Love can transform the most common place
Into beauty and splendor and sweetness and grace!
Love is unselfish, understanding and kind,
For it sees with its Heart and not with its Mind
Love gives and forgives, there is nothing too much
For Love to heal with its Magic Touch!
Love is the language that every heart speaks,
For Love is the one thing that every heart seeks!
I agree with @herberto . What a relief it was to finally identify with a faith without having to compromise my deep down belief that everything is "magical" without having to be inherently magic. I think ritual is nice, even beautiful and meaningful, but superstition is not going to get me (personally) anywhere closer to nivana. When I was a child I flounced about with Wiccan theology for a while, which as you may already know is deeply steeped in ritual and talismans (fancy religious knife! fancy religious candle! fancy religious bowl!). None of that got me to where I was going any better than my short traipse through Christianity. They were chapters in my life for which I am grateful, but they are too fancy for me. People with ADHD can't handle that much distraction, lol!
This site might be of interest:
http://secularbuddhism.org/
Aaah I still have my athame and pentacles. They make me smile
It was nice to put a feminine face to God for a while. I've still got my Wiccan friends, they are a great bunch of people, it just didn't meet all my spiritual needs - although I stuck at it for 15 years.
I was a Jewitch for a long time before becoming a JuBu
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@dhammachick I still have all my things, too! I can't give them away for some reason. I think it's just another reminder of when I was young and wild and free.
Plus they make pretty decor. :P I still have my collection of female mother goddesses from across the globe, too. As you said, it's lovely to be surrounded by a feminine power like that. Now I can relate to KuanYin. I keep a sculpture of her in my home, though I do not worship her. Really appreciate the idea of her though. The concept of airing out your frustrations, and then just letting them go off to a positive place. She teaches me the value of compassion.
I didn't realise that. Could you say what you found lacking in Wicca in the end? I have a soft spot for Paganism but I can't get my head around believing in gods and stuff.
This is the problem I have with most religions - gods and demons don't seem very in tune with the natural and scientific worlds, which are the two major domains I've always relied upon.
Even Buddhism has its odd niches which I have difficulty with, like the stories of the Buddha's past lives, chunks of the Tales of King Milinda with people just appearing on the slopes of a mountain, magical powers, prayers to Buddha's for various favours, the Buddhist cosmology.
It's rich and magical and perhaps on some level comforting, but I feel an effort should be made to keep it in tune with pragmatic common sense, or it should be made clear that it is illustrative, like poetry, but not real.
Could you say what you found lacking in Wicca in the end? I have a soft spot for Paganism but I can't get my head around believing in gods and stuff.
This is essentially how I felt, too. I felt like a little kid pretending to be in a movie. I wanted more sincerity than that. I'm okay with ritual as long as it actually means or represents something. What I was doing then was fairly shallow in meaning. I had the moves but not the music, if that makes sense.
One thing I still love about Paganism is the symbolism. I couldn't really jive with thinking there were in actuality a bunch of gods and goddesses floating around. As @Kerome mentioned... it's not very scientific at it's core, and I am pretty into science and informed knowledge. But the idea that we can be thankful of things in our world for what they are and what they represent is very cool. It's like the Bodhisattvas... KuanYin is not really a Goddess to me, but a very useful symbol to help guide my meditations and mindfulness. The same with chants. All good tools. The mythology is beautiful from a literature perspective, too. Didactic texts give a priceless look into the culture of the time and place the myths come from. ((You don't want to see my book shelves!))
I'm a bit of an amateur naturalist ( not naturist! ) and love being outside and looking closely, I've also worked with the traditional elements quite a bit. I looked at this kind of thing: https://humanisticpaganism.com/religious-naturalism/
but it didn't seem to add anything to what I was already dong.
You might like biopantheism then. I came across it a while ago and it makes a certain kind of sense...
I've looked at quite a lot of ideas, the problem is that the ideas always seem to get in the way of directly connecting.
That is certainly true... One of the things I took away from Osho's commune is how incredibly heartful people there were. The standard greeting was a hug and a smile, people worked very hard, and in the time they had to play they really connected heart-to-heart. It's a pity something like that is so hard to find these days.
But I think Buddhism does ok, in its emphasis on the sangha and on doing as well as learning. It is one of the things that attracted me to it, that there is a path for action. And streams like Bernie Glassman's socially-engaged Buddhism really appeal as well.
I think you have the medium working against you as well, the Internet is full of theorists, people who think and talk rather than do.
Sorry for the delay in answering.
I found for me, it wasn't the God/dess that I found difficult. It was the growing, incessant "You can't tell me what to do" mentality which came with the birth of the internet. I became involved in Wicca pre Internet age (showing my own age here
) so you had to actually do the grunt work to find others, work at being invited to attend circles and self initiation was a completely foreign concept. Then the movie "The Craft" came out and suddenly EVERYONE was a Wiccan and/or Witch.
The real sense of spirituality and connection to the Divine was superseded by everyone wanting to change their hair colour, eye colour (although Revlon had a good range of hair dye at the time and hello, contact lenses!) and levitate. Once that connection was gone, it was very hard to find again. And those who WERE genuinely interested in the spiritual path of Wicca would argue amongst themselves over what was or wasn't right. It was and still IS to a large degree, pretty damn pathetic.
I confess the duality and wishy-washy interchanging of deities and their "roles" was a bit much for me. In contrast, I like the certainty of Buddhist practises. The 4 Noble Truths, the Eightfold Noble Path, they're constant. The texts are reliable. You have none of that in Wicca anymore and it's a real downfall of Wicca and also many Pagan paths where adherents are too PC to say when shit stinks.
That's just my personal take on it anyway.
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@dhammachick You were Wicca before Wicca was cool?
No honey I'm just old
^^True dat.^^ (Takes one to know one....)