Nature and spirituality

Jeroen

It struck me a while ago that most religious views of the spiritual are useless obfuscations at best. For example, the Muslim heaven has rivers of wine. The Christian heaven and hell are places among the clouds and in the lava. These are things which are derivative, they are present on Earth and some enterprising priest has extended them into the spiritual world. Yet language brings these concepts to us as if they were truths. “Don’t you know what heaven is? Let me tell you…” They are cheap tricks to convince and frighten primitive people.

If you accept these things are all the dreams of other people and largely illusory, you are just left with places which are more pleasant and places which are less pleasant. If you wish to truly understand the world, a walk among the woodlands has more to teach you than the words of priests. You would see that everything is continually transforming, trees becoming soil becoming bushes, clouds becoming rain becoming streams, plains becoming mountains before being worn down again, and that all form is purely temporary.

It seems to me only reasonable that in a spiritual world there might be a similar principle, that acting beings get recycled from role to role according to the whims of the energetic winds. That as beings become more sophisticated they pass through a series of natural challenges to do with how well evolved they are, which are intended to teach them lessons.

Jeroen

For us here on Earth, the most important lessons to learn seem to be about love. When we are young, we need love to survive, a baby without physical affection dies. Later in life, love becomes about reproducing the species, it is born of physical attraction and later becomes a meeting of minds and hearts. When mature, love seems to become about care.

How we cope with the mind in this process is a great challenge, different people seem to go about it in different ways. Until finally we learn to leave the fascination with thoughts behind and stop identifying with the mind, and become more about being. Then the question is to laugh, and to celebrate.

Zen seems to me, a perfect expression of the no-mind. To live in being is to live in Zen. I like the example of Ryokan, who was a Zen poet and calligrapher and would occasionally go to drink sake with local farmers. I’m also reading Osho’s stories about Zen, the book Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing about Sosan’s verses is nice.

Jeroen

One thing that I have found important is to become aware of our deep connection with beauty. You can look at a rose, and examine petals and thorns and its heart, and miss the beauty of the whole rose. In a way, this beauty is a message from the beyond. It speaks to us, about the essence of life, about the sense of things in the unconscious mind.

There are many things that are beautiful — women, sailing ships, horses — and each contains a drop of the essence. You gain an appreciation for things, and this tendency to appreciate, this sense of beauty in what you see is an echo of the essence of things. It is the heart calling to you about your purpose in life.

Learning to recognise what makes your heart sing, what inspires you, is an important step. It is only then that you can work to bring these things into your life, can explore or multiply them. In a way these things breathe life into our vision of the world. Things are ordinary, and seeing the beauty in them makes them magical.

lobster

Dear Friends of Buddha Nature,
Naturalness and nurturing natures. As we know, we can learn from animals, plants and interactions. This experiential interdependence flows through our experience and potential to unfold. Some examples:

• Not everything grows, some dukkha in nature feeds the next generations
• Live, love and life dances
• Birds sing for trees, so too are we clusters of transcendence
  https://www.inspiringchildren.org/mental-tools-embrace-nature

Jeroen

One of the earliest experiences we have is being born, which introduces ideas of separation and a hostile world. Being expelled and separated from the mother who is warm, cozy, all we know of existence; then the trauma of the birth canal, and the smacked bottom to induce breathing, that’s the start we get to life.

From there we learn about living life as a separate being, first as a dependent child, and later as a self-sufficient adult, and then again as a dependent old person. At the same time we learn about autonomy, discovery, love, attraction. If you are lucky you learn to let go early, and you experience the best of life without much suffering and heartbreak.

The transcendent experience of oneness that so many hear of, are enchanted by and go in search of, is actually part of relatively few lives. The whole mystical experience is a rarity, and naturally only found by those few ‘wounded healers’ who in primitive societies would become shamans.

how

@Jeroen

or perhaps that transcendent experience of oneness is actually an underlying constant in life that the human condition simply obfuscates with its own storyline. Perhaps no sentient being gets to escape from the occasional leakages through such delusionary coverings and our respective "practices" are just a spiritual preparatory triaging to face such experiences, no matter how subtle or transformative each bleed through may turn out to be.

Jeroen

@how It is possible, but is there evidence for it in Nature or the natural human experience? Even the spiritual thirst that we here share may be something that is relatively rare, only a few people in every hundred feel drawn to the stillness of Zen gardens. And of all those who feel drawn to it, only a few experience more than a few echoes of oneness.

I think love and beauty and attraction are universal to all humans. That is why I chose to write about them in this thread. Perhaps the search for self-knowledge and truth is as well, that at a certain point in life most people come into contact with it. Perhaps there are many more such themes.

Jeroen

Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet on religion:

And an old priest said, Speak to us of Religion.
And he said:
Have I spoken this day of aught else? Is not religion all deeds and all reflection,
And that which is neither deed nor re­flection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?
Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupa­tions?
Who can spread his hours before him, saying, "This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?"
All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.
He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.
The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.
And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage. The freest song comes not through bars and wires.
And he to whom worshipping is a win­dow, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn.
Your daily life is your temple and your religion.
Whenever you enter into it take with you your all.
Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute,
The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight.
For in revery you cannot rise above your achievements nor fall lower than your failures.
And take with you all men:
For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower than their despair.
And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.
Rather look about you and you shall see him playing with your children.
And look into space; you shall see him walking in the cloud, outstretching his arms in the lightning and descending in rain.
You shall see him smiling in flowers and waving his arms in trees.

It makes a good point, that in a way the spiritual search is fruitless, for the answer is all around, and worshipping is done at all times. This is well suited to the natural way of spirituality, which does entreat us to see the divine in all things.

IdleChater

@Jeroen said:
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet on religion:

And an old priest said, Speak to us of Religion.
And he said:
Have I spoken this day of aught else? Is not religion all deeds and all reflection,
And that which is neither deed nor re­flection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?
Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupa­tions?
Who can spread his hours before him, saying, "This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?"
All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.
He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.
The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.
And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage. The freest song comes not through bars and wires.
And he to whom worshipping is a win­dow, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn.
Your daily life is your temple and your religion.
Whenever you enter into it take with you your all.
Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute,
The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight.
For in revery you cannot rise above your achievements nor fall lower than your failures.
And take with you all men:
For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower than their despair.
And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.
Rather look about you and you shall see him playing with your children.
And look into space; you shall see him walking in the cloud, outstretching his arms in the lightning and descending in rain.
You shall see him smiling in flowers and waving his arms in trees.

It makes a good point, that in a way the spiritual search is fruitless, for the answer is all around, and worshipping is done at all times. This is well suited to the natural way of spirituality, which does entreat us to see the divine in all things.

Well, maybe.

I find it curious that we entertain Gibran on a Buddhist forum, with no tie-in to Buddhist teachings.

If we are to see the divine in all things, where, then, should we look?

Personally, I'm skeptical. The existence of "divine" is provisional at best, and to search for it, would prove futile.

Jeroen

@IdleChater said:
I find it curious that we entertain Gibran on a Buddhist forum, with no tie-in to Buddhist teachings.

Well, if we were to only talk about Buddhist topics then it would be even more quiet around here than it otherwise is. So in the interests of liveliness I decided to range a little. Feel free to bring in more Buddhist topics if you like.

lobster

Personally, I'm skeptical. The existence of "divine" is provisional at best, and to search for it, would prove futile.

Ah ha! Just as I didn't think ...

Not only is the search for Nibanna and God futile, especially as they are all around and nothing special BUT ...

That which transcends also descends into existence, consciousness and an overflowering cup of Cha-cha dancing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fana_(Sufism)

All Hail the Buddha [Peace and Blessings Upon Her]

Jeroen

I don’t think any discussion of nature and spirituality would be complete without mentioning death, which is very much a part of life in nature. It is a curious phenomenon, because in a way the life of the body carries on — we are home to many kinds of bacteria, a micro biome, which start breaking down the organs, the skin, all the different parts of the body the moment that life departs.

That moment, when life ceases, is very unique among moments of life. The breath stops, the heart ceases to beat, the light of intelligence leaves the eyes. There is a kind of silence that descends, a hush that one rarely finds elsewhere. And that is as far as my experience of death has taken me.