Saturday, November 05, 2005

Bodhisattva

The Buddha's first words, upon his emergence from his mother's womb supposedly were: "I have come to free all mankind from suffering." Noble ideal, huge undertaking, partial success, perhaps inexacting apprehension of the true cause of suffering. I have come to believe, and hence am engaged writing this blog, that the cause is BOTH the architecture AND the Architect of material existance.
In Tibetan Buddhism, a Bodhisattva is anyone who is motivated by compassion and seeks enlightenment not only for him/herself but also for everyone else, and, for some, a vow not to 'cycle-off' the 'Wheel of Dharma" until ALL can do so has been taken and motivates incarnation after incarnation.
Now the smart thing for anyone who awakes within a lifetime like this to a sense of 'samshara' (being-in-the-world-but-not-of-the-world) is to, as quickly as possible,
analyse - to the best of one's abilities - the quickest way to accomplish this aim, and, to borrow a phrase from a famous redneck comic: "Git 'er done"! So am I attempting to do.
Part of my particular path to the conclusion that our existential raison d'etre is inextricably linked with the oppressive need of our Souls for Growth, as it were, and that need causes each and every life, for each and every one of us, to be an enforced sacrifice of such contumaciously wrought circumstance that one must conclude that both the very nature of corporeal manifestation, AND whatever it was that concatenated such a system into being was seriously lacking in moral and ethical reflection, was the study of Christianity from a "X-Files" point of view.
The idea that the (perhaps) fractal nature of the impingement of beings BEYOND the perception of our universe we are capable of with our 5 senses necessarily imbues them with some sort of "divinity" is a solopsism so insidious and pernicious as to poison our understanding of the possible gallimaufry of multifarious permutations of descriptions of reality that could be used as lenses for our understanding of our place in the omniverse and said omniverse's structure itself.
Just as we are (self-conscious) beings, trapped by the constraints (Laws) of Physics at the bottom of a gravity-well, kept from apprehending the preponderant nature of the universe (space is a mostly a vacuum, matter is an exception to this rule, etc. etc.) by our spatial limitations, so I believe, are our minds constrained by a gravity-well of inculcated religious and philosophical limitation from perceiving the truer (that is, more in conformance with a preponderance of the data) implications bidden by the designed trap that our limited sensorium has placed us within, if we let the hubris of conditioned delusions-of-grandeur blind us to the possibilities inherent within a world view that posits the possibility of existance beyond our self-awareness, and the (I believe) PROBABILITY that these "ineffable" existances could be using us, say better KEEPING us, in durance vile, for the glorification of their own ends.
Well, "To each his onus.", I have always said, and thus and so, I guess I have my work cut out for me - but I shall endeavour to persevere. The simplest truths seem the hardest to communicate (QUICK: explain gravity to yourself RIGHT NOW, in your head! . . . Did you involve any inverse square ratios in your explanation? And if so, how and why?) . . . see what I mean?