I have been a practicing Buddhist for 25+ years. During that time, my practice has deepened, I am one with the true Buddha nature inside me (well, almost), and I share my faith and knowledge with others through my Buddhist blog, www.thepracticalbuddhist.com, and through the several books I have written.
It has been reaffirming for my faith to learn that the mystical traditions of all three Abrahamic faiths and great religious thinkers all basically teach the same thing as Buddhism: that suffering is universal and that we suffer because we have fallen away, out of touch, with the divinity that is within each of us; consumed instead with the ways of the world and the lessons it has taught us. And that is is our responsibility, and possibility, to reconnect with that divinity and thus end our suffering.
Most recently, I found that reaffirmation in reading an article in The New Yorker, about Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish anti-establishment Christian thinker. The article notes that he said that everyone is in despair and that if someone thinks they are not, they are lying to themselves. Interestingly, in a recent video of mine, “The Mind - Suffering Connection,” I begin by noting that many viewers will say that they don’t suffer. After asking them some questions, I say, “You may be in denial, but you suffer.”
Kierkegaard says that only by acknowledging our suffering can we begin to understand that suffering is “defiance of God,” or in modern theology, defiance of the divinity that is within each of us. And that we can be freed from that despair or suffering only by giving ourselves over entirely to God. The Zen monks who taught me put the same point this way, “by surrendering your ego-mind to your true Buddha nature,” or in the language of 12-step, “by turning your will and your life over to the care of your true Buddha nature/higher power.”
He wrote, as the monks taught, that the responsibility of choice - to believe or not believe, to act or not act - is always individual. This is beyond difficult: to overcome our training, our life experience. But it is possible and the responsibility is ours to do so.
He also said that life can only be understood backward, but it has to be lived forward. In Buddhism, we learn that we do what we do because of our learned experience: the emotions, judgments, cravings, and attachments that form our ego-mind. This is the past that for most people not only explains their current lives but controls their future. Only if one frees oneself from the past, from the intervention of the ego-mind, can one move forward in a way which is one’s best interest, free of the burden of the past.
The last point I will make in this comparison is that Kierkegaard says that as one begins the spiritual path it is complex and then becomes more and more simple. That is the experience I have found in my Buddhist practice. As the practice deepens, as my connection with my true Buddha nature deepens, life becomes more simple because I am not pulled this way and that by the past, by my ego-mind. Instead, I know that life is just the way it is. There is no obsession with future; only the present moment is real. And I know I will be safe regardless what life throws my way because I have returned home, and will always return home, to my true Buddha nature.
And so how sad, how proof-positive of the fallen nature of man (including the men of organized religion) that instead of focusing on these universal truths and the fact that all religions at their core teach the same thing … and that we thus are all one … man and organized religion has used religion as a divisive instrument, a way to control their followers and gain and maintain power by creating an us v them world view. How opposite of true spirituality is this! How perverse and dark. Our religious leaders are an obstacle to our spiritual growth, not the light they should be.
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