Ever Wonder Why the World Is the Way It Is?

We live in a dysfunctional world.  Violence and conflict are all around us … within ourselves, within families, within societies, between nations.  How often do I hear people asking, “Why?”

The typical answer is some version of, “That’s just life,” or “It’s human nature.”  But that’s too easy and facile an answer.  The truth is more complicated and enlightening.  While it’s true that it is the way it is, it is not human nature; it’s human development.  That means it’s not inevitable; people can change.  We have a choice.

All religions depict life as a constant struggle between light and darkness.  In former times, that fight was often spoken of as being between God and the Devil. 

These days one hears little about the Devil for the same reason that most people don’t talk much about God.  The existence of these deities as external forces that control our lives, to whom we can on the one hand pray for deliverance or on the other bargain with for what we desire, just flies in the face of both our life experience and scientific knowledge.  Many have thus lost their belief in the God of our forefathers, if not declaring God dead.

But another concept of God is very much alive for those who walk the path of spirituality/mysticism … whether it’s Buddhism, Hinduism, Jewish Kabbalah, Islamic Sufism, or Christian Gnosticism.  Their truth is that the Buddha/God essence is within each of us from the moment of our birth and remains there throughout our life.  

But that divine essence becomes hidden from us over the years, buried by successive layers of our ego-mind’s reaction to life’s experiences.  We become wounded by those experiences.  We become lost to our true selves.  And so we walk the path to reconnect, to rediscover our true selves.  Our salvation comes from within us, not from some outside force.  And so the eternal struggle is seen as being between our heart/soul and our ego-mind.

While we learn that the Buddha was tempted by Mara, the Buddhist equivalent of the Devil, I have never, I believe, heard the Devil mentioned when speaking of the challenge of healing ourselves, of ending our suffering. The reference is rather to freeing ourselves from the control of our ego-mind, it being the true source of our suffering, not the events we experience.  As the Buddha said, to free ourselves of the conceit “I am” is the ultimate freedom.

Recently, however, I felt the presence of the Devil.  I was having dinner with a friend who knows he has to limit his consumption of alcohol.  But he said he wanted a second glass of wine that night.  And that after dinner he wanted to go to some bars and have a beer like he does when he travels with other friends of his.  Knowing I would disapprove and say “no,” the expression on his face when he talked was a mocking one, sly.  I was aware of the strangeness of it at the moment, but I didn’t recognize it.  Only when I meditated the next morning, did I realize that I had been in the presence of the Devil.

I now understand that just as in some religions the Devil is thought to be a fallen angel,  in Buddhism, as well as the mystic traditions, the Devil can be equated with our ego-mind, which is our internal fallen angel/Buddha/God nature.  We have become so wounded repeatedly over the years that the ego-mind has no trust, no faith, and is consumed by fear; it has become cynical about the world around us.  It has overpowered our true self to “protect” us; we are in its control.  And so the Devil, our own Devil, is inside each of us; it is the nature of our ego-mind.

Ernestine, the Flip Wilson drag character, used to say, “The Devil made me do it!” In comic strips, a person was sometimes portrayed with an angel sitting on one shoulder whispering in his ear and the Devil sitting on the other doing the same, being confused by the competing advice; a graphic depiction of our internal Devil as well as our internal God-essence.   We have all experienced that.  So the concept is not foreign to our culture or experience.

I have written in previous posts how all the conflict and violence in the world, whether in the home, workplace, society or between nations is a result of the insecurity that man acquires from his life experiences.  (See my posts, “The Root of All Abuse and Violence - Insecurity” and “Insecurity as the Cause of Social Conflict and International War.”)  

That the ego-mind is not only filled with the fear, anxiety and self-centeredness (and often aggression) caused by insecurity but through continued wounding has acquired the lack of faith, trust, and cynicism of the Devil makes the dysfunction we observe all that more intractable.  And it explains the specter of evil that we see in all corners of the world.

This is why the world is the way it is.  It’s not because people are bad … there is no such thing as a bad person, just people who do bad things … or that humans are flawed.  It’s because our life experience has made us insecure and our ego-minds have reacted in a way which makes us a threat to our own well-being and the well-being of those around us.  The greater our insecurity, the more of a threat we become.  At some point we become the Devil incarnate.

If one wants to save the world from itself, this insight offers a possible agent of change.  It may not only be very helpful in a practical way for those already struggling to free themselves from the control of their ego-mind, the control of their emotions and perceptions, it may encourage more people, both leaders and followers, to enter upon that path.

How?  We very much identify with our ego-mind.  Its feelings and perceptions are all we’ve known our entire life.  Even for those who walk the path of the spiritual/mystic traditions, while we come to learn that our feelings and perceptions are the cause of our suffering and are not a reflection of our true selves, the power of these feelings are often barely diminished because we find it hard to deeply disown them.  So powerful is the ego-mind.  

When push comes to shove, we always return to the perspective of our wounded self, our ego-mind.  We have not purged ourselves from its grip.  The roots in our self-perception go too deep.

Identifying the ego-mind with the Devil may be very helpful because that image does not conjure up “I.”  It conjures up instead trickery, deceit, doing something against one’s best interest, evil … which is in truth how the ego-mind operates and controls us.  

Most people, regardless their status in life, regardless their lack of spirituality, would not I believe want to self-identify with the Devil.  It thus may well open the door at least a crack to the light of their heart.  And encourage people to at least ponder walking the path in order to find the way to disown their ego-mind and say “no” to its guidance, thereby freeing themselves from its control and finding inner peace and happiness.

Each soul saved makes for a better world.  Religions have always taught that.  But now salvation rests with the individual, what he chooses to do with his life.  Whether he chooses light or darkness, peace or suffering, not with his belief in a God external to himself.  This spirituality is of the present moment.   Its reward is here and now in a life of peace and happiness, not a Heaven to be experienced after death.

God Is Not Dead, We Just Look for God in the Wrong Places

There have been many pronouncements that God is dead.  The most famous perhaps is that of Friedrich Nietzsche, although it is widely misunderstood.  If you look beyond the quoted phrase, Nietzsche was saying that we have killed God.  That we have taken away everything that was magical in God’s creation and are left with nothing to moor us.  

“But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?”

This is not the statement of a Godless man, but one who realizes that our modern knowledge makes it impossible to believe in the God of the Old Testament and that we must find something else to believe in, to moor us.  

Darwin’s theory of evolution as well as the many discoveries of modern science regarding the history of the world just are not compatible with the Bible.  In a word, one cannot believe that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and that man is several million years old .. even modern man is about 50,000 years old … and believe in the God of Genesis.

But others have argued a more fundamental point, as do I.  The history of life on Earth has proven that the concept of a God to whom one prays and who is said to answer prayers and control life on earth is an illusion, purely a creature of belief.  So even if one looks at the Bible with a grain of salt and says that God guided the creation of the Earth and all that is upon it over this expanse of time, the God that we’ve been taught to believe in just doesn’t exist.

What kind of God would have allowed slavery?  What kind of God would have allowed the holocaust and all the other gross and minor inhumanities of man.  What kind of God would for some reason make a child suffer and die?  The questions go on and on.

In the old days, and even today, many people answer these questions, not willing to see the facts as evidence that such a God doesn’t exist, with the classic, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”  Because if they did not believe in God, what would they believe in?  As Nietzsche said, God is their mooring. 

The answer is not so much a “new” conception of God, but one that has existed almost as long as the world’s major religions … that God, that the Devine, is to be found in each of us.  It’s just not a concept that has received much exposure. 

The mystical traditions of all three Abrahamic faiths ... Christianity (Gnosticism), Judaism (Kabbalah), and Islam (Sufism) ... as well as Buddhism and Hinduism contain the teaching that what we think of as being ourselves, our ego, is not our true self.  That instead our true self is variously defined as our heart, our true Buddha nature, our Divine essence.  Our suffering results from our true self having been buried under years of learned experience at the hands of our family, peers, and culture, of our thus identifying with and being under the control of our ego.  Unfortunately, these truths are not stated in the Old Testament or Koran nor are the flocks of these religions taught this truth.  How sad.

Although Christ did not speak to this issue, some in the early church, such as Paul, and later Augustine, and then the Reformation, put forth the concept of original sin … that we are all born sinners because of Adam’s not heeding God’s word in the Garden of Eden and being cast out.  And that only God, or Christ, can bring salvation.  This concept became central to the teaching of the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations.

But as I noted in my post, “Our Culture Is the Serpent in the Garden of Eden,” I believe that this take on the story is wrong.  What then is the real lesson of the Garden of Eden?  

As told in Genesis, in the paradise that God created, man and woman were naked, but they were not embarrassed by their nakedness and they were one with all things.  The only thing forbidden to them was to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.   They lived in a world where there was no “knowledge” of right or wrong, good or bad, no cravings, fear, or strife.  Interestingly, the paradise of Genesis is virtually identical with the Buddhist Nirvana.

But they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The point is not so much that God’s commandment was broken and that they thus sinned and were cast out, but that because it was broken in this specific way, they lost their innocence and the world would never be the same.  

The story does relate dramatically, metaphorically, that man would be separated from the Tree of Life, from the knowledge of his true self, his God-essence, having gained knowledge of good and evil.  But not that man for all eternity will be burdened with original sin and be born a sinner.  That is the spin that Christianity put on the story.  And as a result, millions of people in each generation have believed, because they were so taught, that they were born sinners.  Not a healthy self-concept.

The teaching of the opposing universal truth … that our ego is not our true self but that the God/Buddha essence is … is found in the teachings of the Buddha, in Sufi literature such as, The Art of Being and Becoming, in the Kabbalah, in the teachings of Gnosticism, and in the Bhagavad Gita.  Contrary to the fear of Nietzsche and many others that man will be left rudderless without their belief in the old God, contrary to the proof they see in our modern culture of the death of the old God and the resulting waywardness of people, God has always been alive and well inside each and every one of us.  

But it is for us to rediscover it, to uncover it, and allow it to embrace us and transform us.  For example, according to Kabbalah, “every soul is pure in essence and the only salvation is to become enlightened (i.e. to remember the truth of who and what we really are). … Salvation is the process of clearing out whatever obstructs our manifestation of the concealed divine image. … Kabbalah leads to the conclusion that ultimately we must rely on ourselves - for we alone have the power to save ourselves.”  It is to our heart we must look for guidance, not our ego-mind.

If one were to ask why most of organized Christianity adopted the doctrine of original sin, and why in Judaism and Islam the teaching that the God-essence is in each of us is mostly confined to their mystical branches, the answer might be found in that statement of Kabbalah just quoted … “we must rely on ourselves, for we alone have the power to save ourselves.”  Organized religion could well have felt that that teaching would reduce its power and influence.   Or it could be that organized religion didn’t have faith that we, ordinary people, can save ourselves and thus felt we needed something external to believe in.

Having found Buddhism in my middle age and walked the path for more than 20 years now, I can attest that freeing ourselves from our ego-mind is not an easy matter.  It involves changing the habit-energies of a lifetime; changing everything we have come to believe about who we are.  But it is possible, with discipline and good teaching, to find the Buddha nature, the God essence, inside each of us.  First comes belief in the teaching, then meditation and practice, and ultimately self-realization.

God is alive and well.  The God-spirit is in each of us, no matter how high or low, no matter how pure or consumed with evil thoughts and acts.  We have all been led astray by the serpent of learned insecurity and the culture of “want.”  We have been programmed by our life experiences to act and think as we do.  But that is our ego, not our true self.  There is no such thing as a bad person; just persons who do bad things.

If we all sought to find the Divine in each of us, the world would be a very different place.

The Bible - God’s Word or Man’s?

“What,” the reader may well ask, “is a post on this topic doing in this blog?”  Many of the problems that the world experiences, both today and over the millennia, are a direct result of religious teaching, or the cynical use of religious teaching.  Why does religion continue to hold such sway when in many ways the power of religion is weaker now than ever?  (See my post, “How Faith in Consumerism/Technology Replaced Faith in God.)  

Orthodox believers of Christianity and Judaism believe that the Bible, the Old Testament, is God’s revealed word.  Their certainty in their perspective of right and wrong, their self-righteousness, and their disapproval of all who do not follow God’s word/law as revealed in the Bible is based on that belief.  For Muslim’s, the same is true for the Koran, but this post deals solely with the Bible.  (I am not in this post going to discuss how these very same people/groups typically pick and choose those sections of the Bible they choose to follow and those they choose to ignore, which if it’s all God’s word I don’t understand, but that is another matter.)

Until the 20th century, this was actually the generally held belief …because all believers were orthodox.  And it still is the position of most Christian denominations and Orthodox Judaism.  While many Christian believers nevertheless adopted a more modern view of the Bible during the 20th century which did not interpret it literally or see it as God’s word, in recent decades those that adhere to orthodoxy in Bible interpretation have been increasing in numbers, voice, and power.

But is the Bible God’s word?  Recently, I came across a passage from Genesis that to me proves that the Bible, or at least parts of it, is not God’s word revealed to man but is man’s word.  The passage is Genesis 1:28.  “And God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish in the sea, and over the foul in the air, and over every living thing that moveth on the earth.”  [emphasis added]

There in a nutshell is the spiritual basis for what has become man’s relationship with himself and the rest of planet Earth.  Man is the controlling force on Earth.  Everything else that God placed on Earth is there for man’s benefit and use.  End of story.

Later in Genesis, after having seen the wickedness of man and sending the flood to destroy all living beings save those in the ark, God repeats this message with an even stronger statement.  “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air, on all that move on the earth, and on all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hand. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs.”  Genesis 9:1-3

How convenient for man that God gave him such license.  Could the contemporary despoilers of the Earth come up with any more powerful and unquestionable language to spiritually legitimize their actions?

If one believes this is God’s word, well, there’s probably no arguing the point.  It either is or it isn’t.  You either believe or you don’t.

But even if you believe in God, it should be legitimate to ask whether the Bible is indeed God’s word as revealed to man, or whether it is just man’s word.  Thus the question arises … if God created the world and all that is in it, whether in 7 days or over millennia, would God have had such little regard for all the life and beauty that He created, for the miracle of life, that He would essentially say to man, do with it what you will, subdue it, rule it?  Especially having just had experience of what wickedness man is capable of.

I think not.  I would argue that if the Bible were indeed God’s word revealed to man, it would say something more like, “Be fruitful and multiply but always be mindful of your duty to your fellow man, your fellow creatures, and the bounty of the earth that I have created.  Every living thing must be honored and respected; no life shall be taken by you except when in need.  Use the bounty of the earth for your benefit but in so doing you must honor and respect it; any action by you should leave the earth whole and pure.”

Now that sounds like something God would say.  But the Bible doesn’t say that because it would be inconvenient for man.  It would not give him free reign over the creatures of the earth and its riches.

A believer would probably counter that because God created man in His image and is the highest life form, the language in Genesis is consistent.  Even assuming that, however, I still would argue that God would not be so cavalier with the life and bounty that He created.  But in fact this is just another example of the Bible being man’s word.  What conceit and brilliance to make the creator of the universe and man one in physical form.  And not just a man but a white man!

I would thus argue that, assuming there is a God, the Bible is not God’s word revealed to man but man’s word, at least in part.  That as such, the Bible is not sacrosanct or infallible.  Important parts of it are instead an exercise of man’s duplicity in his desire to use the power of faith to uplift himself and control all else.

The Bible has in fact been so used.  It has been a powerful weapon of control over the ages, and not just of God’s other creations but of men as well.  It has been interpreted and used to sanction man’s perspective … no, better put, the perspective of the male establishment … everything from the divine right of kings to slavery, the secondary status of women, and the pariah status of gays.  Such interpretations and misuse of the Bible have caused millennia of suffering for mankind.

But if you subscribe to my reasoning, that time is past.  People may choose to follow certain customs because it pleases them to do so.  But they cannot say that it is God’s word.  People may, for example, hate gays, but they cannot say that it is God’s word.

Instead, if one is a true believer, you will find in your heart a respect and compassion for all of God’s creatures and creations.  I must note that as a Buddhist I am not a believer, but I do have respect and compassion for all creatures and all elements of the universe.

None of what I have written here is to gainsay that there is without question much spiritual teaching in the Bible that mankind would be wise to follow.  Whether these lessons are the product of holy men or the revealed word of God should not matter.  The West, however, has always needed their spiritual guides to have a private line to God, either as His prophet or as His son or, these days, just being reborn.  It is that connection that legitimizes their teaching.  In the East, the Buddha did not claim divinity or that he was a vessel for God’s word.  It is not the source but the wisdom of the teaching that should be of paramount importance.

The Bible should be used as a tool to lift man from his earthly ego and open his eyes and heart to his true spiritual nature, his goodness.  The essence of the Bible is the Golden Rule … do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  

Indeed, Christian believers could do no better than follow the popular slogan of the 90s, “What would Jesus do?”  Regardless whether dealing with personal matters, or larger issues of domestic or foreign policy, the Bible’s central lesson of not doing harm to others but rather help them would result in a far more just and humane world.  The Bible should not be misused, in decidedly unspiritual ways, to subjugate human beings or the environment.

Our Culture Is the Serpent in the Garden of Eden

As told in Genesis, in the paradise that God created, man and woman were naked, but they were not embarrassed by their nakedness and they were one with all things.  The only thing forbidden to them was to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.   They lived in a world where there was no knowledge of right or wrong, good or bad.  Interestingly, the paradise of Genesis is virtually identical with the Buddhist Nirvana.

But once they ate the fruit of the tree, they became aware of and were embarrassed by their nakedness.  They now had knowledge of value judgments; they were no longer innocent.  They lost God’s favor and were forced out of the garden into a world full of the frustrations of cravings, fear, and strife.

The Abrahamic faiths’ take on this story is that man is a sinner because he violated God’s commandment.  And that women are the causal source of sin because it was Eve who listened to the serpent and tempted Adam to eat the fruit; it is thus also a cautionary tale regarding sexual temptation.  Man can only be saved by obeying God, which is to obey the multilayered moral and ritual strictures of His religion (take your pick as to which one).  

But if one looks at the story with fresh eyes, without all the layers of religious interpretation by rabbis, monks, imams, and others, a different lesson takes shape.

The real lesson here is that the world of God is the world of innocence, where there is no good and evil.  There is no evil because there is no desire for what one does not have.  There is no good because man does not compare himself to others.  There is no good or evil because man is one with himself and all things.  This is the world of freedom from the known.  The point is not so much that God’s commandment was broken, but that because it was broken, mankind lost its innocence and the world was never the same.

Speed forward several millennia to the current age.  The world is filled with serpents, those who seek to entrap mankind with the knowledge of good and evil, of beauty versus ugliness, of every duality one can create.

The consumer culture on which our capitalist economy depends is based on people being manipulated by marketing into wanting more of what the masters of the world want them to crave and into thinking that a product will in some way give them entry to a better life by satisfying that craving.  We have all been taught that happiness comes from having what we don’t have and thus we have become creatures controlled by craving.

The political culture is based not on bringing people together but by dividing them into opposing camps.  Often fomenting ill will and at times even hatred towards those “others,” thus again manipulating the populace.  Political rhetoric today, such as it is, appeals mostly to the emotions, even when it is put in a form which sounds rational.

Even the prevailing religious cultures provide no refuge.  Religion, which theoretically should be the main advocate for peace on earth and goodwill towards all, instead has over the millennia been perhaps the major source of strife among mankind.  It has been, together and in concert with nationalism, the greatest divider and thus the greatest source of conflict.  And how convenient to fight others, exploit others, dominate others in the name of promoting God’s law, when in truth it is always about promoting the power of nations and individual men.  And to the extent that the fight was against “savages,” ironically those who were being “saved” often lived a life and had a culture much closer to the garden of eden than the warriors of religion.

Towards its own, religion has never really been a force to bring mankind back to the state of grace that existed in the garden of eden.  Instead, it has created a system of fear, using its own concept of good and evil to control its flock and build power and influence.  

In truth, though, none of this should be surprising.  Religion is after all, despite its protestations to the contrary, a product of man, not of God.  If it were the latter, why would there be so many different religions, all at odds with each other?  

Is there then no force in the world to help mankind return to a state of innocence, which is its birthright, and live in peace?  The only force I am personally familiar with is found in the teachings of the Buddha.  His teachings seek to enable man to perceive that all his suffering is caused by what he has learned from family and culture and that all this learned experience is empty of any intrinsic existence and has no inherent value.  When he perceives these truths, he experiences all things without the intervention of thought and emotion ... he is once more free of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  And when he reaches that state, all suffering and doubt cease.  (I must acknowledge that I am a practicing Buddhist.)

The Buddha was a historical person.  The Buddha saw his role as relieving mankind’s suffering by putting him back in touch with his true pure nature, thus ending his craving and bringing him peace.  Jesus sought to achieve a similar aim by putting man back in God's grace.

But even here, the teachings of the Buddha are one thing ... Buddhism as an organized religion can at times be something quite different, witness the Buddhist mobs doing harm to Muslims in Myanmar, or even at times vying groups of Buddhist monks fighting with each other.  These are cases of men being Buddhists in name only.  They have strayed far from the teachings of the Buddha.

Indeed all religions ... including Judaism, Christianity, Islam ... have at their core the basic moral teaching of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you and most sought in their own way to bring mankind back to a state of grace because they are all based on the teachings of truly holy men.  But the basic teachings of most religions also created an us v them culture, and in the hands of less holy men the religious establishment has turned this aspect into the dominant theme of our world.

If we want to free ourselves from having tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, if we want to experience peace and happiness, there is only one way, and that is to turn our back to the dominant culture and follow the simple truths of the teachings of the Buddha and the other religions, while disavowing any teaching that your religion is the only path to God.

One final note ... Eden was a place here on Earth, not a paradise one accessed in heaven upon death.  While there is no way, given the dominant forces and the conditioning of mankind, to ever achieve that state of innocence again here on Earth, we can each in our own small way create waves of Eden that spread out from each of us.