Unlike the religions of Abraham, Buddhism does not divorce speculative thought from psychology. In fact, it is by means of psychology, under the general heading of meditation or psychical introspection, in particular, that the speculative side of Buddhism is confirmed.
We pause briefly to mention that psychical introspection, in the practice of Buddhism, takes place when the mind is fixed on the direct comprehension of itself, such that it purely beholds itself being no longer blocked by its own generations (i.e., phenomena). And because of this emphasis, Buddhism is not estranged from human suffering knowing, instead, how to alleviate it through meditation which apperceives the non-suffering element.
Without the psychological element any religion is flying off into the realms of unbridled imagination which can only be supported by conceptual or formal thought that is undergirded by a baseless, fanatical belief. This leaves members of religion vulnerable to manipulation and evil which Buddhism personifies as Mara the Evil One who is ever seeking to preserve the illusory Five Aggregates against the spiritual world of the Tathagata.
In this context, ‘evil’ begins with an excessive lack of psychological introspection leaving one open to powerful or partial influences of various instinctual drives, cultural trances (Charles Tart), simplistic religious beliefs, and ideologies—all of them headed in the direction of psychopathology and evil.
If, for example, we are to believe that God exists, where is the psychological confirmation for us of his existence? Where is a meditation described that might reveal God as independent of the meditator’s subjectivity, a subjectivity that is egocentric? Do we look for him within? And how far do we look within since there might be different strata? And just what are the pitfalls? (Buddhism describes 50 false enlightenments.) Having no such meditation some side in principle behind Tertullian’s delusional dictum: “It is believable because it is absurd, true because it is impossible.”
In the case of the Buddha, when he was a Bodhisattva trying to win awakening, he confirmed the speculative thought of his teachers with meditation and finding their meditative state incomplete, dug introspectively deeper into himself until he awakened (sambodhi). At no time did the Buddha take up a doctrine by a teacher that was without that teacher’s specific meditative proof which he had to master—although it was eventually found to be inadequate.
Turning to the Buddha’s own doctrine (dharma), if the Buddha says the following which is taken from the Mahâmâlunkya Sutta:
“He turns his mind from these things [five aggregates]; and when he has turned his mind from these things he focuses his mind on the immortal element thinking: ‘This is the real, this the excellent, that is to say the tranquilizing of all the activities, the casting out of all clinging, the destruction of craving, dispassion, stopping, nibbana (nirvana).”
We are to understand that the foregoing only points us to where we should look by means of introspection; that there is, in fact, an immortal element that we can see and verify for ourselves with the right amount of effort. A Buddhist need not be like Tertullian. In fact, Buddhism would be absurd without psychical introspection to confirm the Buddha’s teaching which plumbs the depth of the psyche, eventually leading to the immortal, i.e., nirvana.
This brings up a fundamental problem with Western thought, in general, that it hasn’t evolved, sufficiently, as it might. It has largely ignorned or is simply ignorant of meditation and its unique language having never, by all appearances, set foot in this arcane territory. It has not the slightest understanding that meditation can penetrate through the rind of phenomena entering into the expansiveness of an infinite medium that the Buddha described as undying.
To reiterate, Western thought hardly has a language, or the same, an established literature, which expresses the depth of the introspective path, its profundity, or its fruits. As for the religions of the West, they are oversimplifications, that is, “truth in a tale” that “shall enter in at lowly doors.”
Furthermore, Western thought doesn’t understand the actual roots of psychopathology which, from a lack of introspective practice and accomplishment, makes the mind vulnerable to evil. And certainly the West has cooked up much evil such as the Cold War and before that two great wars, not to mention the Holocaust and other slaughters of this scale. Those who can rationalize such evil (and that is what it is) are psychopathological in every sense of the term. There is nothing to defend—the West has produced much evil. And only by adopting a Buddhist like religion in which meditation is the means of proving its speculations, can the West hope to leave its evil empire behind. Worth adding, Einstein once said “The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion” that “should transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology.” That religion Einstein said is Buddhism.
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