Ornoth

Major milestones don’t come as frequently after 18 years of meditation practice, but this month provided a big one in my burgeoning role as a teacher: my first time having the honor of offering the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts.

Taking the Refuges & Precepts is the most fundamental Buddhist ceremony, and is frequently offered at meditation retreats.

The Three Refuges are a public statement of confidence in the historical Buddha as a regular human who came to a profound and useful understanding of how the human mind works; the Dhamma, or teachings he gave based on that understanding; and the Sangha, the community of like-minded practitioners. It’s helpful for meditators to relate to these vows as more descriptive of how one feels and where they are currently at in their practice, rather than something proscriptive that someone else is imposing upon them.

How important these vows are in the context of your practice, the specific technicals details of what they mean, and the consequences of breaking them are entirely up to the individual. You can view these as a solemn public statement that you are “A Buddhist”, or you can simply consider them an unnecessary holdover from uncomfortably devotional Asian Buddhist practices, or anything in-between. The Refuges & Precepts are only as solemn as you want them to be.

The Five Precepts are voluntary ethical practices that prompt the practitioner to increase our awareness of the skillfulness of our thoughts, speech, and actions, and to reflect on their impact upon our inner wellbeing.

The Precepts in particular can be uncomfortable for meditators brought up in the Abrahamic religions, where they can come across sounding like the Ten Commandments. However, the similarity is very shallow. A practitioner can adopt all, some, or none of the Precepts. In modern formulations, each Precept not only includes refraining from a particular unskillful action, but also cultivating a corresponding beneficial one.

In addition, taking the Precepts is completely voluntary, and there’s no requirement or pressure involved. They aren’t an edict imposed by some arbitrary external authority, but something one chooses for oneself because of the value and benefit one expects to receive by working with them. And there’s no one handing out punishments for failing to keep the Precepts.

Finally, the Precepts are vague, and (I believe) intentionally so. They’re meant to urge practitioners to look inside themselves and explore the subtleties of what their heart tells them is ethical and skillful. You would think that the precept to refrain from killing living creatures would be pretty straightforward, but our modern society raises complex questions in the ethical grey area that we must all face. Does that mean you can’t kill troublesome insects? Even accidentally? Does it rule out compassionate euthanasia or assisted suicide or abortion? Does it mean we cannot eat meat? And isn’t killing plants still killing a living being? And it’s the same with all the other Precepts; they encourage us to explore our own internal values and how well our real-world actions conform with them.

So that’s what the Refuges & Precepts are. Let’s get back to me…

I first took the Refuges & Precepts in April 2006 at Cambridge Insight, two years into my practice. I’d devoted enough time and study to be confident that I’d found a good home base for exploring how to live my life in accord with my inner values. When I took the Refuges & Precepts, it was deeply meaningful for me.

Over the years I gained knowledge and experience as a practitioner, then began slowly moving into teaching. The Refuges & Precepts were always in the back of my mind, and I hoped that someday I would be able to offer the ceremony to others. But I didn’t feel confident enough to volunteer until recently, now that I’ve got five years of regular teaching under my belt.

But it was the timing that forced my hand. I’ve always felt that the Refuges & Precepts should be offered in May, on the holiday of Vesak, which Buddhists observe as the day of the Buddha’s birth, his enlightenment, and his passing. When my Monday meditation group started lining up our May teaching schedule, they granted my request to take two consecutive weeks — May 9 and 16 – to offer the ceremony.

As the date approached, I sent out an introductory email to the group. After all, this would be very different from our usual sitting and dhamma talks, so I gave people fair warning and set expectations, and sent along the translation we’d be using. It’s worth noting that following the Covid-19 pandemic, the Monday group is still meeting in an online videoconference.

I think people heeded my warning, because only six people attended the first session, about half our usual size. My goal for the evening was to go over what the Refuges & Precepts are – the information I covered above – leaving plenty of time to answer questions. The explanation seemed sufficient, as there were only a couple questions.

The second session had seven people, as we lost one of the previous week’s attendees but gained two new ones. After a quick recap for the new people, I took a couple more questions, then segued into the actual ceremony.

In short, we read the Homage to the Buddha, the Refuges, and the Precepts. For each, I encouraged people to recite them with me in English, then I chanted the Pali version (and anyone who wanted to join in was welcome to), and rang the meditation bell. Because doing this online would have otherwise been a mess, I asked everyone to keep their microphones muted. It seemed to work out fine.

I wanted to follow CIMC’s custom of following the ceremony with a shared social celebration, and I’m really glad I did, because it helped me convey my joy and how special an event it was. For some people it was their first time ever taking the Refuges & Precepts; it was the first time the Monday group had offered them; it was, of course, also my first time offering them; it was the day of Vesak, the most important Buddhist holiday, observing the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and passing; and the Monday group’s fifth anniversary is close at hand. And talk about auspicious: there was even a lunar eclipse! It was a wonderful opportunity to share with each other the joy of our practice together, and seeing it bearing fruit.

I probably don’t need to repeat how pleased and honored I feel at being able to offer this ceremony for the first time to a dedicated group of friends and practitioners of varying levels of experience. For me, it was a resounding success, and a huge milestone in my meditation practice and my growth as a teacher.

Now I just have to turn around and teach Dependent Origination two days later to the other group I sometimes lead!

Back in October 2009, I kicked off a planned year of intensive metta (lovingkindness) meditation practice (start, finish). Metta is one of the four Brahmaviharas, also known as the Divine Abodes or the Immeasurables. These are four key virtues that are absolutely central to Buddhism.

About halfway through that year of practice, two things happened. The first was that I decided that upon the conclusion of my year of metta, I would then proceed to the next Brahmavihara, devoting another year of practice to karuna, or compassion.

The second thing that happened was that I learned of a document called the Charter For Compassion. Given that I was already planning to devote a year to cultivating compassion, that title immediately got my attention.

The charter was initiated by a writer in comparative religion named Karen Armstrong. She had won the TED Prize, which is given to someone who has a particular vision of how the world might be changed for the better. Armstrong’s goal was to craft a document based around compassion and the Golden Rule which all major religions could support, and use that universal agreement as a springboard for the growth of compassion worldwide.

Six months later, shortly after I began my karuna practice, I learned that Karen Armstrong was about to release a new book, entitled “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”. She also planned to stop in Boston on her book tour, so of course I reserved a ticket.

This post is mostly my review of that book, plus my reaction to her local appearance.

The title is an intentional reference to the “Twelve Step” program of Alcoholics Anonymous. While I don’t consider that a particularly auspicious linkage to make, it makes some sense. Armstrong asserts that the root of the problem is our preoccupation with our own ego, something that provides short-term gratification but is a long-term poison, and that letting go of our small selves is akin to recovery from an addiction.

Unfortunately, where I think the parallel fails is that the development of compassion doesn’t naturally lend itself to that specific number of steps. So the steps, which should be logical and flow from one to another, come across a bit muddled and not very clear.

One thing I was particularly interested in was her methodology for cultivating compassion. This is, after all, her how-to book, and I thought it would be fascinating to compare her approach to the Buddhist techniques I was already practicing in my metta and karuna practices.

Well, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of her methodology is Brahmavihara practice! The essence of the book is simply a description of these popular Buddhist techniques, with the few expressly Buddhist bits secularized. There was surprisingly little material drawn from other religions, other than historical corroboration. On one hand, that made me feel a bit of pride about the Buddhist approach, but it also disappointed me, in that it offered me few new insights.

Still, if it helps other folks cultivate compassion and introduces them to Brahmavihara practice, I’m all for it! Unfortunately, this is where the book seems to fall down.

My impression is that the book was written for an audience of highly self-motivated intellectuals. It reminds me of a yoga book that shows pictures of the asana poses, but doesn’t describe them or go into any detail about how to achieve them. For example, the entire chapter on mindfulness—Step 5—is only seven paragraphs long! In no way is that sufficient for a layman to master a technique that meditators spend years developing.

Armstrong’s descriptions of the steps are not very clear, and are described en passant. The call to action isn’t clear, and the more expansive background material that’s provided is mostly of historical interest rather than practical instructions. So it feels like the Cliff Notes version of a book that should offer much more, and more practical, instruction.

What would such a book look like? Imagine if this book were put out by Wiley Publishing, and entitled “Compassion For Dummies”. It would take the reader through clear, basic, step-by step instructions. It would be succinct, but provide all the information needed for an uneducated person to understand what to do at every step of the way. In short, it would read much more like a how-to guide than an historical treatise meant to prove that compassion is a part of all the world’s religions.

On one hand, I couldn’t be more supportive of any effort to promote compassion in our modern society. But on the other hand, in order to successfully bring about substantive change, this needs to be a very practically-focused how-to book—one that speaks equally to lawyers, nurses, florists, and cabbies—and I think even well-intentioned people will find it doesn’t support and guide them as much as they need.

One final bit of surreal synchronicity before I close the book.

The twelfth and final step in Armstrong’s book is “Step 12: Love Your Enemies”. Two pages before the end of that chapter, Armstrong tells the story of Aeschylus’s drama “The Persians”. The play, which was staged only eight years after the Greeks defeated the Persians, surprisingly treats the Persian leaders as tragic, sympathetic figures. Armstrong uses this story to show the Greeks’ attribute of honoring their enemies. The central Persian characters are King Darius, Queen Atossa, and their son Xerxes.

In my previous blog post, I reviewed a very different book, one which depicts the history of cancer. Forty pages into the book, the author describes the world’s second earliest mention of cancer: the description of a Persian noblewoman who, after hiding due to the perceived stigma of a bleeding lump on her breast, had a Greek slave cut her breast off. The noblewoman is Atossa, years earlier. She humored the slave who had excised her tumor thus: although the King Darius was planning a westward campaign, Atossa convinced him to turn east, against Greece, so that the Greek slave might return to his homeland. This is what subsequently precipitates the Persian defeat related in Aeschylus’ play, that is cited by Armstrong. How bizarre that both these books—one on cancer and another on compassion, two of the larger themes in my life at the moment—would mention the same obscure Persian rulers!

Turning this review back to the positive, one thing I can say is that Armstrong is much more engaging and persuasive as a speaker than she is as a writer. Her talk was interesting, confident, and pointed. It also featured a clear call to action: her response to critics who said that the focus on compassion was “preaching to the choir” was that she “doesn’t mind preaching to the choir because the choir aren’t singing”, implying that although most people give lip service to the Golden Rule, they do not personify it in their daily lives. It was a very enjoyable talk, and quite inspiring.

I was accompanied by my dhamma friend Kaela, who also seemed to enjoy the talk. It was held at a synogogue in Brookline: the first time I’d been in a synagogue in many, many years. To my utter frustration, the first three topics that were brought up in the Q&A period were, in order: circumcision, Hitler, and the Holocaust. While I’m sure these are sensitive issues in the Jewish community, that degree of preoccupation reinforces stereotypes of Jews which I consider unfortunate.

If you are interested in the topic of compassion, I’d recommend taking a look at Armstrong’s Charter For Compassion. Feel free to read her “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”, although I suspect it won’t be of immense practical use. Instead, I’d suggest looking into the original Brahmavihara practices, and one of the best books I can recommend for laypeople in that regard is Sharon Salzberg’s “Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness”.

Last Saturday our dharma book club discussed a book I recommended. This post captures some of that discussion, and why I chose the book I did.

When I was first asked to pick our next book, it was pretty obvious to me what my selection would be: Alan Watts’ “Wisdom of Insecurity”. Written in 1951 by a British scholar in comparative religions, it was one of the first books in English that brought Buddhism to an American audience, including the Beat Generation. More recently, it also played a pivotal role in my own movement toward Buddhism.

Back in 2002, I decided to review my existing philosophical beliefs. In high school, I’d adopted Existentialism after reading Sartre and Camus and Ionesco in French. It had appealed to me as a typically angst-ridden adolescent, but did it still serve me as I approached 40?

Coincidentally, I had just begun blogging here on LiveJournal, so as I spent the next year plowing through Nietzsche and Sartre, I was able to document many of my thoughts along the way. One of the most important of those thoughts came from the following passage in William Barrett’s 1958 book “Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy”, a book I read in January of 2003.

The Self, indeed, is in Sartre’s treatment, as in Buddhism, a bubble, and a bubble has nothing at its center. But neither in Buddhism nor in Sartre is the Self riddled with negations to the end that we should, humanly speaking, collapse into the negative, into a purely passive nihilism. In Buddhism the recognition of the nothingness of ourselves is intended to lead into a striving for holiness and compassion—the recognition that in the end there is nothing that sustains us should lead us to love one another, as survivors on a life raft, at the moment they grasp that the ocean is shoreless and that no rescue ship is coming, can only have compassion on one another.

That one somewhat convoluted reference was the first I’d heard of any commonality between Buddhism and Existentialism. Apparently, although the two philosophies began with similar assumptions—that there is no paternal creator god, that there is no inherent meaning in life, and that man has no permanent essence that survives his corporeal body—Buddhism offered something that I never got from Existentialism: a positive and ethical way of living one’s life based on those assumptions. That was the seed that got me thinking about looking into Buddhism. You can read my original comments on Barrett’s book here.

Just a few days later, I found myself browsing at a local Barnes & Noble. I’d scanned the entire Buddhist section and gotten nearly to the end of the alphabet without seeing anything that called out to me. Then I saw this tiny little paperback with an eye-searing lime green spine and the words “THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY - ALAN W. WATTS”. The cover blurbs seemed to intuit exactly what I’d spent the previous year looking for, so I immediately picked it up and blew through it.

Watts was the first author I’d read who, rather than restating the existential problem and wringing his hands, provided a rational and fulfilling way to respond to those conditions, without resorting to the self-delusion of unproven faith or its opposite extreme of pessimism and despair.

Even today, I’m stunned by the serendipity and good fortune I had to happen upon that exact book, because it was the perfect gateway to all the wisdom, development, and fulfillment that has followed. You can read my original reaction to the book here.

So that’s why I selected that particular book. It has an immense amount of personal meaning for me.

As you might expect, I was a little anxious about sharing something that personal with others, even my fellow meditators. That feeling was compounded by the long wait: three months passed between when I was asked to select a book and our discussion of it!

However, it didn’t take long to get a reaction. As soon as he learned of my selection, one of the attendees emailed back: “AMAZING selection!!!!!!! I will definately [sic] be there. I cannot express how amazing this book is to read.” Okay, that’s one solid vote of confidence!

Another one came a few weeks later. Socializing after a sitting at CIMC, one of the attendees showed me her copy of the book and mentioned that she was enjoying it. That’s two!

But as she flashed the book, its amazingly ugly lime green and purple patterned cover caught the eye of the woman who had officiated at the evening’s meditation. She recognized it immediately and also effused about it, indicating that, like me, it had played a big part in her coming to Buddhism. That really made me much more confident about the selection, since she’s a longtime practitioner who is known for managing CIMC’s “sandwich retreat”.

By the time our book club discussion came around, even the woman who hosts the group made a point of letting me know that she was enjoying the book. So I was able to go into the meeting without too much self-consciousness about it.

That’s not to say that the book received unalloyed praise. Watts’ language was both commended (in his choice of metaphors and images) and critiqued (in his tangential rants and sometimes inaccessibly complex sentence structure).

Eleven people attended the meeting, and about half had read the book, which is a bit better than normal. Let me gloss over a few of the topics that came up during the discussion.

One comment that was repeatedly made was how pertinent Watts’ words are today, even sixty years after he wrote them. He wrote about consumerism and how everyone was chasing the newest, best television. It stunned us that in 2010, we’re still being sold new and supposedly much better televisions, just as was the case back in 1951! He also anticipated our need for ever more rapid and imposing forms of entertainment. He could surely have been talking about last week in this passage:

There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down—traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.

We spent some time talking about how religious faith can be a comfort, but once it has been pierced by skepticism, you can’t ever restore that belief. That harkens back to my own feeling that you cannot simply decide what you believe; belief is not an object to be so simply controlled, and you can do little more than discover and perhaps indirectly influence what you believe. As one attendee put it: the challenge of Watts’ book is how to stay connected with modern reality in the absence of mollifying religious faith, without being scared.

Another big theme that people pulled out was that our feelings of insecurity are the direct result of the fact that we want security. If you want something, by definition it is something that you feel you do not have now, so the more desperately we seek security, the more insecure we feel. This was likened to the concept of the “power of attraction”, where one must be careful to cultivate the vision of having what one wants, not the wanting itself, because focusing your energy on the wanting presumably reinforces your yearning and the absence of the thing you’re after.

Our discussions also circled around the Buddhist concept of conditioned behavior, and the large degree to which our actions can be reduced to a response to the situation we are in, based on patterns of behavior that have been successful for us in the past. Where this got interesting was our realization that as dharma friends, we are each providing conditioning factors for one another, and hopefully influencing one another such that we will all make wiser, compassionate, and more fulfilling decisions in the future.

Another amusing tangent had us discussing the idea that on average, your friends are more popular than you are. This is mathematically true, because we all tend to be friends with outgoing people who are already very popular.

Obviously, the discussion was much broader than those few items, but I wanted to capture those in particular, and they’ll also give you a flavor for where we went with it. Overall, the discussion stayed pretty well on-topic, and people kept returning to the book and reading key passages aloud, since Watts’ prose is eminently quotable.

In preparation for the book club, I re-read “Wisdom of Insecurity” myself last week. After three readings, almost every single page has something highlighted on it. It’s an extremely dense book in terms of the profundity of its concepts, and I feel that although it’s only a thin 150-page paperback, one could easily base a semester’s study around it.

I wanted to highlight a few things that I got from this most recent reading that I didn’t mention in the book club discussion.

Here’s a great passage, where Watts begins by commenting on our impossible and irrational desire for permanence:

For it would seem that, in man, life is in hopeless conflict with itself. To be happy, we must have what we cannot have. In man, nature has conceived desires which it is impossible to satisfy. To drink more fully of the fountain of pleasure, it has brought forth capacities which make man more susceptible to pain. It has given us the power to control the future but a little—the price of which is the frustration of knowing that we must at last go down in defeat. If we find this absurd, this is only to say that nature has conceived intelligence in us to berate itself for absurdity. Consciousness seems to be nature’s ingenious mode of self-torture.

In other words, if we’re intelligent enough to realize the futility of our plight, we must then be nature’s way of mocking itself! When I read this section about the basic absurdity of humanity’s quest for meaning, seeking pleasure, and avoiding pain, I realized that the best way to think about life is as a Zen koan. There is no answer! And any attempt to arrive at one rationally is bound to fail. Life is a paradox; accept it and move on!

Another passage:

To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being which we call “I”.

What leaps out at me from this section is the absurdity (again) of feeling that one has to prop up or defend something that we’ve defined as eternal and immutable. How ridiculous! If there is some permanent “I” within us, then what need does it have for defense? If such a thing existed, it would persist irrespective of anything we did or did not do.

Watts spends a great deal of time on the importance of living the present moment fully, and not letting desired future states obscure our ability to enjoy and be fully present with what is. The difference between someone who perpetually looks for fulfillment in the future and someone who lives for the present couldn’t be more poignant than in this passage about death:

When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectation must come to an end. While there is life there is hope—and if one lives on hope, death is indeed the end. But to the undivided mind, death is another moment, complete like every moment, and cannot yield its secret unless lived to the full.

This passage shows how the fear of death is mostly rooted in the fact that it signals the end of our ability to expect a better, more pleasant future. It shows that by a simple change of mindset, we can begin to leave this fear behind. Imagine having a relationship with death that wasn’t dominated by fear!

Then there’s this little zinger. Compare the following passages:

If it is true that man is necessarily motivated by the pleasure-pain principle, there is no point whatsoever in discussing human conduct. Motivated conduct is determined conduct; it will be what it will be, no matter what anyone has to say about it. There can be no creative morality unless man has the possibility of freedom.

That citation, which says that ethics and morality make no sense if man doesn’t have the freedom to make choices, is from “Wisdom of Insecurity”. Then:

You are deluded to assume that you are reading this of your own free will. My friend, you had no choice but to read this! Will is not the action of a being; it is the end product of a process. […] Whatever you do is just a result of complex programming.

This counterpoint is from Ajahn Brahm’s book on jhana practice, “Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond”, which I reviewed here. Ajahn Brahm subscribes to the view that free will is an illusion, and that our behavior and apparent choices are indeed fully determined by present conditions and our past conditioning. I’d love to get these two in a room and ask them to debate the topic of choice. Or maybe not…

Finally, consider Watts’ description of hell:

Hell, or “everlasting damnation” is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained.

I might clarify this definition of hell as threefold, comprised of seeking for pleasure but remaining unfulfilled, running from pain but never being able to avoid it, and looking to the future for fulfillment without ever being present at that future. As such, I think this is a perfectly apt description of many people’s lives, and a good way to understand why a lot of people find themselves frustrated, angry, self-absorbed, and suffering from existential angst.

In conclusion, I have to once again say how delighted I am with “Wisdom of Insecurity”, and how heartily I recommend it to others. It’s amusing, quotable, succinct, and very deeply profound. It impresses me as much today, after seven years of Buddhist study and practice, as it did on day one.

I am truly amazed that it was written sixty years ago, by someone who was only 36 years old. It contains an amazing amount of wisdom in a very tidy little package. Well, except for the single ugliest cover ever created by man.

Ironically, one final surprise is that all that wisdom didn’t necessarily help its author. In the ’60s, long after this book was published, Alan Watts experimented with mescaline and LSD, and became something of an advocate of marijuana. He became an alcoholic, went through three marriages, and died of heart failure at 58 years of age.

But then it is the nature of all things to change, isn’t it?

Interesting study released today by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Especially interesting if you’re a Buddhist. Here’s a couple pointers:

Buddhist Channel article
Boston Globe charts
Pew Forum

On the Globe’s charts, you’ll note that Buddhism scores lowest of all religions in terms of dogmatism, and most liberal of all religions with respect to abortion and homosexuality.

Now if we could just get more than one in every 143 people to be Buddhist…

It may be ironic, but one of the biggest things I’m dealing with right now are issues of faith.

Faith? You mean, like, “Do yew bEEEElEEEEive? Praise JEEEEzus! Yew arr hEEEEled!” faith?

Definitely not, since skepticism is actually a core tenet of Buddhism. In the earliest suttas, the Buddha tells followers of his path to not take anything on faith, unquestioningly, but to test everything—including the Buddha’s own words—against one’s own experience of whether it leads to less suffering or not. The Buddha specifically argued against any “blind faith” based simply on human or scriptural authority, tradition, personal preference, or specious reasoning.

Faith in Buddhism is almost always linked with the concept of “discernment”: the need for the individual to judiciously weigh the value of everything he or she is told. Ironically, it is exactly this analysis of the value of any teaching that helps a practitioner understand and develop one’s true inner wisdom, rather than just mindlessly parroting someone else’s insights.

That means the practice of Buddhism is much closer to the scientific method than it is to any religion. While the world’s religions offer many theories about overcoming life’s obstacles and living ethically, in Buddhism you are always encouraged to test every teaching to see if it is true for you.

But there’s no impetus for you to do all that analysis and experimentation unless you have some degree of basic faith in the value of the Buddha’s teachings. You need to believe that that kind of analysis will help you. Whether you’re practicing Buddhism or cognitive-behavioral therapy, unless you have some confidence that the path you’re on is a beneficial one, you won’t develop the self-discipline necessary to follow it, right?

So there is a place for “faith” in Buddhism, but it’s not the baseless faith required by many religions. Instead, the Buddhist idea of faith—known by the Pali term “saddha”—is closer to our concept of confidence and trust in the efficacy of the path.

Saddha also includes the idea of perseverance and steady effort along the path leading to freedom. It’s not passive; it’s your motivator. Your belief that Buddhism will help you in your daily life is what provides your impetus to practice.

In that sense, I have to say that I have “found faith”. The teachings I’ve internalized have proved very useful to me, and I am confident that continuing to practice will greatly benefit me, and—through me—the people I come into contact with.

It’s still a strange thing to admit, being someone who views religion as a purely social phenomenon, and to whom “faith” is a very dirty word, but it means something very different in a contemplative Buddhist context, where I have been encouraged to find out what actually works for me, and allowed to set aside the practices which have not worked.

Though I must admit that there are many, many Buddhist sects, and not all of them are so contemplative. There are sects which are rigidly structured, rely on ritual and dogma, and believe all kinds of mystical stuff that has no pertinence to healing suffering or our everyday lives on Earth. In fact, the majority of the world’s Buddhists practice in this manner. That’s not a path I would follow, and I have friends who turned away from Buddhism as a result of such practices.

Contemplative Buddhism seems both much more open—less dogmatic—as well as more attuned to a reflective but skeptical, scientific mind like mine. Therefore, I am confident (i.e. I have faith) that it is of philosophical, ethical, and spiritual value to me.

If you’re an Orny reader, you’ll know by now that for the past couple years I’ve been reexamining my personal philosophy, which has led me from secular humanism and Existentialism into Buddhism. So the following quiz results should come as no surprise to you:

I am pretty righteously amused, however, to see a perfect tie between Buddhism, atheism, and paganism. I would admit to all three, and think there’s absolutely nothing that makes them incompatible with one another.

I also took the “commonly confused words” test and got the following:

That is, of course, not a surprise, although the botched “beginner” level is a bit odd. Having spent the past 35 years with writing competence as a priority, I actually expected a bit better.

Were you raised in a particular religious faith?

No.
 

Do you still practice that faith? Why or why not?

No.
 

What do you think happens after death?

From my February 24th LJ entry "Philosophy for Dummies":

When we die, like any animal, we die. There is no essense or spirit which survives when our brain activity ceases. Because death is an inevitable end of our being, and because we never live to experience it, it is illogical to fear death. On the other hand, it certainly is logical to fear suffering and pain, if those are part of your road to death. But death itself should be accepted as the ultimate, immutable fact of life. Accept it and move on and enjoy your life, motivated further by the knowledge that your portion of life is finite.

I firmly agree with the Existential creed that there is no meaning to life other than to experience it, and believe that is an incredibly empowering, liberating, and optimistic realization.
 

What is your favorite religious ritual (participating in or just observing)?

Although I do not believe in religion as such, I feel that it is eminently logical to observe the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days, although not in any self-impressed wiccan sense. On those days I try to reconnect with nature and quietly celebrate the beauty and wonder of nature and life.
 
One tidbit: did you know that the change of seasons actually used to be observed on the cross-quarter days, rather than the solstices and equinoxes (they were thought of as the midpoints of seasons)? I find that a much more logical arrangement.
 
And happy Samhain everyone (even if few people realize that the cross-quarter day actually falls on November 7th).
 

Do you believe people are basically good?

I believe people have a strong trend toward laziness, ignorance, selfishness, and fear . As a moral relativist and secular humanist, I do not believe in the ideas of objective "good" and "evil" as such. The only "good" is acting in conformance with your own unique set of morals and values.