Religion is just the search for the Unconditional

In Christianity Jesus shows unconditional love on the Cross. God's love is equal and infinite for all of us. The hindrance is that we don't recognise this and prefer the world of the conditional. In Buddhism the Middle-Path points at avoiding extremes. For the mind attached to the conditional, the world seems to always change. Whatever we have found that we like or don't like it never seems to last, we are left either missing it when it goes or wanting to change it because it won't go. Thus we live a life of struggle and suffering being tossed around on an ocean (often called Samsara). The Middle Path lies between these extremes of having and not having, between attachment and rejecting. That is where the unconditional lies in Buddhism.

Its fairly easy to arrive at the conclusion that all things are conditional or relative. If there was a continuous hum in our ears that never changed we would never become aware of it. If we made machine that could measure it we would calibrate them to that zero was this hum. It would be undetectable, unmeasurable. The conditional mind is like that of reptiles: we sense and are attracted to change--the excitement of finding something, the need to get rid of something. We live in the space between things. When we are thirsty we like to drink, but soon that thirst goes and we become quenched. Then we are bored again and onto something else. Always moving like a snake, sewing our lives between the opposing things of the world. This is actually suffering, we never go anywhere or become anything. Ultimately the journey is pointless.

Likewise in Christianity we are in a state of eternal Sin after we forbade God in the Garden of Eden and were banished from his protection to work and struggle for our living. We rejected the unconditional and were forced into the conditional. Sin is missing the mark, not thinking and behaving true in accordance with God. That is not behaving with insight of the unconditional and being swayed by the condition. As a simple example Greed is taking more than we need. Equally "Miserliness" is taking less. As Buddha discovered you cannot beat greed by starving yourself to death: that is incredibly naïve; that is still conditional thinking. To beat Greed you must beat Miserliness as well: these are the extremes and the conditional mind swings between them. Actually why don't we just take what ew need? That is the end of suffering, and the end of Sin.

So why don't we just take what we need? We are like that snake slithering between things, or the lizard only seeing movement. As conditional minds we only see the changes. We don't see the satisfaction of having taken what we need, we enjoy the process of satiation instead. And when we are satiated then we try to satiate a some more and eat some more when actually we don't need it. This is why all religions point at the same things: appreciation, gratitude, kindness, love, joy. When we eat just what we need we appreciate the gift of the food that nourishes our body; we have gratitude to the world and the people who have supplied this food; we are kind to our bodies that need the food and the world that must supply that food (non-meat eating is a natural progression); we love both ourselves, others and the beautiful world that has such a thing as eating and food in it; and we are joyful to abide in such a world. By contrast the Glutton and the Miser have no joy in what they gain, they seek only the momentary pleasure of eating or of denying themselves, they do harm to both themselves, others and the world. This is sinful and achieves nothing but a life of suffering.

So what is the Unconditional? This is a question best not asked. Whatever we say will be conditional. The conditional is characterised by birth and death, that is creation and destruction. Nothing lasts forever and nothing has been in existence forever. Take a feeling that we have: you will be able to say when it started and you can we 100% sure it will end (pretty soon in the case of feelings - they are very fleeting). Every part of our minds is changing very rapidly. This is the "burning house" that Buddha spoke of, every single part in flames and changing. Even the words I write here take me only a half hour to write, and less to read and will be out of mind in no time. Hopefully they say things about the world that have greater longevity but even these ideas come and go. Buddha said even Buddhism has a shelf life. This is why we must take urgent steps to escape the sea of Samsara while we have the chance, gain that crucial scrutiny of the conditional so that we can unhook leaving only the Uncondition or God.

But what is the Unconditional if we wish to push this. Note this is a dangerous path because suppose we did identify the unconditional while still having a conditional mind we would immediately attach to it: "Ah! Look I have found the Unconditional" we would feel to ourselves and immediately we would reject everything else. Yes the Unconditional is not relative to other things, it has nothing to reject and so it has nothing to attach or attract to. There is no "truth" in this sense. Its not like a argument over the colour of Morpheus Butterfly. The person who say Blue is correct, they can get a gold star and a point, and the person who say Green gets nothing. But this is conditional and relative truth. You can be right or wrong. Unconditional Truth just is: no right and wrong. God cannot be wrong cos he cannot be right. He just is. But as mentioned there are things that are characteristics of the Unconditional like Kindness, Love, Gratitude, Patience, Frugalness, Equanimity and Even-Mindedness. If we perfect these we find that we rise slowly out of the turbulent seas of the conditional and the snake instead of moving around things starts to move through things and we stop noticing the change so much as abide in the peace at the heart of things.

Now the one thing I am unclear about this this analogy. The conditional mind is like the weather. Some days it is rainy and some days it is sunny. In other words, crudely, some times good things happen and other times bad things happen. But while the weather is always changing the Sun always shines constantly in the sky. While the changing weather is the conditional, the unchanging Sun is the Unconditional. Now what I don't understand is whether the "happiness" we feel when things are going well is a window into the Unconditional, but we experience that core nature of the world through a conditional lens. In other words when we finally give up the conditional and stop looking at the weather and just accept the good days and the bad days as relative and unsubstantial are we then basking in the Sun. Or does letting go of the opposing good and bad days and being dragged this way and that enter us into a different world than we even got a glimpse of on happy days. Are "good times" in our ordinary worlds of suffering a glimpse of the Eternal or is all such worldly attached experience part of the conditional. In Yin-Yang terms whole the Black and White oppose each other, the Dao is neither Black nor White, nor Black and White, not etc etc. But this is irrelevant as the actual task is just to enter the middle path and make our arrow true and Sinless.

This is religion.

How Humans can become Squirrels

 

Been having some fruitful meditations on our squirrels and the bird feeders.

So the truth is captured by the camera. There are 3 squirrels: one is bigger and has used this to finally get to the feeders. There are 2 others who cannot do this and feed from the crumbs. What is very interesting to observe over several weeks is the skilful squirrel never once drops peanuts for his family. This squirrel does not see what the camera sees, but is biased towards itself. It has a small, local and conditional* perspective. For this small squirrel death will consume it entirely. Its a prefect demonstration of Capitalism in fact... but this is just squirrels; humans have the potential to escape death, though few develop it. So where does this potential lie? This is the subtle bit. No-one can become a dispassionate camera and have an "out of body experience". Ok arguably they can, but they don't need to. Much better than a literal camera perspective, is separating ones actual awareness into that which is small and conditional and that which is large and unconditional. When we awake and become aware we are awake we don't just see, we are aware that we see. Indeed we have the potential to observe everything in our minds, even our mind state. We can see whether we are happy or sad, we can see whether we know something or not--even before we recall it--, we can see what we are thinking--that is we don't just think, we can see ourselves think. We have the potential to observe everything about our small conditional minds. Now how is that possible? It is possible because we are not our small conditional minds. We are actually much bigger and unconditional. We actually look at the world from an unconditional perspective like a camera, and within that we see the conditional world that we habitually think is our self.

The tricky problem is that we seek to own that small conditional self that we see, and that anchors our unconditional free mind to the conditional prison world of death. In meditation people from Capitalist countries have a particular problem of trying to own their breath and trying to work on it. It is extremely difficult just to leave it alone to be what it is. In the same way its extremely difficult to give up our conditional existence and remain at the level of unconditional mind. In squirrel terms its very difficult--faced with hunger, tasty peanuts and the success of having got to the feeder--not to sink into that moment in a toxic way and lose touch with the bigger view that is freedom. We have hit the jackpot, we're prepared to give up freedom cos we have what we want. We don't realise that in giving up freedom there is now no escape. Our fellow squirrels go hungry, but right now that doesn't matter cos I have tasty food filling my senses. I am all that matters. This becomes in the extreme solipsism and madness but right now that is fine.

However soon I will be full and the food has no use to me, eating no longer has value. So I am satisfied, but now I am now trapped inside my own small perspective. I am unavoidably conditional Me now. OK maybe this time I can work to give this up, renounce the Devil etc but it becomes harder every time until I am just small minded, trapped in the mortal shell of me facing death eventually. But its actually not true. I just got tricked by sense and desire.

If George Orwell was to write a really profound story it would be the one where Humans become squirrels under the influence of Capitalism.

* Conditional here means subject to conditions. That means it changes in different situations, and it depends upon situations. This is our experience of constantly changing senses, emotions and desires. Our world is constantly changing. One minute we are hungry, the next full, the next we are bored, the next we are sad, the next enthusiastic and positive, the next negative. It's forever changing. A bad thing happens and we are immediately plunged into emotions, a good thing happens and its the same. Obviously in this world eventually the very bad thing will happen and we will die. Things are always balanced in this world however. We can only die because at some stage we were born. It is a "relative" world too. We are only happy because before we were unhappy. We are only full because before we were hungry. If we were always full we would forget about food and eating all together. Its the constant moving between opposites that keeps our lives forever moving and stops us finding peace. Often we like this constant moving because peace is initially quite a struggle. We find it boring, or even frightening as the clouds of our busyness settle we start to see ourselves as we are. That can be a moment of honesty we are not ready for, and something we avoid through habitual activity. The Unconditional is quite something else. It is always with us, it is the perspective inside which everything happens. Regardless whether we are happy or sad, excited or bored the unconditional just watches unjudging. We can block the unconditional out however. This is what is called The Unconscious in psychology. We can be unaware of things, even actively avoid them in our lives. Some time in the future we see them and can't believe we didn't see them before. Well actually our unconditional self did see them, but we hid from it. That line reminds me of Adam and Eve hiding from God in Eden. Perhaps Nietzsche has a point that the Genesis story is actually a good analysis of consciousness.