by John Rixey

Created on: May 09, 2009

To solve the puzzle, we have to look at the relationship between the two concepts: Buddhism and truths. So us whitey's have the Christianity business, but everybody knows that's not true, just some people are just too scared of the concept of hell not to believe it. If you're interested in Buddhism, however, you'll have to change the way you think about religion and truth.

For Christianity, truth is something that you learn from others or from a book or two. Buddhism has the advantage of being discoverable based solely on your own experience. Buddha is not a god in the way Christians think of God. He's just a guy who more clearly understood what's happening with the phenomenon of human existence.

So the whites have a god who's staring at you right now as you read this, but He is keeping in Mind that he put a person on the planet to be sacrificed for those sins of yours. The easterners approached religion from a more philosophical and curious perspective, as if they honestly wanted to know the truth about where human beings come from, what it means to be a human being (if anything), what we're supposed to do when we're alive, and what happens when we die.

In an effort to discover the "truth" about these questions, Christians look to human events, human language, and a human-like god and soul. Buddhists, however, consider the experience of being a person completely dependent on the rest of our environment, whether it be through sensing the outside world or sensing our bodies and minds as our hearts keep beating and thoughts keep rolling.

The Christian approach looks away from the experience of reality and toward a dramatic story about the creation the world in order to be dominated by the human being - who turns into a sinner who can fight off death by putting faith in a human sacrifice two thousand years ago. The eastern approach examines what we're really asking questions about - reality. Since it would make sense that you believe your religion is the truth, and since truth is supposed to be an accurate description about reality, it would then make sense to look to reality to gain a better understand of the truths that we classify as religious in nature.

Observing your experience of reality in order to understand truth and form a personal religious system less conflicted with reality is what meditation is. A thorough investigation into what is typically thought of as a soul or self results in the very conflict that causes many people to be afraid of spending twenty minutes alone without anything to do. The soul, the last safeguard against having to experience personal death is found to not exist, not quite leading to death, but to an understanding that there was never something to be born or die.

Instead of this bleak, empty understanding of human life causing awful depression, attention is focused back onto the experience of being a person, as there is nowhere else to put the attention, the soul/self having been found to be imaginary. Human experience then stops being filtered through beliefs we have about who we are, what we're supposed to be doing, and what happens when we die and back to a more truthful experience of being something or other.

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