That's Me!

 

As I read the Lotus Sutra, I find myself saying at various turns:

That’s the Buddha!  The Perfect Human Being!  The very model of what it means to be fully human.

But then I think of someone I admire, someone that’s just like the one described in the Lotus Sutra, and in my mind I say to that person:

That’s you!

After having the experience of discovering who the Buddha is, and that there are others just like him, over a period of 27 years, just yesterday I heard myself exclaim:

That’s me!

That’s me!  That’s me fully realized.  What in me is potential, in the Buddha is actual..  The Buddha is a completely actualized, realized human being.  In other words, awake or enlightened.  The Buddha is a metaphor for just how great, potentially or actually, a human being is.  We’re not talking about a god, and certainly we are not talking about God.  Buddhism says nothing about God.  Buddhism is completely absorbed with human life in the here and now.  Buddhism neither affirms nor denies the existence of a supreme, all mighty, omniscient, omnipresent, personal God.  So it’s agnostic?  Not at all.  It only claims to know that which is directly knowable by human beings.  There is no revealed truth in Buddhism.  Life, reality, will reveal itself to those who seek knowledge, understanding, wisdom, happiness, enlightenment.  What is the Buddha?  He’s awake!

That’s you!  All I said above about the Buddha and about human beings can be predicated of you as well as of me!  Yeah, that’s what I have learned over my 27 years of practicing the Lotus Sutra, a Buddhist scripture.

Buddhist scripture, actually any scripture, any holy writing, is a metaphor.  Analytical thinking as applied n the scientific method is simply not capable of analyzing that which cannot be analyzed.  Scientists are analysts. They analyze concrete, tangible, physical reality.  Attempting to analyze what is not analyzable, something you cannot get or see under the microscope, is something scientists leave to philosophers and theologians, and to the bus driver, the barber, and the shoeshine boy!  So am I saying that philosophers and theologians have some sort of magical powers to be able to analyze that which is not analyzable?  Not at all.  Oh, yes, they do analyze what to the scientist is not analyzable, but they use different tools.  Two of the Top Tools in their toolbox are the metaphor (Jesus' parables) and the negative way (Socrates' I only know that I know nothing as opposed to Descartes' I think therefore I am), describing a reality by what it is not.

For my purpose in this blog and in this posting, I will simply say that the dream is the greatest invention of the human spirit.  The dream is a way of us telling ourselves something we need/want to know in the only intelligible language for such a task., the metaphor.  There is much out there about dreams.  I just want to say that I believe, along with Fritz Perls (god father gestalt therapy), that the dreamer is the dream and the dream is the dreamer.  100%!

If I have a dream of me being chased up a tree by a tiger, I am the me, I am the tree, I am the tiger, I am the dream.  I like to imagine it like this (a metaphor!):  When the tree and the tiger wake up, how will they tell this dream?  It’s their dream too!  Akira Kurosawa made a movie called Rashomon that starts off showing us a scene, telling us a story.  Straight forward?  Not at all.  Now we begin hearing the story being told by the various characters we saw at the beginning.  They were all there, just as we were there, yet they all tell a different story, as do we.  That’s the dream.  You and I can have the same dream, theoretically, but relate it to someone quite differently.  So movies are metaphors.  The great movies are great metaphors.  After you see a great movie, and while you are viewing it, you keep saying, Ah Ha!  That’s right!  You recognize a truth in it, perhaps a truth you never recognized before.  But now you know something you didn’t know before, or something you didn’t know you knew.  And that’s the power of the metaphor.

What’s the deepest realization about the Lotus Sutra?  It is that I am everything and everyone in the Lotus Sutra.  It is the story of my life.  Of course I could say the same about the Bible.  In fact, St. Paul once said Now lives not I but Christ Jesus lives in me!

So say I of the Lotus Sutra:  That's me!