In Buddhist psychology, it’s said that the underlying cause of all suffering is ignorance. Ignorance is not being aware of what we don’t know. Many individuals confuse knowing facts with knowing, when in truth, knowing has a whole dimension of levels that ‘knowing facts’ is but a small part.
An essential aspect of who we are is based on our individual emotional makeup and our spiritual essence. We have aspects of our makeup that transcend merely learning and memorizing various sorts of data, including facts.
All too often, we go through our childhoods accumulating certain experiences and formulating certain ideas. We experience lessons about life from our families, and the thoughts we have about who we are serve as the emotional foundation of how we come to view ourselves as people.
Often, the conclusions we come to are inaccurate and cause us pain. Such life experiences and lessons learned are, again, only a part of us becoming aware of being unaware.
Can a leftist be a Christian?
This article was inspired by a PBS interview I watched. Judy Woodruff chaired the interview, and the topic of the discussion had to do with this question of importance: “Could someone who was politically on the left be a Christian?”
The conclusion was that someone on the left couldn’t be a Christian. Those who believe in abortion, for example, violate Jesus’s notion of loving others, which is essential to his teachings. How can you love when you kill a fetus during an abortion procedure?
There were a whole host of such examples, given by Conservatives, about how those on the left couldn’t be Christian due to this group’s views about life. The reasons given sounded, to me, like a limited understanding of the teachings of Jesus.
Christianity and Buddhism
I’ve found that the marrying of Christianity with Buddhism provides a deeper foundation for my present understanding of what love is in its deepest sense. Love for me, in its truest sense, is filled with awareness, is responsive and not reactive to life, and is filled with profound compassion towards ourselves and others.
Jesus took the teachings of Moses and the Ten Commandments off the Tablets of the Law, and was a human, relational expression of the essence of those teachings as he walked through the countryside, teaching those whom he encountered.
The teachers of that time weren’t aware of his role in life and were suspicious of him. For example, it was written in the New Testament that he was confronted by elders who were trying to trap him as someone who was against the Law of Moses. A woman who had been found to have committed adultery was brought to the teachers, and they asked Jesus if he’d condone the woman being stoned (in accordance with the law) for her behaviour. They asked Jesus, “What do you say?”
Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” The crowd began to disperse until there was only the woman standing there.
After all had left, except the woman, Jesus asked her “Has no one condemned you?”
The woman said, “No one, sir.”
“Then neither do I condemn you, go now and leave your life of sin,” Jesus replied.
Become aware of emotional charges
For me, our task is to bring awareness and compassion into every aspect of our lives. We need to understand that the difference between reacting and responding to a person is the emotional charge our reaction carries with it. A reactive emotional charge is an indication that we’ve experienced unresolved pain somewhere in life.
By understanding this difference, we can gradually erase ignorance from our lives and begin to eliminate the causes of our suffering. We will, then, become free from judging others and ourselves. We’ll be able to live in the present moment and express our essence in all that we do and with those we share our lives with.
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imagen: PietroMerola
