Buddha: an Imaginary Journey

How many ingenious solutions and profound ideas were tempted of the Buddha in his quest to find  inner harmony with the world and the cosmos in all its primal truth?

How many strange paradises did Siddhartha Gitauma the Buddha have to pass through before reaching Enlightenment?

 What vision was true and complete enough that it could take root in the real world and not be the same old war of dominion?

IN THIS RE-IMAGINING, the Buddha’s question is: how do I help to fashion a more compassionate civilization when greed, exploitation and war are the dominant forces at work in our civilizations? How many ideas fuelled by good intention had to fall away like so many of the leaves of yesterday’s pain? Did the tree that grew in his own soul become part of the tree that exists where Heaven meets Earth, and Nature meets Civilization in Harmony’s Nursery?

Perhaps we all sleep under that tree that the Buddha once sat under as he tried to plant a spiritual vision in the earth and in himself and his actions.

Let’s be honest. If this is to stimulate a re-appraisal of our cultural program in the civilized world then we will have to move beyond boredom and flights of destructive abandon to a degree. Yet we will also have to diversify our ideas of a good time. I am not attempting to take away our toys, I am simply suggesting we repurpose them.

And so let us state some truisms to get the ball rolling. These might be called the 4 Elements of Compassion of the Flora and Fauna on the Crust of the Earth. So named because they are available to all of their number on our planet.

Let compassion temper our actions.  Let compassion cool the flame of the heart’s desire. 

These were some of our imaginary Buddha’s tools. They are keys to the stream of The Powers of the Compassions and their many Companions of which the Buddha is one.

Harmonizing human civilization with the natural world in a more compassionate and more honest way, he waited there under that fig tree until his vision was as true and right as that Bodhi tree which he sat under. 

The 4 Unconditional Powers

which uphold some of the Living

and the

Foods of the Great Wheel of Fate

1. Sunlight

Solar light feeds the planet like a beam of love from the center of our collective heart. It is real. It is a great and simple truth of life on Earth that its Love is Universal. Its rays do not alight upon the earth only to serve your purpose and life. It comes to all. Get too close to it and you burn. Too far away--and you freeze. It seems only too close to the emotional truth of cultural life, where in our loneliness we freeze, but in our raging flights of cultural abandon we burn. In other ways the similarity between the Sun and a highly populated cultural center is so energetically and physically equivalent that to pretend the comparison is metaphorical is misleading: both survive and thrive on a nuclear (and chemical) level power. A Star fuses elements together to fuel its own existence which must resist the forces of gravity which threaten to crush itself sheerly as a function of its own mass.

2. Air

The winds too, work their universal love magic to all that come. We inspire our own futures each moment with the breath of life--- and that we do simply to survive or empower our own voice, though the power of breath is so much more when we allow our thoughts and emotions to sleep. And just as all life must be nourished by and consumed by life to survive, all life must be cleansed and harmonized with all that has been and will be in order that it survive--we call it breathing. 

3. Water

We must drink water to diffuse, dilute and balance the scales of hydration and dehydration. So too does water provide a fluid connectivity and constitutes a great holistic medium inside and outside the body. 

4. Salts

We must consume salt for much the same reason as water, diffusion, dilution and the balance of salinity. 

The metabolic processes which constitute the Great Wheel of Fate have a particular cyclic power. Life feeds Life, Life creates Life and Death, or Life falls down deeper into Death and is broken down further in a chain of transformations. Water too holds much of this in its fluid form and so the body must push out what it can no longer use. 

Foods of the Gods

Food is not the most obvious cosmic compassion as evidenced in the classical idea of the elements. 

We must eat of life and its substance regularly to survive and empower action. Yet in this consumption we eat of those which are living. So although there may be a sense of compassion involved in eating and providing sustenance for a living creature, there is also the reality that one living thing’s destruction has factored into another living thing’s health and intentions.

Without humility to basic truths, we do not get far. We must humbly learn to weave to have clothing. We must humbly learn to work metals to have tools that have strength and precision. We must humbly learn social skills because without them we may devolve into survivalism and panic. 

Let me divulge. Social skills. 

I am still working on them. It is not unheard of that any species would develop them. Life can be industrious to degrees that inspire the primal awe of any who gazes and wonders-- imagination and invention have happened and shall happen no matter what time, what species or what place. 

No doubt people have to be instructed with continued care and attention for longer than many living things have had the pleasure of living. If a dog hath 20 human years, when does he go to public school, to college? How do we get the proverbial pup out into the world? 

So what is the problem of the Buddha, seen against the backdrop of the limits of time, relearning, cultural understanding and upheaval?

A Brief Cultural Picture of our Imaginary Buddha

Let's imagine that he saw the whole of his culture encapsulated in a reality that was only too ready to draw blood to revive a huge dying beast. The dying beast is the civilization which always must expand and grow to survive. The blood is as ever drawn from slavery, industry, and war. It is very close to the old faerie maxim that what riches we reap in our world, leave the faerie races poor of it.

The point: What prosperity and abundance there are for one species, culture or lifeform can create scarcity and hard knocks for others. So what is the fall out of our obsession with abundance? And how can a great big civilization prosper without creating scarcity for everything else it doesn't support? 

To have a university and colleges and literacy costs big for energy consumption, which is certainly not to knock any of those things. Yet we have wanted to find a way to make a better world for our own. It is a basic instinct perhaps to make a better way for your future. Most animals given the choice would likely choose to have a safe place to sleep and eat and play. It has also ever been the dream of the maid or man-servant  to magically have the daily work finished without bothering to do it, dishes washing dishes, and mops doing the mopping. 

Factories can do some of our work. Factories do produce goods and feed and clothe and comfort hundreds of millions.

They are very extreme measures for a dire situation. They are at maximum speed, are these factories. They are constantly working and churning. Factories are one of the great engines of civilization. It’s no secret. War and raiding is the other great engine. Americans are certainly like the primal viking raiders of old. Oil is another gold rush, another way to get rich selling stuff that isn't ours. Oil is imminently good for burning. It is as though some folks have decided “let us burn gold for a profit.” And we may realize at the end that it is not too far from the child who burns a house because it’s fun to play with fire. (Much like the child, the persons who exploit nature’s true gold--the living beings known as trees in old growth forests that are far more useful and precious than wiping your ass is--those persons are having a joy ride as they profit from setting fire to a nursing home full of rich philanthropists whose particular riches are lost to rich and poor alike once the fire has had its way. )

How do we better invest in social harmony? How many solutions must we forgo so that a system that is reasonable and sustainable and not founded on exploitation and personal greed could flourish? How many lies must we see through before we can start to recognize the horrors hidden inside our civilized ways? How many lies must we tell to make a civilized horror sell?