Buddhism provides us with some of the most powerful tools by which we can drop deep into our experience of existence. Down, down, deep down. And in the process we are changed; in this, Buddhism is a fellow traveller of alchemy, of Carl Jung, of archetypal psychology, of Taoism, of Sufism. Its body of ideas and models are not really meant to tell us ‘the truth’, as they are meant to be tools we use to travel beyond what we know.
Like so many other –isms, it started out with one person wandering around, and simply taking the hands of others and encouraging them to travel into the belly of what we don’t know. It is a deeply sad fact that Buddhism is often taught in the west as if its ideas were simply more of the ‘ten commandments’. That is: as dogma, as belief-systems, as ‘recipes for how to be,’ as pseudo-profound final statements on ‘the nature of everything.’
The Buddha was very clear on this: the culture with which he taught was for others to take what he said and use it to journey deeper down into awareness, not only of themselves, but of the world and even deeper, into the unseen realms, into those places where we actually open into experiencing the interconnectedness of everything. That’s deep. To actually go there. Not just to talk about it.
