Open Buddha

Today, I finished The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason for my Para-Rational Perspectives class. I’m going to do a paper deriving from this book and some of Flannery O’Connor’s spiritual stories.

A funny thing happened while I was reading this book. The main thesis ideas of the book are:

• Public discourse in the West refuses to judge the validity or invalidity of religion (it is a taboo subject)
• In discussing the "War on Terror" and various political problems in the Middle East, Europe and the U.S., we do a little funny dance to avoid discussing the role religion (or, in particular, faith) plays in creating the world-view that causes a lot of the current problems for humanity.
• Unreasoned or unquestioned faith is a poison. Only beliefs that stand up to rational scrutiny are valuable and not just holdovers from previous ignorance (like the belief in a flat Earth).
• Spirituality is possible without faith. A spirituality based on actual experience and open to the scientific method of research and examination.

I was reading this thinking "This guy would be a good Thelemite" and "This guy would be a good meditation practitioner." When you get to the last section, he makes a bias clear in that he thinks that the experiential path exhibited in the technical language and methods of Buddhism is valuable even though there is a lot of folk religion and unreasoned faith involved in the practice for millions of people. He also makes it clear that he’s been trained in and has practiced Vajrayana and Dzogchen. At one point, he randomly pulls out a quote (he gets the book at random, he says, from his bookshelf and just opens it) to exhibit the level of rational and technical examination in Buddhist practices. The book he uses is John Reynolds’ book on Self-Liberation. As some may know, Reynolds is a primary teacher of some of my friends and I was fortunate enough to spend much of a week with him on a small retreat a bit over a year ago.

It’s a small world.