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Fred Blackburn: Welcome to part two of our series on The Self. And like I was mentioning last week, we talked about a Hebrew view of the self, an ancient Greek view, and we talked about some Native American views of the self, especially highlighting and focusing on different temperament and personality types. But this year, I mean this week I thought we would go to the East, and we’re going to look at a completely different worldview than the Hebrews or the Greeks had. And I think to start off I need to make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to worldviews. So let me pull up my images.
Fred Blackburn: This will help orientate us to different worldviews. And I thought this was a fairly helpful chart. So if we go all the way over here to the left, we have the universe, but there is no god, we simply have nature or the cosmos, and that’s would be an atheistic or materialistic view. And we will talk about that particular view of the self next week. This week, we’re going to be talking about a pantheistic view of the self. And this pantheism literally means it’s the Greek word pan, which means all or the world, and theo, which means god. So it literally means all is god or god is all. So there’s a direct equivalence to the universe and god. In fact, you can use those words interchangeably.
Fred Blackburn: Deism is this concept that there is a god, a creator god who made the universe, but this god is separate or detached from the universe. This is what we would normally call classic theism, would be this dualism where you do have a god who is spiritual, but you also have a physical material universe, but god is engaged with or interacting with this universe unlike the detached view of deism. This is kind of like The Blind Watchmaker concept where god constructs the universe and sets it into motions with laws of nature, but then he’s pretty much absent. This isn’t the type of god you pray to or worship. This type of god however is, because this god is interacting with the world. And then this last piece I want you to become aware of if you’re not already is the term panentheism. So we have all and this little en here means in god, or it can also be switched to god is in all. So here we actually have the universe nestled within god.
Fred Blackburn: And out of all of these views I personally think this one is the most accurate, and that may be a new concept for you. This has great problems philosophically and theologically and often leads to this view of deism. But like I said, tonight we’re going to talk about… All the groups we’re going to talk about tonight fall under this pantheistic view of god, where god and the universe are one and the same. Any questions, comments on any of those illustrations? What I like about this last picture is you have the universe nestled in god. It’s not like it’s existing separate or outside of god, but they also make a clear distinction that the universe is not god. Here there is no such distinction. So even though these two words are very close, they are philosophically radically different, all right? All right, no questions on that one. I’m surprised.
Fred Blackburn: So tonight I want to start with our little journey to the East, and we’re going to talk about Hinduism. And let me pull up a picture here for you. Okay, so this is going to be your little Hinduism 101 introduction. So Hinduism is one of the oldest, if not the oldest organized religion in the world. They have sacred texts that go back to roughly 2300 BCE. If you want to compare that to the biblical text or scriptures, probably the oldest books in the Bible would be the Book of Job, followed by the Books of Moses, and we’d be looking at maybe 1800 BC for those books. So this is a very ancient tradition coming out of the subcontinent of India. And the first thing I want to mention is Hinduism is a made up scholastic term from 19th century European scholars. There weren’t people in India calling themselves Hindus. What you had were the Vedic religious traditions, but you had a huge variety under this in the subcontinent of India. So it became helpful to just have a term. Hinduism became the broad category for those Vedic religious traditions.
Fred Blackburn: Now, the Vedas are the scriptures of the Hindus, and very similar to the Old Testament much of the early Vedas talk about ritualistic purifications, sacrifices, songs and hymns and praise to god. But as the Vedas began to develop and we move into the later Vedas and the Upanishads, there’s a shift that begins to take place. And I like to describe Hinduism almost like… I’m going to stop sharing here a sec while I talk about this. If you think of Hinduism kind of like a great jewel and it has all these different facets. So one facet you could simply put the name god, but then another facet you might put Jesus or the Buddha or Allah or [Wonkateka 00:06:40]. And each of these different facets of the jewel may have a different name because like Rhombus University, as people are looking at different angles, they are seeing god from a different perspective or point of view.
Fred Blackburn: But these Hindu sages began to realize there are not millions of gods, there’s only one god with a thousand faces and that’s of course euphemism, but the idea is there is only one god. In fact, they go even further than that and say there is only one thing. All right, so wrap your mind around that. And this would be the key to understanding a pantheistic worldview. There is only one thing and you can call it god, you can call it the universe, you can call it it, it doesn’t matter, but there is only one reality and everything is a part of that reality. Any questions on that?
Fred Blackburn: Very different from our view in the West where we think so much in terms of I-thou relationships, and the West has specialized in distinguishing between minutia in the world. We really like to see how things are different. For heaven sake’s, we even have a name for this little piece of skin on our fingernail, right? I mean, a cuticle. We’re out of control in our labeling and categorization and differentiation of the world in which we live. In the Eastern mindset, their focus is looking more how are things connected? How are all these things one, even though they may appear so radically different. And so try to wrap your mind around this.
Fred Blackburn: The truth is the whole. If you just are looking at a part or a piece, you do not have the whole truth. You’re probably all familiar with the old story about the blind men and the elephant, where this elephant is brought into this village where they’ve never seen an elephant before. And there’s five blind men that live in this village. And so they bring the blind men out to engage this elephant. And the first one touches the elephant’s tail and he says, “Oh, it’s kind of like a whip or a switch.” And then the next one touches his leg and he says, “What are you talking about? It’s like a tree. This is like a tree trunk.” And the other one touches its side and he says, “It’s like a house.” And the other one touches his ear and he says, “No, it’s like a fan.” And the other one touches his trunk and says, “No, it’s like a snake.”
Fred Blackburn: Well, they were all partially right, but just like that image I’m giving you of god is a great jewel, they were only seeing single facets of the whole and so they were incorrect. And so in this Eastern perspective, the idea is can you see through all these different facets or do you understand each of these facets are windows to look at the same thing or into the same place? So that’s the first thing I want you to wrap your minds around this idea of the truth is the whole. We are going to get to the self, but I have to build a framework of a world view for you so it will make some sense.
Fred Blackburn: And in Hindu theology, there is no sin. Sin would be described as ignorance. And I find this really interesting. This was very similar to Aristotle, the ancient Greek’s view of evil is caused by ignorance, because if people actually knew, really knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t do it. That’s his understanding of the human condition and understanding. So there is no salvation in sin in this Eastern perspective. What you have instead is enlightenment, so that the key to overcoming is knowledge. It’s not salvation. It’s not someone taking your karmic debt for you. It’s knowledge. Knowledge is the key to get out of this world of samsara.
Fred Blackburn: And I wish I had my whiteboard and I’m not going to try to draw on the whiteboard in here with my mouse. It’s too difficult. So I’m going to draw with my hands for you. And so this Hindu idea, one of the major metaphors they use for their understanding of god and their high name for god is Paramita Brahman. And Brahman is compared to the ocean, but like water, god is like water, so he is in the ocean, he is the ocean, but he is also the evaporation that comes up into the clouds. He’s also the rain and the snow that falls into the mountains. He’s the little creeklets and rivers that flow into ponds and reservoirs and lakes, and then are released into mighty rivers that work their way back to the sea. But whether it’s in the ocean, in the air, in the streams, in the rivers, it’s all the same thing. It’s just different forms of the same being or the same reality. And so that’s kind of like this Hindu idea of the self.
Fred Blackburn: And so one of their analogies they talk about it’s called the Wheel of Samsara, and samsara means illusion. And that is the spacetime world in which we live. We live in Maya or illusion, this world of illusion. And so Brahman, this the one, the universe am I, manifests himself in every conceivable form you can imagine, and he incarnates into the world. And let me just take you on a journey. So say Brahman, here’s the Wheel of Samara, and you have Brahman the ocean and he incarnates into this world of illusion. And say he incarnates as a bacteria. And all he’s got to do is divide and replicate and he’s fulfilled his dharma.
Fred Blackburn: And then he can come back his next life maybe as an insect or an ant or something. And maybe he comes back a few lives as a worker ant. He does the worker ant, worker ant, worker ant. He gets to come back as a soldier ant, maybe then come back as a drone, maybe comes back as a queen. And when he finishes his ant dharma. Dharma is the Hindu concept of your destiny or your duty, what you are here to do in this life. And everyone has their own dharma. It’s kind of like active righteousness. Or if you’re from a Catholic tradition, it’s your charisma, what god has placed you here to do on this earth. So you have to fulfill that dharma if you want to advance on this Wheel of Samara.
Fred Blackburn: And then say you’re done with your ant incarnations and you come back as a butterfly, you do the whole metamorphosis thing. Then you get to come back as a rodent. And then maybe you’re a good little rodent so you get to come back as a mouse or as a cat. And then you’re a good little cat and you come back and eventually you get to be a human. And so congratulations to everyone here on the Zoom call. You are on the last stretch of getting off this Wheel of Samara. Unfortunately, even in humans, there could be 10,000 reincarnations of you being a human. And this idea of reincarnation is it’s kind of like our true self is traveling in different vehicles. And so this vehicle I’m in today, it certainly is not the vehicle I was born in. And let’s see, I’m on my wow, eighth. Is this my eighth vehicle?
Fred Blackburn: We basically replicate all our cells more or less every seven years. And so every seven years, it’s like you’re in a new vehicle traveling through life. And I’ve noticed this vehicle is a lot rougher, my last vehicle. And I’m guessing my next vehicle is going to be rougher than this one. But eventually this vehicle I’m traveling in will wear out, but me myself will come back into another vehicle in another incarnation where I will continue on in that form. And so basically, if we now take it down to this home stretch on this Wheel of Samsara. We started as a bacteria, ant, butterfly, rodent, predator, human. And then as humans this is where we see the cast system in Hinduism. The lowest cast would be the outcast, literally people so low in society that they don’t even have a cast. They would also be known as the untouchables. The next group up would be your laborers, manual labor. But this could be everyone from a ditch Digger to someone who operates heavy equipment or machinery.
Fred Blackburn: The next cast is your merchant cast. And these are like your trades people, your craftsmen, your skilled laborer, the people that own their own businesses. And this could be someone who owns a coffee cart in the mall, all the way to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The next rung up for humans is the warrior cast. And this could be anyone from a mall cop to a brigadier general. And then the last and highest cast is the noble or religious cast. And this is where you have the priest, the scholars, philosophers, theologians. And usually these are also your noble royal blood people. And it is believed in Hinduism that once you reach this top cast, you have enough knowledge and training where you can see the illusion of the Wheel of Samsara, and you can actually get off. You don’t have to come back anymore and you go back into the sea of Brahman.
Fred Blackburn: And just like whether it’s the Mississippi or the Ganges, once that river hits the ocean, it forgets where it came from. It’s just the ocean again now, right? It’s not thinking, “Oh, I used to be the Nile or I used to be the Ganges, or…” No, you are the ocean again. And then you are just like evaporation, you’re cast out back into the world and you start the cycle again. So this is the Wheel of Samsara, the wheel of illusion, and this concept of reincarnation. And reincarnation is based on if you fulfilled your dharma and you were able not to acquire bad karma.
Fred Blackburn: And so karma, the concept of karma the best way I can explain it is it’s like the idea of you reap what you sow. Okay? You also pay as you go. If you don’t pay for something in this life, you will have to take care of it in the next. So maybe you were a misogynist in your past life. And so this life you’ve been born a woman so you can experience what it’s like to be a woman who is treated in a disrespectful manner. Does that make sense? Maybe you were an incredibly violent person. You may not even get to come back as a human. You may digress and come back as a tiger or a lion until you get a life full of blood and violence and you’re sick of it, and you’re ready to move on into a different place. All right?
Fred Blackburn: Any questions, comments about this? I mean, this is way outside the Western norms. In the West we have concepts of incarnation, especially with Christ, right? And we have an idea of resurrection, but there is really no concept of reincarnation in the Western tradition. At least not in the Christian tradition. Okay. So the next thing I want to share with you is Hinduism even though they have literally millions of gods, there is only one god. And so try to keep that fixed on your head. And I’m going to start at the top. So we have Paramita Brahman. This is the god beyond description. There’s really nothing we can even say about this deity because to try to define it or label it would be to box it in and diminish it. And so the most they say about this god is they usually define it in negative terms like the god that is not two, the god that is not bound, the god that is not limited.
Fred Blackburn: So they’re giving negative things because they don’t even want to give positive attributes because each of those would be like a side of the box that would contain this unbound deity. Below this unbound deity are three main manifestations. And so this is the Hindu Trinity. Unbelievable. So the Hindus have a Trinity. You have Vishnu, and Vishnu is kind of like the… Well, let’s start with Brahman. So we have Paramita Brahman, and then we have Brahma, and Brahma is the creator god of Hinduism. So this is the god that made the world. And if you look at the Hindu creation story, it is so similar even the order to the Genesis creation account, it’s freaky geeky. And you see this being creating all life in the world as we know it.
Fred Blackburn: And then we have the next aspect of the godhead, which is called Vishnu, and Vishnu is like the preserver. This is the one that brings peace and goodness and light into this world. He’s called the preserver. And then the last aspect of the godhead is called Shiva. And this is the lord of the dance, and this is the destroyer, and this is the one that will consume the world in the end. So you have creator, preserver, destroyer. And this is the triune godhead of Hinduism.
Fred Blackburn: Hinduism also has incarnations. We have the incarnation from the Christian Trinity of the son coming down and incarnating in human form as Jesus of Nazareth. In Hinduism, you have an avatar of Vishnu, The Preserver, incarnates as Krishna. And Krishna brings enlightenment to the East. And so Krishna and Christ are very similar type characters. In fact, if you tried to evangelize a Hindu and started to describe and explain Jesus to them or Christ to them, they would say, “Oh, yes, we know this one. We call him Krishna.” And in fact, Yogananda, he was a Hindu and he was sent by his guru to the United States to bring Hinduism to the West. And he realized early on that Americans needed to hear Hinduism in Western terms and languages.
Fred Blackburn: And for those of you in San Diego, if you want to learn more about this, he still has his self-realization fellowship up there at Swami’s in Encinitas. If there’s a really beautiful meditation garden, that’s open to the public and they have a beautiful bookstore. It’s like a museum. And the ladies are very helpful that work there, but there’s also a fellowship, the self-realization fellowship, and they do, I believe their services are on Sundays. But if you go in, there’ll be a front altar and on the altar will be a picture of Jesus and a picture of Krishna side by side looking at you. And what Yogananda taught was just as Jesus came to bring salvation to the west, Krishna came to bring enlightenment to the East. And remember for the Hindu, it’s all one thing, there really is only one religion. All paths lead to the top of the mountain. All rivers flow to the sea. Light from many lamps. Water from many Wells, but it’s all one source. It’s all one reality.
Fred Blackburn: Okay. So can everyone see that close lotus flower I got posted up here? All right. I love this analogy. And Lotus petals are a big, another big metaphor in both Hinduism and Buddhism. And I like to use this in a talk about the self, because in this concept of the self, your true self lies within all these different petals. But we get so distracted by these externals, we confuse them with being our true self. But the reality is these petals are either relationships we have because we’re in the world or because we’re physical material beings as well. And it keeps us confused and distracted from who we really are.
Fred Blackburn: And so part of that Raja yoga I was telling you about, it’s like this thousand-pound lotus of the mind, and you are trying to deconstruct. For example, one of my petals may be I’m male. Another may be I’m American. The other may be I’m a professor, I’m a son, I’m a brother, I’m an uncle, I love the environment, I’m an artist, but none of those things are who I am. They’re either relationships or things that I do. And so through this practice of yoga, the idea is to begin to deconstruct the self and to peel back these layers until you get to that self within.
Fred Blackburn: So here we have, you’ll often see the Buddha sitting on lotus petals. And I’ll get to Buddhism in a second, but I just wanted you to see this picture. So the idea is, if you think of this as like this lotus petal of the heart, and you’re pulling back these layers, and you’re trying to see who it is that is dwelling, who is the true self? Not these things you do, not the relationships you have, not where you happen to be born or the ethnicity or gender you happen to be, but who is that true unchanging self? And I love this picture. I wish I had a big one. And so here we have a Hindu yogi and he’s meditating. And as he is deconstructing and looking at who it is that is in the core of his being, when he peels back that last layer what he ends up seeing is called Atman. And Atman is the Hindu term for Brahman within. And so basically your true self is god dwelling within you. That is the core reality of your being.
Fred Blackburn: All right, let’s pivot to Buddhism. And the first thing I want to say about Buddhism is can you see that guy with the big eyes? That’s Bodhidharma. And first thing I want to say is… Then we’ll come back to him. Buddhism is to Hinduism as Christianity is to Judaism. So one more time Buddhism is to Hinduism as Christianity is to Judaism. So Hinduism was an older tradition that Siddhartha Gautama, who was in that highest cast, that Brahman cast of nobility, scholars, priests. His father was a Hindu priest. And no, actually Siddhartha’s father was a warrior chiefdom. And on the day of Siddhartha’s birth… And this is a real historical figure, this isn’t just myth or fairy tales. We have the village, we have archeological evidence of where Siddhartha Gautama was born. And it’s probably in modern day Nepal, Northern India in this province. And on the day of his birth, there were all these signs and omens. And one of these old hermits came out of the wilderness and he said, “I want to see this child.”
Fred Blackburn: And it reminds me so much of the story of Simeon in the Bible who wanted to see Jesus before he died. And so you have this hermit come in and he makes a prophecy. He said, “This will either be a great war lord that will unite all the different kingdoms of India, or he will bring salvation or enlightenment to the world.” And the father being a war lord said, “We’ll take option one. Thank you very much.” And the hermit said, “Well, you can pick what you want, but destiny is not always as we wish it to be.” And so his father knowing this prophecy, did everything he could to steer Siddhartha towards this path of being a warrior and not be religiously-minded. And so he taught him in the art of hunting and warfare, and he got him a beautiful wife, and he had summer palaces and winter palaces. And so he kept him in this bubble of opulence and tried to keep him away from any sort of pain or suffering or things that might start you questioning the meaning or purpose of life.
Fred Blackburn: But as Siddhartha got older and he had just had his first child, he told his father, you expect me to rule after you, but you don’t even let me see your own kingdom. I want to see the people. And his father said, “Okay, give me a couple days.” And so he whitewashed the city. He gave the peasants all new clothes to wear and threw them a feast so everyone was in a good mood. And then he paraded his son, Siddhartha, through the town, down a select route and then brought him back into the palace. And Siddhartha was so excited about his day and the things that he saw that he snuck out again that night with one of the servants to see the city again. But this time the facade was gone, the parade was over and he was seeing how the people were actually living.
Fred Blackburn: And he saw three things that day that he had never seen before and it changed his life forever. And the first thing he saw was old people. His father had never allowed him to see old people because he didn’t want him to realize that was the fate of all men. And when he asked his servant what’s wrong with those people, why are they all wrinkly and hunched over, his servant said, “They’re old, Siddhartha.” And he said, “Old, what’s old?” And his servants said, “Siddhartha, everyone gets old.” And he said, “Even princes?” And he said, “Yes, Siddhartha, even princes.” And as they traveled along the next person he came across was someone screaming in horrible agony. And he says, “What’s wrong with that person?” And his servant said, “They’re sick. They have a horrible disease.” Siddhartha’s father never allowed him to be around sick people or see any illness or suffering.
Fred Blackburn: And Siddhartha was like, “What do you mean disease or sickness?” And the servant said, “Siddhartha, everyone gets sick at least one time in this life.” And he said, “Even princess?” And he said, “Yes, Siddhartha even princess.” And then the next person he encountered was a dead body down by the Ganges. And in that time in India, even to this day, they would often burn the dead and then throw the ashes into the river. And his servant said, “This happens to all men. When we die we become stiff like wood and we have to be burned, and then our ashes are thrown into the river, and the cycle starts all over again.” And the last person Siddhartha met that day was a sadhu. And a sadhu is a Hindu ascetic. Does anyone know what a ascetic is? They’re also called like faekirs, F-A-E-K-I-R.
Fred Blackburn: These are the people you see charming cobras, sleeping on beds of nails, walking across embers, those sorts of things. And these ascetics would try to so control their physical bodies such that they could release their spirit and be free from their mortal form. And when Siddhartha saw these four people: the old people, the sick people, the dead people, and then these ascetics, he vowed that he was not going to rest until he found the end to suffering in this world. And so he left the kingdom, he left the palace and he became an ascetic. And he lived with these people in the forest where he would just practice meditation. He would basically sit like a stone in the rain, in the cold. He would live off of bird droppings and raindrops, and not a healthy diet.
Fred Blackburn: And one day, while he was in this extreme asceticism, he heard this sitar teacher teaching one of his students. And he told the student, he said… And the sitar is like a guitar of a 12-string. And he told the student, “If you tighten the string too tight, it will snap. But if it’s too loose, it will not play.” And Siddhartha had one of these aha moments. And this is what’s called the middle way in Buddhism. And the idea is to avoid extremes. If you’re so ascetical that you’re going to kill your own body from malnutrition, your string is too tight. But if you have no discipline, no self-control, then it’s going to be so loose that you won’t make any progress. So he to hold his followers, “We need to follow this middle path.”
Fred Blackburn: But just like I showed you that picture of the Hindu sage and he saw the picture of god within him, Siddhartha did the same sort of thing. And this is what’s called his time, he’s found enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree. And the Bodhi Tree is just, it’s like one of those big fig trees like we have in Balboa Park. And so he’s sitting under this tree and it’s so similar. He had fasted for, guess it, 40 days. And then when he’s in this state, Mara, the Lord of Darkness comes to tempt him basically with wine, women, power, riches. And in each case Siddhartha is like, “No, that’s just elute. I will not be distracted.” But when he thought he had passed all those distractions and he pulled back the last petal, what appeared before him was his own image. And he saw himself, but he realized this was the last test and where the other Hindus had failed before him. They had been seduced by the ego self proclaiming itself as god, where Siddhartha renounced his own ego and annihilated his self until he realized there was anatman or no atman.
Fred Blackburn: So in the Buddhist sense of self, there is no self. There is nothing inside of that flower. But now I have to qualify, because Buddhist nothingness is very different from Western nothingness. And I actually learned this from a Western philosopher, Georg Hegel, who was a German enlightened romantic philosopher. And you ready for this one? This is going to be mind bending. You can share this with your friends and family. I’m going to show you how everything and nothing are the same thing by definition.
Fred Blackburn: So everything is that of which nothing can be added to or taken away from. Because if you could add something to everything, it wasn’t everything. And if you take something away from everything, it’s not everything no more. Nothing is that of which nothing can be added to, because if you add something to nothing it’s not nothing anymore. And it’s that of which nothing can be taken away from, because if you could take something away from nothing it wasn’t nothing. So everything and nothing is that of which nothing can be added to or taken away from, which makes them the same by definition. So when the Buddhist says he pulls back the… Oh, that’s, Buddha just means enlightened one. And when Siddhartha Gautama became enlightened he was called the Buddha. And that was his enlightenment that there is no self. There is nothing inside of you, but that nothing he’s talking about means everything. Everything is inside of you because the universe am I, but there is no me, there is no I. There is just the universe.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Fred Blackburn: Yeah. I can imagine how your psychological wheels are spinning now, and how in the world are you supposed to counsel a Hindu or a Buddhist? I was talking to a Buddhist online once, and I love going on online chat rooms of different religions, and really interesting conversation. And I try not to use any Christianese terminologies because I’m trying to learn and make sure I understand. And we were talking about this idea of annihilation of the self or killing the self. And so I asked this particular Buddhist. I said, “Even if you managed to annihilate the self, who is it that destroyed the self?” And they weren’t able to answer it for me. And I said, “I’m not trying to proselytize you or anything, but in the Christian tradition we have to be killed, put to death by another. We can’t do it to ourselves.”
Fred Blackburn: And think about crucifixion. When Mel Gibson put out that Passion of the Christ movie, one of the people was so taken by it, they went home and built a cross in their garage and they literally nailed their feet into the bottom and they nailed in one of their hands. And then they realized they had one hand waving free. And that’s the problem. You can’t self-crucify. You have to be crucified to another. And we were crucified with Christ. And I don’t know how I missed that part growing up. I got the part Jesus died for me, but I somehow missed the part that I was in Christ when he was crucified. So I was put to death with him and resurrected. I’m living a resurrected life tonight. It’s not just when this physical vehicle dies. It was when that endemic self died, Fred became a resurrected being. He became a new creation in Jesus. And so very different systems.
Fred Blackburn: I think Hinduism is incredibly philosophically sound, but it’s all your own effort, because you are god, you have to achieve that without help from anybody. And I am speaking in super broad brushes. I mean, Hindus make up over a billion people and you can imagine the scope of range within Hinduism. There are Hindus that are very much like Christians and those are the Hare Krishnas. They are counting on Krishna consciousness, we would say Christ consciousness, that that is what’s going to get them off that Wheel of Samsara. That Krishna is that incarnation of Vishnu is going to take care of them. But other sects of Hinduism would tell them, “No. You’re still going to be living in a delusion as long as you see an I-thou distinction between you and Krishna or between you and Jesus. Until you can say, ‘I am Krishna’ or ‘I am god,’ you are still living that dualistic life.”
Fred Blackburn: And in Christianity, we’re not saying… We are saying that god isn’t dwelling us, but there is an us that god isn’t dwelling. We’re not saying we are god, we’re still, there is a creator and we are the creatures, but we now have this knit together union with god that we did not have in our endemic self. There we were separated and cut off from god. Where the Hindus believe no one’s cut off from god because everyone is god, just some people are too ignorant to realize that. And then the Buddhist, I love their idea of loving kindness and compassion. It’s kind of like a gentler, kinder Hinduism. But once again, the problem is you have to do the workout even to killing your own self. And I’m not talking about suicide. I’m talking about that ego self. You are responsible for killing your own ego. She’s like, “How in the world are you supposed to kill you?” Even if you succeed, you’ve just managed in exalting yourself.
Fred Blackburn: All right. I just wanted to give you a quick teaser about can you see that picture of the three guys?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Fred Blackburn: Okay. This is called the Vinegar Tasters and it’s a classic Chinese metaphor. And so here we have the Buddha who’s basically seeing life is sour, life is cruel. And so we’re basically trying to check out from life. And I wasn’t trying to give you a overview of Buddhism, but let me mention to you Buddhists see the world and this incarnation, this is part of what’s called the… I should stop this real quick. This is called the Four Noble Truths. And the first noble truth, and this is what came to Siddhartha as he was sitting meditating under this Bodhi Tree.
Fred Blackburn: The first truth he realized was that to live is to suffer. If you live in this world, you are going to suffer. Suffer or suffering is caused by desire or unmet expectation. That’s the second noble truth. So the first truth is to live is to suffer. The second is suffering is caused by desire or unmet expectations. And the third noble truth is if you want to stop suffering, stop desiring or stop having expectations. And then the fourth noble truth is that wheel I showed you called the Eightfold Path. So to live is to suffer. Suffer comes from desire. Stop desiring if you want to stop suffering, and follow the Eightfold Path, that’s the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.
Fred Blackburn: So if we go back to this share screen with the three vinegar tasters, here you have the Buddha tasting this pot of vinegar and he is just suffering, right? Maybe he expected it to taste sweeter or something. And that’s the thing, when we have expectations and they’re not met, that’s when we have pain in our life. In fact, Buddhists goes so far to say, “If on your deathbed, you desire one more breath, you will get an entire lifetime of them because you will be reincarnated once again.” And remember, reincarnation is not a good thing in the East. It’s a horror because you keep going through this wheel of illusion over and over and over, with all this pain and suffering and heartache. And so the goal is to get off of that wheel. And the only way to get off of it is to realize your true nature, which for the Buddhist is you have no nature.
Fred Blackburn: K’ung Fu-tzu who in the West we know as Confucius, he was kind of like your Miss Manners of ancient China. He told the people how to live in community. And so when he’s sensing the vinegar, he’s thinking about its proper uses, its proper etiquette, it’s proper uses. When it should be served at a meal, with what. All of that kind of bureaucracy going on in this head of Confucius. But the third guy, Laozi, who was the father of Daoism, he’s simply taken the vinegar for what it is and he is just like, “Hmm, vinegar.” As you can guess of these three, I’m a fan of the daoist. And what happened in China was you got a blend, a synchrotism of all three of these views: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. And this later became known as Chan Buddhism. And when its missionaries traveled to Japan, that’s what we know today as Zen Buddhism.
Fred Blackburn: For those of you that have watched the Disney movies like Mulan, even though that’s set in China, that’s a really good example of Shintoism and ancestral worship. And this is a really big part of the Confucian ideal. And so you have to remember in the East, they do not have a sense of like we have in the West. We pretty much have the Greeks to thank for that culturally. They had such a sense of individual being in each individual human. Now, they did have a collective sense in that they were part of a city state. But think as a modern 21st century Americans what in incredibly enhanced sense of self you have. Now, you may have a family name, you may be close to your church or your tribe, but we have an incredible sense of individuality and self here in the West. In the East, it was much more collective. And in that story of Mulan, it starts off with her going to the family shrine where she’s praying to and offering sacrifices to her dead family members, because remember, death does not mean annihilation, death means disconnection.
Fred Blackburn: And so the Buddhists aren’t seeking disconnection from the self, they’re seeking an end to or annihilation of the self. In death where there’s a disconnection from our physical body, it doesn’t mean that person has ceased to exist. And we see this in cultures throughout the world. Cinco de Mayo. Not Cinco de Mayo. Dia De Los Muertos, Day of the Dead in Mexico. In the Celtic peoples it was Samhain, which was co-opted by the Catholic church and we know it is All Hollows Eve or Halloween. The Japanese have what’s called the Obon Festival. And Africa they teach of the living dead. And what this is, is this idea that all of us here in this conference are living, but when we die we go into this realm called the living dead. If you guys saw Coco, they did a really good job of explaining this concept.
Fred Blackburn: As long as someone that is living still knows you, you stay in this living dead place. But when the last human, like so for my grandma, Blackburn, when my nephew Jordan dies and goes into the living dead place, she will go from this place because he was the last human that knew her, she will go from this place into the spirit realm. And then the next realm is deity. And so in Confucianism, there’s this huge sense of respect for the ancestors, birth order, how to behave. And it all has to do with how to live together in a polite society. Laozi was more like Mr. Natural. He was like, “That’s all artificial constructs. If we want to know how to live, we need to look at nature. And we need to find that balance between the different forces that are going on in the world.”
Fred Blackburn: And you’ve probably seen this symbol. This is called the yin-yang or the yin-yang symbol. Focusing on this part, the yin-yang where you have these two different shades moving into each other. And let me just go back. I’ll draw with my hands again. So in the Dao De Jing, we have this concept that in the beginning was the one. The one became two, the two became three, and then the three became all things. But all these things are contained in the one. So this oneness that Laozi was talking about, that is what the Buddhists are seeking. This undifferentiated wholeness where there is no high. There is no low. There is no black. There is no white. There is no male. There is no female. There is no good. There is no evil. But in this realm of dualism where you see the split between the yin and yang, now you have the world of opposites.
Fred Blackburn: And think about the creation account. In the beginning, god, who transcends all distinction, because he’s the totality of reality. He separates the light from the darkness, and now dualism begins. He separates the waters. He separates the dry land from the waters. He creates the world and he makes male and female. And out of the male and female comes the child. So out of the one comes the two. From the two comes the three. From the three comes all things. But all things are contained within the one. What I like about the Daoists over the Buddhists, is the Buddhists are just seeking this oneness place without distinction. But for the Daoists, it’s almost like they have a toggle switch in their mind. If they want to be at peace and rest, they toggle into the oneness. If they want to engage into this world, they toggle into the dualism. And so they can toggle back and forth between dualism and oneness, where the Buddhists are just always trying to get to this oneness place. But in doing so, I think they deny what’s good here in the world, instead of just saying that’s illusion.
Fred Blackburn: One more thing I want to point out. The whole point of Buddhism is to avoid pain and suffering. And you do this by not having desires. In Christianity, I’m not saying you are to seek suffering, but suffering will come and we are to embrace it. We are to sanctify it and make it holy. It’s not something we’re trying to avoid or deny, but it’s something we embrace. And that’s a huge distinction in my mind between Buddhism and Christianity. Don’t get me wrong. I love Buddhism. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Buddhist I didn’t like. I wish I could say the same about the Christians, but there’s a lot of beauty there, but there is so much pressure put upon the self which supposedly doesn’t even exist. And so it makes it very difficult.
Fred Blackburn: All right. That was a heck of a lot for one sitting. I think I’m going to stop there, but I’ll hang out a few if people have any questions or… While you’re thinking, next week what I’d like to do is to go back to the West and trace these ideas of the self through the Middle Ages, to where we get to the enlightenment. And then when we get to more existential philosophy, because that’s really where modern psychology has its birth, specifically from like Schopenhauer, Freud and… Or Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Brouwer, and they all affected Sigmund Freud and others. And I think that will be really helpful because if we go back to this chart, what ends up happening in the West is we end up with this far left piece where all we have is the universe. We basically reason god right outside of his whole domain.
Fred Blackburn: And so I think a lot of you, especially, if you go on for your PhD or other things in psychology, you are going to have to confront a materialistic naturalistic worldview. And so I want you to be prepared for it and understand these people believe you have a body, but you do not have a soul. You have a brain, but you do not have a mind. And so I think that will be important to talk about. And then the fourth week, I want to talk about what I believe is a Christian view of the self, which we’ve been kind of teasing at, but that will be the big focus for the night.
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