Welcome back, Gleef here, I might be coming out of the depths of my dark mood (not that "normal" for me is sunshines and happiness), so here's one that's only a little dark. But first, this guy has built a pretty waterfall based on a design from one of my favorite artists, let's watch it for a moment.
More wonders and mystery after the flip...
Background
I feel I should dedicate this diary to Jon/linkage. It's been bouncing around my head for months now, but all his recent talk on metaphor has really helped it gel into something I could write on.
Many people find some aspects of Buddhism very mysterious, arcane, confusing. Reading the sutras, the writings of the old Chinese Zen masters, of later Japanese and even American Zen masters, from the viewpoint of someone with no exposure to Buddhism, it's easy to see why.
There once was a little hut called Fei’tien, meaning “rich field,”
where a monk lived for thirty years.
He had only one tray made of clay.
One day a monk, who studied under him, broke that tray accidentally.
Each day the teacher asked the student to replace it.
Each time the disciple would bring a new one, the teacher threw it out saying,
“This is not it. Give me back my old one!”
Genro’s Poem: It is broken; Run fast after it.
— Master Genro, Iron Flute, Case 90
What's someone supposed to do with writing like that? There's almost nothing to hold on to. Even if you succeed in grasping something, someone's sure to tell you to stop it.
So let start the chat in Greece, that seems useful to me.
Dharma Chat — Mystery
When I was a young child, I loved Greek Mythology. When I became a teenager, I realized that I had spiritual feelings, a drive towards spirituality that, since my parents raised me without religion, had no obvious outlet. My thoughts turned towards Greece, but I'm an iconoclast who is drawn to doing things the hard way, so I became an Erisian, and thus my pagan days began.
Being a neopagan in the Greek Pantheon, I started to study what the ancient Greeks were doing, and one recurring theme in Ancient Greek Religion (as opposed to just the myths, the stories I had studied before), was the Mystery Cult.
At first, being a naive teenager, I thought they were mystery cults because they were hoarding some great secret, secrets I wanted to know. A bit more research and it became apparent that that's not what mystery meant at all here.
It wasn't that these cultists didn't share these mysteries because they were hoarding them, the cultists didn't share these mysteries because there was no effective way of communicating the underlying concepts.
There were many of these cults, the two biggest were probably for Apollo and Dionysus, but for examples I'll draw on the cult of Demeter, goddess of fertility and the harvest, mother of Persephone (that girl who ate the pomegranate seeds in the underworld), because it's arguably more timeless, more accessible to the modern reader. Her mysteries, the Eleusinian Mysteries, probably focused around the importance, intensity, and interconnectedness of the various cycles of nature, of life, they were apparently directed at transcending those cycles and reaching a form of immortality.
Dharma Chat — Initiation
So, if there's no effective way of communicating the mystery, how does a religion that depends on these mysteries to maintain its sense of identity survive? They went slowly, using a two stage process.
First came instruction, though some would call it mentoring, others indoctrination. More experienced cultists would be responsible for steeping the novice in the folklore and metaphors of the cult. They would also be sure to provide the novice with opportunities to learn what's important in great detail.
So a novice in the Cult of Demeter might be put to work in the garden, with a mentor being sure to ask pointed questions, direct the novice's attention to subtle things that are important, yet easy to miss. Or, perhaps, as apprentice to a midwife, also a senior cultist, also focusing the novice's attention where it might be most fruitful to dwell.
When the novice was ready, when they had a skeleton of understanding of the mystery, they would become an initiate, and be permitted into the secret rites. The point of the rite is to hammer home the importance of the mystery. The rites were kept secret, not because the rites gave the mystery away, the initiate needed to understand some before even going through that door. They were secret because having a sacred space apart from the mundane world was important to their function. Having a sense of surprise was also important, these rites, these initiations, drew upon the Ancient Greek's renowned talent for symbolic metaphor, and for stagecraft, to draw the initiate through an intense and singular experience.
[Incidentally, drugs were probably also used to heighten the experience. In the case of the Eleusinian Mysteries, scholars suspect they prepared a mixture based around ergot, a grain parasite that's the natural precursor of LSD]
These initiation rites were practiced on a regular basis (some more frequently than others), and senior cultists would repeat the rite to reaffirm their faith, but there's nothing quite like your first initiation.
So, putting the Ancient Greeks behind us, let's take a look at one of the more accessible mysteries out there, the mystery out of which I try to allow these chats of ours to spring, love...
Dharma Chat — Love
By the definition above, love is clearly a mystery. Sure, we talk about love all the time, we tell our family we love them, we write love letters to people we seek to become closer to, we discuss the foods we love, artists sometimes share quite profound expressions of love.
But the underlying concept, the raw emotions that we feel which we call love, how do you share that. If you walk up to one of those rare impoverished individuals who lack all understanding of love, is there any way of explaining it properly? Any way to really give them that understanding? If you know of a useful and effective way, please share it, because that might reduce a whole lot of pain in this world.
In the meantime, we're reduced to using stand-ins for those feelings, the word "love", the heart symbol, countless poetic and artistic metaphors and similes for what we feel inside, and hope we have enough shared experience with the person on the other end of those words to connect.
I speak the word "love", decorate it as best I can with verbal context, with vocal intonation, with the expression on my face, in my body, in the environment surrounding us. You hear the word, pick up some of the cues I surround the word with, and piece it together with your past experiences, with your present feelings, with your future dreams, and come up with an understanding of what I'm trying to say. But your understanding springs from you, it's not my understanding. If we're lucky, our understandings will be close enough, that's the best we can hope for.
If we have the talent, we might be better off doing as the poets do, writing lush metaphors; or as the musicians do, pour their feelings out through non-verbal sound; or as the painters do, in their choices of color and light, texture and form. Many of us will latch onto the expression of one of these artists, one whose work speaks to us, and go, "This! This is what I mean!" Yet it only fully works if it speaks to the other person in the same way, and a work of art never speaks to two people in precisely the same way. Again, if we're lucky, our understandings will be close enough.
We even have initiation rites surrounding love, the three that come to my mind are sex, marriage and childbirth. We hopefully approach each of these rites with some knowledge of what they mean, but the rite itself is an intense personal, singular experience that can change or deepen our understanding, hammer things home for us, in a way that can't really be expressed.
For all our attempts at expressing love, our underlying feeling, that fleeting personal glimpse of truth which we call love, remains a mystery, known only to us.
Dharma Chat — The Moon, Reflected On The Calm Waters
And so we return now to Buddhism, to the hard to grasp sutras, the confounding poems and stories shared by the Zen masters. It should be evident by now that these stories contain metaphorical expressions of mystery.
One common example is the moon, which might be thought of as Buddha, as Enlightenment. It's worth pointing out that in these poems and stories, the moon comes up often, but there's not a lot of looking at the moon. We look at fingers pointing at the moon, we look at the image of the moon reflected in a pond.
I can take one of these stories and (after enough research) break it down and explain every metaphor in excruciating detail, talk at great length about what the story means to me. This might help you to understand me, but it won't help you understand the mystery. You have to get there on your own, Buddha himself doesn't have the strength to carry you there, even though there's no distance you need to travel.
Buddhism isn't a Mystery Cult in the Greek sense, but I find many parallels to be drawn.
We approach the mysteries through study, experience, and mindfulness, just like the Greeks. We share stories, and listen to teachers, all with the aim of bringing us closer to sharing a true understanding. We too use a drug to heighten the experience, though the drug we use is the relatively gentle and socially acceptable tea.
Like the Greeks we approach the stage with some knowledge, but less understanding than we like to imagine we have, and we approach that stage through meditation. We lack the stagecraft of the Grecian Masters, but the stage becomes the entire world, inside and outside our mind (I joke), a set far beyond the talents of the most experienced artisan. When the smoke clears, the understanding we're left with is hammered home just the same. Afterwards, the work gets done, and it looks the same; the stories get shared and they sound the same, but the stream has moved on, and those tasks and stories are coming from a new place.
Next week, I suspect I'm talking about home.
So how about you, what mysteries are you exploring in your life? Do you have any questions, comments, concerns, trays to replace?