Discussing the Undiscussable

Religion versus Religion

All Religions are but discussions about the undiscussable

I find it an amazing and very hard to reconcile fact that convictions (yes, convictions) about the one ultimate truth (for there is one, of course) should differ so (often wildly) among religions. And since they do, they not only discuss and discuss and discuss, but argue and argue and argue, and not only argue and argue and argue but kill and kill and kill to convince all the others (heathens all) of their own one ultimate truth.

And kill and kill again.

And isn’t it ironic that the one thing that is truly undiscussable — since the ultimate truth is beyond the ken of man, ungraspable by mind and reason, only intuited by the holy — is the one thing that is so very much, I would go so far as to say endlessly, discussed.

Once I woke up to the fact that there was more to life than food and money — once life had mercifully deigned to show me (to prove to me) that I was indeed a spirit — I began my search for the religion that would confirm and advance that certainty.

Initially, once Life had briefly pulled the curtains apart to let me peek at the One Truth beyond, my only reason for rising in the morning was to find my way back to those curtains and see them pulled apart again, to let me have another, and perhaps longer look — perhaps even to let me split those curtains and enter the beyond. No such luck, though. No sir. Life had now (for reasons unknown) decided to remain mum on the subject.

My friend Eric — who had been to India (or so he said) and observed and apparently experienced Eastern Religion firsthand — when I told him about my glimpse of the beyond, smiled and called me a little Buddha, which, although I never sat him down and asked him what precisely that meant, made me conclude that Buddhism must hold the secret to my seeing past the curtains again. It seemed like Eric would know, so I decided that he did.

But there was no real Buddhism around where I lived at the time, no books about it that I could find — though that dearth of Buddhist writings would be cured many, many times over later in life.

I did have one book, though, that spoke of this mystery with an Eastern view: The Upanishads. This was a Swedish translation and to be honest, I do not remember anything from that reading other than this: Atman is the Individual Soul, and Brahman is the Universal Soul, and they are one and the same.

This, on a visceral level, made perfect sense to me, and I absorbed this wisdom with both heart and bone and brain and mind all the way to my spiritual fingertips and this, I might even call it intuited certainty, made itself a home in my heart and has stayed with me in one form or another over the years in varying degrees of dormancy, only to resuscitate completely of late.

Still, over all these years, I kept looking for the un-parting curtains to part, but they were not parting, not for the Upanishads, not for little Buddha, and not by meditating the way Eric suggested which was a strange way I see now looking back.

Sit cross-legged and look straight ahead and wait for a light to move in from the left, he told me. I tried that a few times: no parting of any curtains.

No light either.

I tried it a few more times. Not even curtains, much less parted ones.

Then I wondered if perhaps I had been saved, Christian style. In fact, when I called my dad to tell him about the curtains parting that is exactly what I told him, “I have been saved.”

“What, seen Jesus?”

“Not exactly.”

“What then?”

“I’ve seen the light.” Which was true, I had seen the light.

Well, what do you say to that if you’re a non-believing father as was my dad? Nothing, really, and that’s pretty much what he said, for I can’t remember at all now how he responded.

Nothing significant in other words.

At one point, reading the Upanishads, I decided to take Eric’s cue and go to India, and once I mentioned this to my dad — for I was going to need his approval, being a minor still (for another few months at least). That was not a wise thing to propose. He told me he’d send the cops after me if I left the country and how else to read that than as permission not granted (I was still only nineteen and the legal age in Sweden was twenty at the time). Not much more was said.

No India.

My next port of religious call was Baha’i, which I dabbled in long enough to know that it was not going to part any curtains either.

Then I talked religion with my deeply Christian uncle Allan who had, against many odds, survived an enormous electric shock in his early thirties which he sustained by accidentally touching the high voltage lines that fed electric train engines in Sweden, 18,000 volts or something like that, which had damaged almost all organs in his body.

The story was that he had climbed up onto an open (flatbed) railway car to inspect a cement mixer and rising up from this closer look he touched the high voltage line and the current that coursed through his body and into the metal car was so intense, I was told later, that it welded the train cars’ coupling gears together. Oh, man.

I know he spent many months in hospital but having had the physique of an ox to begin with he pulled through. A weaker man would have died on the spot. They all agreed on that. Parents, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and so on.

Still, Allan never walked without a cane after that.

So, I sat down with him one day to check his religious pulse as it were. No, I did not go into much detail about my parting curtains with him for as soon as he saw the discussion drift toward a religion other than his he sat back and said that there was no other savior than Jesus Christ and there was no other Devil than the Devil. Though he had not met Jesus, not in person, not what he said anyway, he had certainly met the Devil he said, and the only weapon against the evil one was Jesus, Jesus Christ. And that was the end of that discussion.

Could it be, I wonder. Had he really met the Devil?

Nah. Not for me.

A year on, enter Eric again, this time as a proselytizer for Scientology, which he explained to me at both length and depth (and very well at that) and so managed to convince me that this new Twentieth Century religion would indeed pull my curtains apart for me, finally.

Finally.

Yes, I took his word for it and it took me nearly forty years to conclude that those curtains remained as drawn as ever and were not going to part any time soon.

By then I lived in America and here I found the wealth of Buddhist literature I could have used in 1968 when I set out on this search.

Only to find that they were still discussing the undiscussable.

Within two hundred years of the Buddha’s death, I read, nineteen) or more) different sects had formed, each disagreeing with the others about what the Buddha has actually said, or more to the point, actually meant.

And then, fast-forwarding, we now have Chan and Zen and Tibetan and Theravada vs. Hinayana, and all shades between (Yogacara for one), every shade dead certain that they (and only they) have the answer.

Still no parted curtains.

Still so much discussion.

I have recently turned to Advaita Vedanta, which in effect is a returning to the Upanishads, my initial taste of Eastern Philosophy. And I am now, on a daily basis, strongly reminded that Atman and Brahman are both infinite and both the same.

Shakara spoke eloquently about this.

Ramana Maharshi spoke (mostly through silence) about this, though he never claimed to belong to any religious faction.

And now I begin to see all the more clearly that all mystics — from Meister Eckhart to William Blake — and all truly religious figures: The Buddha, Lao Tze, Jesus of Nazaret, et al. really talk about the same thing residing behind the curtains.

I have now settled on meditation in the spirit of Theravada, Zen, and Vedanta, and at long last I see the curtains flutter a little, self-tugging a little, as if reluctantly eager, toward parting.

© Wolfstuff