Quaker, Buddhist . . . interbeing

One core principle for Quakers is seeing "that of God" in everyone.

In this I can see the roots of all of the Quaker social testimony.

But I am not sure we all accept and understand this concept in the same way. I, for example, find myself saying that there is that of "Good" in everyone else - which indicates the way I interpret it.

I also find myself thinking that God is some thing - a spirit, or energy - that informs everyone and every thing. (As opposed to God as a separate super being.) And this latter moves me very close to the Buddhist concept of interconnectedness.

What I like about the Buddhist concept is it is verified by contemporary science. We can see from a scientific standpoint that everything is inter-connected - that matter is neither created nor destroyed, but merely transformed. The Buddhist word for this is "manifested." That is, what I think of as my self is merely the current manifestation of a certain portion of matter and energy. That same matter and energy has been part of many other manifestations in the past and will be part of more in the future.

But that manifestation is constantly changing, constantly interacting with, everything else. We get it in our head that in terms of space we end where our skin ends and in terms of time we end when our life ends - and we began when our life began. We see our skin as a`physical barrier that separates us from the rest of the world. And we see our lifespan as a barrier that separates us from what preceded and what will come after.

But neither is a true barrier. Our skin, like the rest of us, is nourished by the air we breath and the water and food that we need constantly to maintain this particular manifestation. And with science we know that the matter and energy which currently is manifested as us existed in other people and objects before and will continue to exist after our death. In the end the Buddhist see this concept of self as false - we are totally interdependent with everything else in the universe, past, present and future.

For me this gives rise to a vision of small eddies in a rushing stream of energy and matter - eddies that form for a while, and then untwist themselves back into the main stream. What I think of as my individual self is one of these small eddies. Most of the time I fail to see its relationship to the whole - I don't detect the stream. But this morning, before, during, and after meditation I could.

In meditation - in every moment of our lives - we need to see this . To not do so is to sin. I don't usually use the word "sin" because it is usually misunderstood. For me sin is simply being separated from God - God being everything .

The problem for me with the "that of God" in everyone else is it tends to be a limiting image. That is, we tend to see a seed within others - a God seed that can be nourished if we respond to it correctly. In Jesus that seed has matured into the whole being and so we see Jesus as God.

But we are all God because we are all everything. The "seed" we see is merely our perception of God and to be like Jesus it needs to be nourished with constant meditation. Thus we arrive at the Christian/Buddhist position where we see ourselves as interbeing - inter-related to everything and everyone. We see no separation.

From this, quite naturally, compassion springs,

Here for me is a world view that integrates my knowledge of science, Christianity, and Buddhism and defines a compassionate lifestyle as the most obvious, undeniable choice.

Like other such things I stumbled upon this, this morning, quite unprepared. I did get up with the intention of resuming meditation in the morning. I have hardly meditated at all the past few weeks and for the past couple of months many of the benefits of meditation I had found earlier were dissipating. I think the main cause of this was my war fever - a super focus on war and peace. Now that fever has broken and I feel whole again.

In fact, my meditation this morning had a different quality than before. It was, in a strange way, more relaxed - and yet, at the same time, I was more aware. I think in the past I retreated more into a separate physical state during meditation - a state that was enhanced by keeping my eyes shut.

This morning I had my eyes closed some of the time, but I didn't feel opening them broke the meditation. The key stimulus for this change came from reading - almost at random - some passages about interbeing in Thich Nhat Hanhs' "The Miracle of Mindfulness."

Note: I wrote this four days ago. I am publishing it now after I have had time to digest it, These insights do not stay with me whole. The words and concepts last. The feeling and intuitive integration into my life gets driven out by various distractions of day-to-day living. It's much like knowing that the Andromeda Galaxy is 2 million light years away and experiencing those two million light years as you observe this little blur of light in the autumn sky. For me the experience is extremely rare and I don't know how to generate it. The knowing - having command of the facts is simple. But the facts are an empty skeleton - just the faintest of shadows of the reality.

This too, I believe, is at the heart of Buddhism, though I had experienced it far before I knew anything of Buddhism. The issue is how to grasp things whole - how to go from knowing to being - how to look at the osprey and not simply feel like you imagine the osprey feels, but for a moment be the osprey.

And how to sustain any of these insights for more than an hour or two?

Posted by Greg Stone at May 3, 2003 12:03 AM