Thank you, Jeffrey, for sharing about your father. I see the forces of our Christianized culture catching up with your father, and he succumbed to the type of fear that comes with feeling cut off from God (or Source, or whatever). He’s not alone.
I would add, that being an atheist would also cut him off from the herd. He spent the last 5 or so years of his life in an old folks home, which was Christian influenced, so he would have also cut himself off from the herd at the old folks home as well; which people generally do not want to do, especially as we become frail due to old age.
I suppose that there are whole communities of elderly professors somewhere, where they can find community (a herd in this sense), where they can die as atheists and not feel alienated.
Your point about Buddhism being a more engaged and direct form of spiritual practice/experience is an excellent one. It’s been such a relief to discover (through your influence more than any) the teachings of the Buddha, which do such a good job of describing the stages of spiritual development, as well as the path through those stages. I often wonder what the Western world would be like if a comprehensive record of Jesus’ actual teachings had been preserved, beyond the highly-edited version that has been handed down to us. But the fact that the early Buddhist records are being translated into English (however flawed the translations) offers invaluable assistance to mystics of any stripe.
Yes, Buddhism is more cogent a philosophical system; and I find compelling evidence in the heavily engineered Gospels that we have, that Jesus may very well have been deeply influenced by Buddhism, especially since Buddhism was throughout Persia in his day.
With the highly connected world that we have today, it is likely the Buddhism is going to continue to influence the western religions in subtle ways.
If religion was at least willing to accept both internal and external criticism, then we could see the Bible, Gospels, and translations of Asian literature all improve over time. However, as we see how this community of contemplatives has been marginalized by both Christianity and Buddhism, then we are not likely to ever see a scholarly and cogent edited translation of the literature of any religion.
The GWV is just too small to influence the world at large, let alone survive more than a few more decades. Consequently the mystics of the future will have to cover the same ground we all had to do to realize that we have all been lied to throughout history by the authority figures that mold each and every civilization.
