The Middle Way

Friday 08 Jan 2016

In this blog I hope to point to and illustrate the idea of the “Middle Way” of religion as spoken about by The Buddha some 2600 years ago. It is essentially the resolution of the argument that embroils humanity as to whether there is a God or Many Gods juxtaposed against Atheism. Monotheism or Pantheism is all about an all-powerful God or Gods who have and overarching agency in our lives forever; and then Atheism, which argues that when you die there is, nothing --- Nihilism. The two extremes!

The past two blogs that I have written have set out the ground work for The Middle Way. In the blog on “Unctuousness” I set out the way that unctuousness with its strong piety and righteousness leads to a conceit and stops us from seeing what the Buddha called “Dukka”. This is a word that is hard to see to its depth when we are so invested in our humanity. It means unsatisfactory or not peaceful. The Buddha said when we grasp onto anything Mental or Physical, Dukka will be totally present and we will be to some extent blind. Unctuousness makes us think we can make the world right. We just need to try harder or fix the quality of our faith or belief.  Further, when there is godhead it can help us forgive our own inadequacy, because God or the Gods will have it covered. It stops us from seeing right into the heart of truth.

On the Atheist side of the ledger we can use the hubris that it employs to develop the same conceit in order to develop a belief that there is nothing there after we die because we are clever enough to work it out. We are no longer captive to Gods priests because we have used our intellect and education to develop tools that allow us to see deep in the nature of the world. We can see how the Physical works with the idea that we will one day have a Theory of Everything. In fact some of today’s Physicists have set themselves up as pseudo priests to champion atheism. We don’t need to understand the Buddha’s Dukka because it is irrelevant.  However I believe that most people in the world do see a fly in the ointment of this intellectual argument because basically we know that humanity is made up of two parts, the head and the heart. The intellect and the emotions! Emotionally the nihilism of Atheism is tough to step over.

The last blog highlighted an experiment that Derren Brown did with human emotion that comes out of some of the latest findings in Psychology.  He wanted to show that experience is conditional. He played at being God! At the end of an experiment after Derren had given a lady a transformative experience that was “God Like”, he had to quickly reassure her that he was not trying to devalue her emotional experience. He explained how he set the conditions up for her to have the experience, and then attempted to reassure her. It did not wash completely though, because the lady did say that the experience felt more artificial after he explained how he had done it, so she did devalue her experience. With all this type of knowledge in place the value of humanity is now under attack from two sides, the intellectual and the emotional. There is no wonder why anxiety and depression are on the rise. Everything is being undermined including our humanity. This is the down side of what we are doing.  

The up side is that knowledge can help humanity, perhaps even more than in the Buddha’s day, but the rub is we have to work to understand what Dukka is. This is subtle knowledge, such that even the Buddha started out by deciding to teach to “only those with just a little dust in their eyes”. It turned out that practicing Buddhism is good for all because it teaches tolerance and letting go.

Practicing to understand will eventually lead to seeing what the Buddha saw. Essentially one needs to be able to see what still consciousness (the mind) is. Then the movement and conditions of life, both mentally and physically can be seen contrasted against it. This allows us to see that the still consciousness comes first.  It enables letting go of the minds conditions and develops Wisdom as we learn to understand power and truth of the Present Moment. Eventually with practice and mindfulness consciousness itself will cease because it too is a condition. The Buddha called this Cessation and this can only be found by travelling the Middle Way. This Cessation is not Atheistic nor is it mediated by God. It is what happens at the very heart of the Present Moment, and to get there one needs to have the required purity balance and wisdom in one’s life, otherwise one will be naturally reborn at death. The unbalanced mind can do nothing else but give rise to rebirth, because the mind-stream of consciousness is not balanced. It is still involved with Past and Future and like the “cart that follows the horse” the cart will follow on to a new birth.  

To find the “Middle Way” is our life’s work. There is nothing else that really matters. We need to let go of the conceit that the piety of unctuousness brings, and the hubris that comes with atheism in order to find the Middle Way. The eight fold path to this truth, set out by the Buddha, is a profound pathway that is not a dogma. It is a path that can be reproduced by anyone who is starting to see what Dukka means. It is not a Buddhist path; it is a natural path that will throw up reflections of our individual selves. What we do with these reflections is up to us and to the extent we are able to develop our mind to make it more peaceful and still will indicate whether or not we are doing it right. The Eightfold path works in three areas.

The first is our Morality where following the path at a basic level, as set out by the Buddha, will ensure that we are able to make our minds still enough to get to first base. The second is our Meditation. This part helps us train and recondition our mind toward better morality and to what is the third part of the path. This is Wisdom. The natural emergence of Wisdom trains us to start seeing things in the right way.

So as Morality gets better, compassion and kindness grows, which allows us to practice Meditation better, which allows us to see the pathway of the Middle Way much more clearly with Wisdom.  It is a virtuous circle that leads to the truth that is always present in the moment.

PS: In a future blog I will describe the process of rebirth more fully.