One of the most learned and highly trained American-born lamas in the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition. He is a meditation teacher and author.
Should Humanity Have Been Created? This has long been a debate among learned Jews.
In fact, long ago in the holy land, several centuries after Jesus’ time, the most learned rabbis of the two rival schools of philosophy, Hillel and Shammai, met together to discuss this critical issue.
After two years of intense debate, they decided by majority vote–in true Jew fashion, pessimistic realists to the end, that…It would’ve been better if it hadn’t ever happened!
But then, again true to Jewish form, they decided that given the obvious fact that we have been created—shit happens!—we must always examine and evaluate our deeds vigilantly and candidly. This I read in the NY Times on the last day of Channukah, attributed to Professor Jack Spiro of Virginia.
Doesn’t this sort of sum up our condition? Or is it mere sophistry?
Did God create humanity, or humans create God–or do we co-emerge together, as I’m beginning to think?
Whether you’re a theist or not, isn’t the real existential issue here whether it was worth we ourselves being born into this evanescent world, and what to do about it? In other words, the big question, evergreen: How shall I live? Why are we here, for what purpose; why am I here, and how do I fit in?
Now that we are here, what kind of world shall we co-create?
This I contemplate today as snow blankets the East Coast, looking like a brightly shining field of gravestones, all apparent differences resolved.
Thank you for sharing. I look forward to your contemplations.
Peace.
I don’t know what to believe myself, but I like to think of God as the fifth note in a barber shop quartet: when all things come together into harmony, it creates a beautiful resonating note that is greater than the sum of all the quartet’s parts. Do I believe that we created God? I don’t know, but I personally like the idea of God not just being a part of us, but us a part of HIm.
The first sentence of the Holy Quran has a special Sufi interpretation:
It is said that the sword of la cuts the self of the Lover and after that only the Divine exists.
When we lose our ego and make the step into non-dualism we reach the Divine and create the next step in evolution.
The sensation of doing this is more than enough reason to be created.