Nun of Your Business

Here is an interview that my friend forwarded to me. It relates to something I've been writing recently on Buddhist Perspectives on God. This part is interesting--from the interview with Robert Wright: It’s not the theology of Buddhism that attracts me to it. And there is no single theology of Buddhism. Some Buddhists are essentially atheistic. Most [in Asia] are not. Most of the things Americans think about Buddhism in Asia – that Buddhists meditate and don’t believe in god – are for most Buddhists in Asia, wrong. Most of them...are theistic and don’t meditate. The monks meditate. Evolution of God , by Robert Wright

I've been telling my friends that I'm interested in something I'm calling 'the symbolic process,' these days. So someone gave me the book American Gods , by Neil Gaiman (2001). This fictional adventure is about a show-down between the ancient gods, led by the old Norse god Odin, and the gods of modernity--the ones who run the internet, and so forth. One of my favorite parts was when they (the main character, who is human, and the god Odin) take a sharp right turn off the highway and take a shortcut through the backstage of reality. In order to evade their pursuers, they walk in this realm that has a black, slick ground. When they arrive at their destination--a cabin in the countryside--it turns out that a month has passed in this ordinary reality, even though it didn't seem that long in the black, slick backstage shortcut. That reminds me of explanations we hear from Buddhism (and other traditions) about how time passes differently in various realms. For example...