Buddhism Makes no Sense

The core claim of Buddhism is that your most basic perception of reality can change drastically, not solving all of your problems, but allowing you to see them not as problems, in an instant.

Sounds crazy.

This is not the gross illogic of Christianity.

This is the most logical claim ever. It is fully consistent with Einstein’s claim that matter is just energy slowed way down, that the two are interchangeable in some sense.

Humans often like to flatter ourselves that we are very logical creatures, some of us do, anyway.

As one Buddhist teacher put it, we are not rational beings, we are rationalizing beings. We usually do what we want, then think up some juicy, post hoc rationalization for why that was the right thing to do.

After he awakened, the Buddha became entirely logical.

We don’t usually see it that way because he also became the embodiment of lovingkindness and compassion, which we do not think of as logical choices.

But he also said the constitutive feature of human existence is ignorance. That we don’t see lovingkindness and compassion as logical is a function of our ignorance.

An implication of not self is that we are not the discrete, self contained entities we typically perceive ourselves to be. We are all more than intertwined, we are inseparable.

A common metaphor is that we are all waves, briefly differentiated on the surface…