|
NOTE: This
answer was given on December 30, 2007, during the Shangra-la New Years
conference in Los Angeles, California.
Answer from Gautama Buddha:
As we have explained many times, when we give a teaching, we are not
attempting to bring forth the highest possible teaching. For we do not
even operate with the concept of the highest. For this is, of course,
a dualistic concept of high and low and of comparisons. So what we give
is a teaching that is adapted to the specific people that we are seeking
to reach. And we must adapt a teaching to their culture, to their belief
system, to their state of consciousness.
So when I brought forth the teachings of Buddhism, you had a situation,
my beloved, where Hindu society had become so rigid with the many artificial
constructs of the Brahmins, that they had solidified into the outer
path of ritual. Yet on the other hand you had a long-standing tradition
in India of the ascetics who had withdrawn from the world, who put their
bodies through all kinds of extreme measures and tortures, almost as
a way to punish the body for providing a prison for the mind.
And so it was my aim to bridge the gap, where many spiritual people
of the time thought that they had to be in either one extreme or in
the other. And as I discovered myself, neither extreme could lead to
enlightenment. But the enlightenment had to be found somewhere, not
in-between, but in a different approach.
So at the time the concept of the Middle Way, especially in the Eastern
culture, did not have the same meaning that you have today in the West,
where the Western mind is more linear—and thus thinks of the Middle
Way as being the mid-point between the two extremes. Whereas to the
Eastern mind, especially at the time, it had a different concept, a
different connotation, of being something beyond, beyond the old approaches.
Back to topic
main page.
Back to Answers
main page.
Back
to top
Copyright
© 2007 by Kim Michaels |
