Thursday, February 09, 2012
Who Is Saved and How - 5
Abrahamic Religions (which include the Zoroatrian influence from the Babylonian captivity of the Jews) are a once-created Universe in which a once born-soul lives one life, dies one death, is ressurrected and reconstituted to be the person they were at death, stands judgment and then spends all of
eternity either in an unending torment from which there comes no possibility of reform, repentance, escape, improvement, or else they spend an eternity in a pointless paradise of bliss in which there is also no point in the sense of making and meeting goals, overcoming obstacles, learning
new things, teaching, persuading or leaving behind some legacy or tradition; in which there is no hope for advancement or progress, in which there is nothing to look forward too. For many denominations of belief, those who are saved actually BYPASS the judgment process altogether and are saved on the basis that they professed some formula of creed or belief, accepting Jesus as their Savior or accepting Allah as the only God and Mohammad as his prophet.
Vedic religions (from which Zoroastrian was an offshoot) which include Buddhism in its various forms, Jains, Sikhs entertain the possiblity that there is not ONE univers but possibly many universes like many black holes, each containing within an exploding, expanding, big-bang-time-space continuum and universes withing universes within universes, nested inside each other. For the Buddists the soul is the gestalt of "anatman" which is a bundle of conditioned skanda or perceptions and traits. For Hindus and Jains the Jiva/Atman is no gestalt or collection. But for all, justice and punishment is an inherent property of actions and choices in the form of karma. We are conditioned by the karma of our past lives and with the choices and actions or inactions in our present life we weave the karma of our future lives. But ultimately, at least in Buddhist thought, those who are righteous, the Bodhisattvas, on the verge of leaving the great cycle of birth and death, the ocean of samsara
of the 10,001 things which distract and cause suffering, who are on the verge of entering Nirvana (Nibbana, extinction) on the opposite shore, OUT OF COMPASSION for all the sentient beings, intentionally retain some imperfection so as to continuously be reborn into the cycle of birth
and death until at last all sentient beings should be delivered from suffering. Thus religions are divided into two groups. The one group is those where only a few are saved (some because of their righteous actions and some because of their orthodox faith) while a vast majority are eternally damned to torment or else simply cease to exist. The other group is where existence and being is a vast machine to perfect all forms of sentient being through endless cycles of rebirth and suffering into a form of salvation or deliverance in Nirvana which ESCAPES the great wheel of birth and death and abides in a state which is neither existence nor non-being, or else, the individual sparks of atman/jiva are reabsorbed into the divine light or Bramhajyoti of the Godhead from which they sprang and that God-head is prior to space, matter, temporality, eternity, being, non-being and is the source of future universes.
