Buddhism

1.

   G autama Buddha teaches that life is created in dependence. If so, we look at a tree. The desire – and the effort to make this desire a reality – allows the seed to grow and flourish until it blossoms to its fullest. Buddha teaches that this desire, these driving forces, are born out of ignorance. And he teaches that this ignorance is the origin of all life. Out of it, all other subsequent causes (which in turn are effects) arise until life passes away again. The chain of „emergence in dependence“ (pratitya-samutpada, Sanscrit) can in turn be applied to all life; it is not only valid for human existence. But if one goes back to the origin of this chain, to not-knowing, one can ask oneself the question, from which again this chain arises. Gautama Buddha teaches elsewhere that the human mind is incapable of imagining a final causeless cause (here one might ask whether a consequence without consequences is also unimaginable), but he does not say that this final causeless cause does not exist. Only our imagination is too limited to perceive it or to create it in the mind. Well, I think the name for this last causeless cause, the all-in-one cause, is God.

2.

   We beings, who are creation, find peace through the practical path of tolerance. Mahatma Gandhi’s path of non-violence (ahimsa) does not mean to me that one makes the opinion of another one’s own without examination of conscience, but rather that – true to the Buddha word of the right view – recognition is sought within oneself. Another may recognize a truth other than ourselves; here the principles of tolerance and charity dictate that we should strive to share without dominating, i.e. not to dominate the other, but rather to try to convince him or her to choose the path of love. But what is the path of love?

The practical way to live love is to place oneself among the others. This does not imply exaggerating the other; rather, it means recognizing that one’s own cognition is always limited cognition – as Gandhi gave his autobiography the name: Experiments with Truth. We may be free in our efforts to experiment with the truth and not to take our intermediate steps or results for the truth per se.

3.

   Through mindfulness in the small, that is, through mindfulness of those things that happen to you in the now, through the gift of cognition, which is formed by emotion and ratio, you are enabled to make future behaviour more pleasing to God, taking into account what you have learned in the now. This is one possible process of learning. So the supposed „mistake“ in the now is care for the future. However, this only works when applying the Buddhist motive of mindfulness. Mindfulness is just another word for the attachment of the human mind to the here and now.

   The here and now of the mind implies – as a motif of mindfulness – the idea of sharpened consciousness. The goal of this contemplation is the recognition of the „I am“.