Becoming your own therapist – Ven Thubten Yeshe
Religion: The Path of Inquiry
People have many different ideas about the nature of religion in general and Buddhism in particular. Those who consider religion and Buddhism at only the superficial, intellectual level will never understand the true significance of either. And those whose view of religion is even more superficial than that will probably not even consider Buddhism to be a religion at all.
First of all, in Buddhism we’re not that interested in talking about the Buddha himself. Nor was he; he wasn’t interested in people believing in him, so to this day Buddhism has never encouraged its followers simply to believe in the Buddha.We have always been more interested in understanding human psychology, the nature of the mind. Thus, Buddhist practitioners always try to understand their own mental attitudes, concepts, perceptions and consciousness. Those are the things that really matter.
Otherwise, if you forget about yourself and your delusions and focus instead on some lofty idea–like “What is Buddha?”– your spiritual journey becomes a dream–like hallucination. That’s possible; be careful. In your mind there’s no connection between Buddha, or God, and yourself. They’re completely separate things: you’re completely down here; Buddha, or God, is completely up there.
There’s no connection whatsoever. It’s not realistic to think that way. It’s too extreme. You’re putting one thing down at the lower extreme and the other way up at the upper. In Buddhism, we call that kind of mind dualistic.
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Taken from: http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/becoming1.pdf
