I have to confess that I am now a lapsed Buddhist. For a good while I was a regular attendee of the local Dewachen Buddhist group here in town, complete with its own travelling ordained nun, the wonderful and venerable Tenzin Namdag, who is based in Mackay but tends to a very scattered flock as far north as Cairns and as far south as the Sunshine Coast.
I have always been a huge fan and follower of Buddhist philosophy and practice, but eventually I came to discover that I do not have a devotional bone in my body. Or soul, to be more accurate, I guess.
While nearly every core Buddhist teaching resonated strongly with me (with the exception of reincarnation, but more of that at another time), very little of the iconography, language, and even literature spoke to me. So I have forsaken the formal side of Buddhism and taken with me what is the most practical and useful: the regular of meditation and training of one’s attention.
These days I am attracted to a very pared-down spirituality, a minimalist mysticism. I eschew all forms of spiritual lingo (in fact, I do not even like the term ‘spiritual’) and prefer deep truths expressed in as simple a language as possible. I am very attracted to modern Advaita and people like Adyashanti and Rupert Spira. Simpler is more sophisticated, as Da Vinci once said. And it gets right to the heart of the matter: presence and clarity.
