Message #14527

[Serena Duvet]

 

I'm not a Buddhist yet I might share some of their thoughts on being.  I'd need to do a lot of research to see exactly where my beliefs meet Buddhist beliefs. 

I believe that God is everywhere and everything.  That may be called "Non-Dualism!"

As for the Soul and Buddhism, I found this compilation of Buddhist views on the Stoa Del Sol website:

"THE SOUL IN BUDDHISM-

The idea of soul in Buddhism becomes complicated, because the Buddha...referred to such as "no-soul." The soul (or the self) is not real. [Sanford, SOUL JOURNEY, p. 67.]

To quote the Buddhist scholar Walpola Rahula: "Buddhism stands unique in the history of human thought in denying the existence of such a Soul, Self, or Atman. According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief that has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of 'me' and 'mine'...It is the source of all the troubles in the world..." [Walpola Rahula, WHAT THE BUDDHA TAUGHT, Grove Press, 1959, p. 51.]

For the Buddhist there is no "individual enduring personality that is reincarnated, nor even an individual soul in anything like the Western sense." [Sanford, SOUL JOURNEY, p. 68.]

Rather, there is a constant reformulation of "personality in new bodies." This Personality is a Force at work, streaming through time and "never for a moment the same..." [Sri Aurobindo, THE PROBLEM OF REBIRTH, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 1952, p. 14.]

As Sanford puts it:

"Individual souls are 'no-self', to be likened to the flames of fire that are never the same from one watch of the night to another." [Sanford, SOUL JOURNEY, p. 69.]"

From the website Sto Del Sol  /  Living In The Cosmos: Vignette (4): Soul Concepts-A

http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_sol/living/living_6.html