Buddhism and Christianity.

Buddhism and Christianity are opposites. One says that life--feeling--is at bottom suffering, and love has no power autonomous from suffering (suffering is its positive effect,) but is a slave to the appearances that construct themselves before it, as the objects of desire. These objects of desire are just mirages of suffering that trap it into walking in the desert a bit further. I often feel that this is the truth, but there is a power in my hear that thinks enlightenment is a tragic rejection of what's good (oh what you could have done, holy man, for love's sake!)

It also seems like all the talk of rebirth and achieving nirvana through practice is a particular "tech" that harnesses the impulse to suicide and use it to turn the wheel of a wider annihilation of consciousness. This arises, perhaps, out of a realization out of the self-same solidarity of all feeling beings. It dwells in the infinite space between the thought "nothing matters I might as well kill myself" and the thought "it doesn't even matter if I kill myself."

Yet it seems that in Buddhism the Bodhisattva's compassion shines through; love has a power, and in Amida that love establishes the place of salvation for all beings, with life infinitely passing and coming from oblivion, through illusion, into bliss, and back into oblivion. This constitutes the natural way of feeling such that the fullness of bliss (the fullness of love's kingdom) is achieved in excess of the suffering, and wants this fullness of love wants to fill even oblivion. It crests into it and back into the turbulence of the desires of all the beings in appearance.

Christianity, says that at bottom life is love, and suffering has no power except as leads to love as its positive effect. Then all that is desired leads to love, finally. It is love that drives all things in excess of all things; even, it is love's sympathy for all things that lends them the power to feel in the first place, and to have finite desires. I would live out of this, but I love and hate my life too much to lose it to gain the greater life.

Then there's a third school--modernism we could call it, despite its various stripes. It says "we can build a world where people will never think to ask 'Is life, at bottom, suffering or love?'" Never to think of the bottom of things, but only the play of images on the surface. To cut off this depth in a sphere of depthless experience that calculates every path of escape, and manufactures a maze of symbols to head off any excess in desire. The pure organization of desire so that it drives always into the new, and turns a machine that throws up barriers between self so that desire never enters into conflict, never touches anything but objects and images. So we all desire as appropriate for our place in the system's well-calculated turning.

This might be best. I'm not just saying that--the question is usually ruinous. Yet it it also results in all our desire for others (or most heartfelt desires) becoming impossible as we bounce off the other's alien sensibilities, never fulfilling their phantasy. Also, it is a fragile, extravagant, futile expenditure that sustains this project and it only provides its "ignorance-is-bliss" when it is also ignorant of its contemptible basis--being always only ever built on the backs of the poor, who must, in all their own ways, ask the question. They are naked before it, not having their desires ever piqued, not being in their own personal bubbles, not being clothed in subtleties.

Is there a forth way? Life is bitter. Some feelings are out of love and the power of life, some are out of death. We are follies in the hands of these, and know two contradictory masters. So all we have is to live and feel in blindness. Or are the two the same, so that love gives itself over to suffering--and lives and dies right along with us without remainder? Or is the reality of feeling its full gradient and all its dimensions; love and hate and jealousy and fear and spite and happiness or joy, with a feeling that is not of just one, but is just the touching of touching to create emotions that are truly nameless and ever anew. Gone like tears in the rain. Except all these are just love. How can we imagine them without it? This is the cry of the artist and poet. The tears and crying. But would this cry be finery to hang on the wall, or an aesthetic experience? The voyeurism of dulled souls who would plug in and feel for a while before returning, dreary, to the rat race. Or would this cry come from some depth; the depth of suffering, or the ecstasy of knowing that the hoped for invisible--paradise and the reconciliation of things--is just beyond what we can see.