Since Buddhism has influenced Western thinking through New Age and shaped many modern ideas of spiritual freedom and reality, we believe it is appropriate one last time to repudiate this harmful and false belief in order to clarify the true nature of faith. Actually Buddhism represents anything but faith, because it is based on some major fallacies of thinking, which render faith meaningless, although many Buddhists in their heart and personal way of living may very well manifest this quality. Let us now briefly outline the learned argumentation for the negativity of existence in Buddhism, since it is not a revelation from God, but only a man-made philosophy and a rather inaccurate one, supported by the power of repetition and unquestioned veneration for ages. Fundamentally, Buddhism claims that everything in life and life itself are fleeting and subjected to perpetual transience. Nothing endures. This is the seal of “Anitya” or impermanence. And certainly changes happen all the time, both in and around us, so next we must admit to the far more comprehensive and all-pervasive argument of the non-substantiality of everything and accept the second seal of “Anatman” or non-self. Nothing exists in itself and neither do we. Identity is basically unreal. We are only subjugated to the samsaric illusion of permanent and separate existence, and this creates pain and suffering, because we cling to that which cannot and will not continue existence. In order to release ourselves from this inevitable suffering, we are advised to take shelter in the third seal of “Nirvana”. The road leading to Nirvana is a via negativa – a constant withdrawal from all the illusive conditionings of Samsara, caused by the dynamics of the “interdependent co-arising”. Although Nirvana is often depicted as the ultimate and unconditional reality and thus has a quite pleasant and positive ring to it, it is characterized as an emptiness or a state of mind that equals a void. In this condition there is an ongoing realization of our blankness of separate and independent selfhood, which is a resistant and false idea that evidently requires a lot of avoidance to get completely devoid of. Therefore we are compelled to engage in a sustained process of dissolving, negating, detaching and retiring in the strong conviction of everything being our personal illusion and imprisonment, whenever we cling to it.

Buddhist ethics are closely connected with this pessimistic strategy and understanding of life. They have a negative motive of not getting personally involved with karmic complications and do not go beyond helping others to escape their mind-trap. But the whole occupation with disentanglement of mind and unconditioning of natural life-processes spells backwards in a rigorous regime of control, which by itself involves a heavy conditioning and suffering through abandonment. It produces an existential contradiction. In their search for freedom in life, Buddhists choose freedom from life, which then creates a more severe lack of freedom, as they are constantly occupied with their own “freeing” and banded together without personal freedom in communities of like-minded people, forming a hierarchic system, which is characterized by the same identification and belief in permanence that is denied the individual and the world according to the philosophy.

We find no traces of this way of thinking in the words and actions of Jesus. Take for instance the leap of faith. It is available right now and here owing to our being with God, and there is no question of non-attachment, meditative disciplining of mind, realization of emptiness of experience or any such topic, only simple faith, without preliminary conditioning. Existence is helped and healed, not explained away. Compared to Buddhist convictions, the point is neither that the mountain is unreal nor some product or fixation of the mind, which can be ascertained through adequate training. This way of understanding things is like saying that we can only cope with life when we are convinced of its unreality, attaining mastery over an illusion. Never did Jesus occupy himself with this type of control or dissolving in order to obtain freedom. He was not fighting to disentangle himself from life or physical existence. Yes, he prayed occasionally alone, but he was not doing years of solitary retreat walled up in inaccessible mountain-caves, absorbed in advanced meditation in order to break the chain of co-arising. Because of his faith in God, he needed not rely on himself in this manner.

The paradox of Buddhism is that the occupation with re- and unconditioning of existence relies on the construction of meditative super-conditions. This type of reliance is the very opposite of the power in the simple mustard seed of faith. The Buddhist practitioner is a collector-type, holding back, compiling and storing, stocking up his Tower of Babel with knowledge and skills, trying to reach heaven. But to what avail? God showed himself down here in a man. God could visit him in the next moment, if he chose to do so. He is going back to God anyway. But now this fellow is convinced that it is a waste of time to be here on earth as a man. It is a trap set for him, and cosmos has created this gigantic illusion in order to deceive him and hold him down in ignorance. The whole theatre is viciously and solely arranged for him. He does not see any beauty anywhere, only ugly illusion. What is alive here in creation, he cannot enjoy or adore, because it like him is passing away. And so he works to get out of it before his time has come. He wants to transcend humanity and become superman – an engineered god-man like the Dalai Lama. Instead of listening and praying to God, honouring and obeying him, having faith in his own godlike nature, he wants to be God, the puppeteer, and not a puppet-man. But puppets are only man-made, never God-created. Humaneness is a God-given and free gift, not a puppetry. When Gods finger points at the righteous and faithful life of a man and says: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” [Math. 3:17], it is quite different from the self-proclaimed, self-induced and self-made status of the divine man. The whole reasoning is based on false assumptions and wrong ideas of divinity and holiness. It is reductive and not productive. It is discarnate and not incarnate. It does not realize the true mystery of man and the real meaning and purpose of life; rather it dismantles and annihilates the mystic core of faith. It makes a mockery out of existence and throws away the creation of God. Hence it does not lead to freedom or unconditioning, but to the very opposite of these.

We can agree with Buddhism that man in incarnation is a complex make-up of different energies pertaining to subtle bodies in processes and undergoing constant change, as we have seen from the previous discussion. It is a mere supposition, though, that there is no first cause at any explanatory or analytical level of this make-up, as it is likewise an unargued assumption that there is no point of identity or fixation of the process. Besides it is questionable, whether the human make-up is indeed homogeneous and can be synthesized and transformed as a whole into a unified condition of “Nirvana”, whatever that might be, or whether it includes some kind of disparity and ontological heterogeneity. And an absolute continuity of cause and change finally presupposes a system without any ontological stratification, and this is not to judge from individual incarnation. The central philosophical assertions of Buddhism are therefore assumptive, partly arguing from dogma, partly from free interpretation of experience, jumping to transcendental conclusion in a proto-scientific fashion. The epistemological level and style of reasoning resembles the pre-Socratic philosophers, only they were occupied with nature, giving birth to modern science and rationalism, whereas Buddhism is dealing with the less correctable and verifiable sphere of consciousness. In our view the radical idealism of Buddhist ontology and epistemology is problematic in its separation of the reflecting or knowing quality of consciousness from the total phenomenon of man, trying to hypostatize conscious awareness as reality per se. Whatever transcendental experience of consciousness Buddhists claim as evidence for their metaphysical assertions, the evident fact is that their solipsistic mind and subjective experience is body-based. They tell us they have everything figured out and every illusion seen through, but for all we know they are just running a special mind-game and sometimes even a lucrative profession. Neither on philosophical nor on experimental grounds are the “scientific” claims of Buddhism validated, and so we would like to offer the reader a better understanding of human existence.

Our point is that as long as man is to some degree mindful, he is also proportionally aware of his own actions and reactions, at least as something belonging to a discrete system in a complex pattern of interaction within reality. We honour the individualizing effect of the human body, which is in all cases a true point of reference for people’s actions or non-actions, and we use the term “discrete” here, since it is evident for every man but the solipsistic voyeur, that we are surrounded and perhaps even inhabited by other agents or beings over whom we have no inherent control. That is a basic human experience no matter how we try to explain it away. Thus we are consciously relating, reacting and responding to the processes within the system and from our make-up, and whether this relating is a feature of personality, mind, or the nature of the process itself, it constitutes a new dimension, namely the relational quality, which is linked with our awareness and responsiveness and which can always be differentiated and influenced to some degree. Man in incarnation represents a viewpoint and a reference point by being physically separate and discernible, which is the anchoring of the partial systemic process, he engages himself in. So why do we not respect this crucial feature of human existence? Why not believe that the most apparent and evident characteristic of our life constitutes its meaning and purpose, when we find this economic principle universally valid in nature, where nothing is meaningless. Hence being incarnate is all that matters!

And so we propose that man incarnates with the purpose of being separate, since that is a highly productive condition. What he produces, and what is not itself subject to any change on the situational level, is the resulting “relational quality”. Buddhists will argue that nothing is produced, because there is no producer and no intent. The relational quality is a foreseeable variation within an automaton, which by necessity is generating pure accident. But this is just a postulate forfeiting personal responsibility, not a fact, and at all events actions and reactions will always be distributed according to established relational patterns and qualities, and it is hard to deny the systemic process every capacity of modification and openness without self-contradiction and transcendental error. There is evidence showing beyond doubt that both system and individuals are learning and adapting through discrimination and feed-back, and accordingly, what a human might do or not do is somehow changeable within the system. We believe that man has a free will and a real choice, but anyhow, self or no-self, the process is open, modifiable and highly susceptible to influence, whereas the relational quality is fixed in the situation, and this fixation then constitutes something unchangeable in life.

That is all we need to know. Whoever “we” are, we are separate actors, who can act and modify action, bringing about relational quality, which is inflexible. The quality is relational, because it mirrors the motive of the actor and how he qualifies his action, which is inherent in the result of it. We are not always master of the situation or the outcome, but we can choose our motive, act from it and qualify reality permanently by it. This structure is spiritual and signifies the meaning of life. It is always open to man and pertains directly to the level of the soul. The humaneness in man can only be expressed in relation and with quality, and this dimension is absolutely real and never contingent, emerging from our soul and I-ness, and not from some kind of void or pleroma. Faith knows this and strives to do good instead of bad!

The soul is constantly growing through man’s incarnation, depending on his attitude towards the experiences of life. This growth is the very meaning of existence. Due to the ontological nature of the soul, only the refinement of quality accumulates, whereas misuse of quality is not possible, only negligence, because quality is indestructible. And since incarnated man is necessarily individualized, there exists a corresponding level of individuality in the soul. Again we must encourage the proper understanding of this vital structure. Why would God produce and shape individual incarnation, if this was not something sacred to him and had eternal value? It is through the individual production of quality that man administers and expresses his soul and relates to God, and this relational process is reciprocal, forming the intermediary structure of identity we have termed the I-ness. We agree to the viewpoint that personal identity as such is to some degree changeable and arbitrary so much as it does not reflect quality, but the identity of the I-ness is stable, and a real and individual selfhood is achievable. We refer the reader here to our discussion of individuality. Thus man has the opportunity in life to unite with God in his own fashion, but we seriously doubt that incarnated man can ever completely transcend the conditions of his individuality, no matter what level of synthesis and unity he might experience in mind and body, and what is more, we do not see the point of it. It is sacrilege to waste individuality.

This understanding is contrary to Buddhism with its prevailing negative interpretation of life and incarnation as something low, wrong, mistaken, and undesirable we should try to escape from. Also life is far from the meaningless scenario sketched out in Buddhist philosophy, which debases individual life on earth as an unfree and unhappy mechanical repetition. We question both the motives and the grounds for this denial of the freedom of the soul. What should we believe? On one hand a man-made and culturally conditioned philosophy of mind? On the other hand the greatness and grace of Gods creation? We should place before us the material and realistic question of the diversity of life forms and realize that this expanding multitude is a confirmation and not a sick and private mind-state. In the same affirmative spirit we must value our incarnate life on earth, although limited understanding and perspective sometimes make it hard for us. Have faith and believe that no matter what we have to live through in life, it is always meaningful and important to express quality in relationship!