Buddha, Jesus and the Hippie

Buddha, Jesus and the Hippie

Fictional Conversations and Adventures Near Woodstock Music Festival, Summer of Love, 1969

Written and Copyright 2016 by Ken Albertsen

Published by Adventure1 Publications

ISBN 9781879338012

Distributed by Smashwords

This ebook is available for the person who purchased it. This ebook should not be copied or re-sold or given away to others. Exception: small portions of this book may be quoted in other venues, if it's in regard to reviews or within a teaching context. If you would like to share this book with others, please arrange for the purchase additional copies, accordingly. Thank you for respecting the work of this author. Carpenters, lawyers, accountants and chefs get paid for the hours they devote to their professions, ....so too should authors. It is hoped you enjoy this book. Reviews are appreciated, thanks.

Chapters:

1. Getting Together

2. Thinking Outside the Cube

3. Hanging in There

4. Entering the Realm of Teeming Masses

5. Heruka and the Pastel Door

6. Reunited

Addendum

A-1 Precursors to Religion / What Processes Led to Religion?

A-2 Is There Only One God?

A-3 Agnosticism is not Belief in Nothing

A-4 Guru / Follower Relations

A-5 Comparing Religionists and Others

A-6 Fear

Other books at Adventure1

About the Author

Foreword

Gotama is the name of the young man who lived two and half millennia ago – who would become The Buddha. What compelled him to leave his lavish and comfortable lifestyle? He was a prince, and had a beautiful wife and child. He also had servants, plenty of food, entertainment...

What was he seeking? There's no simple answer. He was seeking a change of scene. He had wanderlust - common to most young people then and now. Youngsters often want to explore and get away from the familiar day-to-day patterns of home. Gotama had glimpses of the world outside the walls of his royal abode. He had seen some unvarnished realities, even though his parents had tried to keep him sheltered. He had seen, outside the royal compound, indications of sickness, old age and death. He had also communed briefly with a holy man.

His mind was stimulated to answer big questions having to do with human suffering; Why is suffering so prevalent? What can be done to lessen or banish suffering? Is sickness, old age, and death inevitable and if so, can it involve less suffering?

Yet, as much as any other reason, Gotama sought to get high, and maintaining high consciousness was a continuing thread throughout his long life. Buddhist scholars would rather seekers focus on the many sutras (spiritual doctrines) which emanated from the Buddha. Additionally, they would be disinclined to agree with the claim, 'Buddha sought to get high.' To them, it would sound demeaning. Scholars, by definition, will take a more intellectual approach.

A similar dynamic comes into play regarding Jesus, nearly 500 years later. Though there were a plethora of sub-plots regarding Jesus' life, one of his primary goals was simply 'to get high.'

Getting two of the most iconic men in history to sit and discuss issues, hundreds of years after their respective demises, is no simple task - ….or maybe it is, in the context of this fictional text.

Speaking of fictional texts: How accurate are the stories of the Buddha's life? Or, for that matter, the life stories of Jesus? For starters, chronicles of both those men were first put to paper decades after their respective demises. Picture a significant person from today's world – and imagine the first written chronicle of that person's life came to be written 65 years later, in 2080. Even when a news story is written a day after the event, there can be inaccuracies. How much more so, if that news were first written over a half century later? Note; the four 'Gospels' about Jesus were first jotted down between 65 and 95 years after his death. There were as many as 30 other 'gospels' written about Jesus' life, but a 2nd century bishop from Gaul decreed that there should be only four. All others were destroyed.

There are various versions of the Bible, all of which stem from texts written in Hebrew. To give an example of how skewed things can get, here is an expansion dealing with just one word in the Bible; The Hebrew word 'hagah' is taken from original Biblical texts, yet within the texts of major versions of the Bible, 'hagah' has been variously translated as 'meditate' and 'roar' (King James Bible), 'poring' and 'plotting' (Moffat Bible), 'meditates' (New International Bible), 'utter' and 'recounts' (New American Bible), 'speak,' (Revised English Bible), and 'growls' (New Revised Standard Bible). All of those are varying translations of the word 'hagah.'

The Pali Canon, considered the first Buddhist collection of sutras (scriptures), was first written down 454 years after the Buddha's passing. Prior to that, they were transferred orally. Granted, in those days it was common, not just for Buddhists, to maintain oral transmissions in lieu of writing things down.

The story herein opens with the hippie meditating amongst a grove of trees atop a mildly sloped hill. It's about a half mile from the music stage, yet still within Yasgur's 600 acre dairy farm. It's mid-August and the Woodstock Music Festival is in full swing. The hilltop was once the site of a one-room schoolhouse, which had all but been reclaimed by nature at the time of the telling, leaving just a few weathered remnants strewn on the ground.

The Buddha joins the hippie and contentedly meditates. Soon after, Jesus appears. One could say the men are apparitions, perhaps emanating from the hippie’s high state of consciousness at that time. Yet, for the sake of enabling the story to unfold, the two visitors are more than apparitions. They're roughly the ages they died: Buddha in his eighties, Jesus in his thirties. They are dressed as they would normally be, in robes. Jesus has no stigmata.

Nearly as amazing as their appearances is their handle on the English language. Fathoming those two items (manifesting in the future, along with mastering a foreign language) can be compared, in a roundabout way, to belief in the Big Bang theory. To embrace the concept of the galactic 'Big Bang,' one is expected to accept three amazing concepts: #1: All matter in the universe began at a point smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. #2: The initial substances, whatever they were, traveled away from the explosion much faster than the speed of light - for millions of years. #3: (and no less mind-boggling), one must believe that time itself began at that initial moment. In other words, before that moment, 13.4 billion years ago, nothing at all had ever existed, and not one moment of time preceded that initial explosion. From the Big Bang, matter proceeded to travel outward faster than the speed of light for a considerable time.

In sum, to believe the Big Bang Theory, one must believe three counter-intuitive things which, scientifically, are deemed impossible. In other words, three mega-stretches of belief. In comparison, to believe in the premise of this story about Buddha and Jesus appearing concurrently thousands of years after their deaths, one must be a party to one large and one small stretch of belief. Namely: That these two men could have appeared in 1969, and.... (the smaller stretch), they spoke English.

Chapter 1. Getting Together

Music from the festival is slightly audible, as it needs to project over two lazy hills before getting to the alcove.

Hippie (H): Hey, did y'all hear some of the music groups?

Buddha (B): I'm fine with just sitting here.

H: My ears are still ringing. I may head back though, there's a rumor going 'round that Hendrix will be playing later. He's a guitar wizard.

B: What's a guitar?

H: It's a musical instrument. It's got a wooden body with thin metal strings stretched over it.

B: Like a lute?

H: Yea, kinda. Where the hollow wood body amplifies the sound of the strings. Except Hendrix's guitar is a solid piece of wood, not hollow.

B: That reminds me of a story: When I was young, before attaining enlightenment, I was with two fellow renunciates who were also my best friends. We made a vow together to attain spiritual enlightenment – no matter what the cost. We pledged to not eat any substantial food until we attained full spiritual enlightenment. One night it rained very hard. I sought shelter in a nearby cave. Some gypsies did the same. One old woman had a primitive stringed instrument – essentially just a hollow piece of wood with two strings – kept taught by two carved wooden pegs. She was singing a plaintive song with the words; 'wind the string too loose and you will get a dull sound. Stretch the string too tight and it will break,....' It got me thinking. I was near death by the strict regimen of not eating more than a sesame seed a day. I was stretching the string too tight. If I had stuck with my vow, I would probably have died in short order. That old woman's song saved my life. Partly due to that song, I set off on my own the next day.

My two friends chided me, saying I would gravitate to town, eat lots of food, get soft, and forget about pursuing our spiritual quest. Thankfully, they were wrong.

My friend, of what faith are you?

H: I'm a hippie.

B: Hippie, I think you're an incarnation of Jagadamba.

H: Who's he?

B: Actually a she. Reincarnations don't have to abide by male going to male, and female to female. She was a dear friend. We shared some joy and intimate times together.

H: Your wife?

B: No, why would you think that? No, lady Jagadamba was one of the chamber maids, cute as a poppy blossom, but don't tell my wife I said that.

H: I don't believe in reincarnation.

B: No? How can you not?! Everyone I knew believed in it without doubt. Why do you not?

H: Well, in a round-about way, I guess I believe in it. I believe when a person dies, he decomposes into organic molecules and is ingested by organisms, large and small. The off-shoot of those organisms could be seen as reincarnation, if you like. I don't see it as: when a person dies, he's next found as a fertilized egg in another human mother, born again, and so on...

B. Who said it had to be a human mother? It could be an animal. And what's this about an egg? We are not birds or reptiles borne of eggs?

H: True, up to a point. I'll concede matters of the mind to you, but since your time, a lot of scientific advancements have taken place. In large measure, those advances are due to observations using microscopes and telescopes. Using a microscope, it's possible to see that humans and other animals are individually created by means of a tiny egg in the female being inseminated by an even tinier sperm from the male. Granted, humans don't have eggs with hard shells like birds, but it's the same basic concept.

B: Tell me more about microscope and macro...., what's the other one?

H: "Telescope. First the microscope enables people to see smaller things more clearly. The more advanced the technology, the tinier the things we can see. On the other extreme, the telescope enables people to expand what they see. Things far away, such as planets, can be seen with detail. As the technology developed, clusters of stars were seen. They're called galaxies. The further the distance we see, the farther back in time those objects are -