Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Worlds & Their Cessation: The Buddha’s Strategic View of the Cosmos" ~ with Adelaide de Bethanie. "

Thanissaro Bhikkhu 
"Worlds & Their Cessation:
The Buddha’s Strategic View of the Cosmos" 
~ with Adelaide de Bethanie.

Recently, while teaching a retreat sponsored by a vipassana group in Brazil, I happened to mention devas and rebirth. The response was swift. 

The next morning, as I was looking through the slips of paper left in the question box, two questions stood out.

The first was a complaint: “Why do we have to listen to this supernatural stuff? I don’t believe in anything except for the natural world I can see with my own eyes.”

The second was a complaint of a different sort: “Why are Western Buddhist teachers so afraid to talk about the supernatural side of the Buddhist tradition?”

To answer the second question, all I had to do was point to the first. “It’s because of questions like these. They scare teachers away from the topic.” I might have added that there’s an irony here. In an effort to be tolerant, the early generation of Western Buddhist teachers admitted dogmatic materialists into their ranks, but these materialists have proven very intolerant of the supernatural teachings attributed to the Buddha. If he was really awakened, they say, he wouldn’t have taught such things.

To answer the first question, though, I asked a question in return: “How do you know that the natural world is real?

Maybe what you see with your eyes is all an illusion. What we *do* know, though, is that suffering is real. Some people have the kamma to experience supernatural events; others, the kamma to experience only natural events. But whatever the range of the world you experience, you can create real suffering around it, so that’s what the Buddha’s teaching focuses on. He’s got a cure for suffering regardless.”

Here I could have added even more. The awakening that goes beyond suffering also goes beyond all worldviews, but the path leading to that awakening requires that you adopt a provisional sense of the world in which human action has the power to bring suffering to an end. This is the same pattern the Buddha adopts with regard to views about the self: Awakening lies beyond all views of the self, but it requires adopting, provisionally, a sense of your self as responsible and competent to follow the path."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Worlds & Their Cessation:
The Buddha’s Strategic View of the Cosmos"  — with Adelaide de Bethanie.
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/uncollected/Worlds.html?fbclid=IwAR1wADyYf3fFjWdUGRRevlgghaCrJWRWjrmr1lsRxDJAYpVnjLRblDZt82g