Welcome

Welcome to The Great Dharma.

If this is your visit, please read this introductory post and then the ‘How to Read this Blog’ page above.

The central theme of this website is that, given the ‘perfect storm’ of existential threats that could confront humanity during rest of the 21^st Century, it will be like no other period in recorded human history. If we are to avoid a series of catastrophes, each potentially being a holocaust of innocent suffering on an unimaginable scale, sooner or later humankind will need to undergo a spiritual renaissance.

Human beings can rise to their best when most threatened. But, as each nation or religious group vies for power or to maximise its share of the Earth’s ever diminishing resources, many of the direst threats could fatally divide us; and, divided, we most certainly will fall. Only an inspiring vision of how the full potential of human life on this Earth could be for each of us as part of global civilization can unite us and help to ensure that human life flourishes on an Earth itself still flourishing with abundant life.

Such a vision of human potential will require a spiritual revolution that will necessarily be both humanistic and ecological. To put it bluntly, when catastrophe threatens there will be no personal, loving God to save us. Only human intelligence, love and compassion and a willingness to unite can do that.

The greatest of all humanistic spiritual traditions, in all its various forms, is Buddhism. The Buddha’s teaching is traditionally referred to as the Dharma. However,  the Buddha himself clearly saw the Dharma as something more than a teaching – far more than a set of precepts that could be expressed in conceptual terms. He saw the Dharma as the greater truth about the nature of existence that he had experienced when he gained Enlightenment.

Buddhism emerged out the great spiritual milieu of India of 2,500 years ago that also saw the emergence of Hinduism and Jainism, amongst others. All of these faiths have a worldview embedded in them, based on the need to achieve spiritual purity in order to escape an endless cycle of rebirths (or reincarnations). Such a worldview, I believe, falls far short of the grander vision of the World and the potential of human life that modern science allows us to glimpse.

My rather challenging view, which I know others share, is that Buddhism, essential as many of its practices are for achieving happiness and fulfilment without a personal God, is ineluctably a mainly personal spiritual pursuit. As such, it cannot inspire a global civilization. I believe that the Buddha’s Dharma will ultimately prove to be an essential but insufficient vision of the Great Dharma: the greater vision of humanity’s potential that is waiting to be revealed if each of us opens our heart and mind and commits ourself to playing our part in fulfilling the potential that the Universe has bequeathed to us.

This website is therefore devoted to trying to glimpse that Great Dharma.