I did my yoga, and I'm starting to see not-self and that I am One. What's for lunch?
Rites and rituals for samadhi in India
(dakota of earth) India's worst way to reach "enlightenment," usually defined in Hinduism as mere samadhi, which is a stage to understanding not the final goal itself in Buddhism.
I think I'm starting to lose my grip on reality.
When one becomes a "saint" (a NOBLE ONE) in Buddhism, having entered at least the first stage of enlightenment (of seven stages usually condensed and described as four main stages), one is immediately rid of four things.
Of these is the wrong view that clinging to rites and rituals could ever lead to enlightenment (bodhi, awakening to the ultimate truth).
Attachment to rites and rituals (sīlabbata-parāmāso) is one of the subtle fetters binding beings (who are constantly becoming and never actually being) to samsara, the Wheel of Life and Death. Śīla refers to "virtue" or "moral conduct" + vata (bata) to "religious duty, observance, rite, practice, custom" [25] + parāmāsa to "being attached to" or "a contagion" (clinging, upādāna) and has the connotation of "mishandling" the Dhamma[26], Buddha's Teachings. Together sīlabbata-parāmāso translates as "the contagion of [adhering to] mere rule and ritual, the infatuation of good works, the delusion that they suffice" [27] or, more simply, "fall[ing] back on attachment [clinging] to precepts and rules" [28]. Whereas the fetter of "doubt" (vicikiccha) can be seen as pertaining to the dharmas of competing wandering ascetics (samanas) during the time of the Buddha, the fetter regarding clinging to rites and rituals likely refers to some practices of contemporary Brahmanical authorities [29]. More
The former prince Siddhartha Gautama (the future historical Buddha), as a wandering ascetic on a quest for enlightenment, practiced these futile things -- particularly extreme fasting -- for years until he finally stopped blaming the body for the mind's defilements and accepted the blissful meditative absorptions (jhanas) as the real path of purification and path of freedom to seeing things as they really are and thereby finally being able to let go of lust, clinging, attachment, and all that binds us to interminable rebirth and suffering in samsara.
Until then, a person might do any useless thing -- particularly engaging in the extremes of severe austerities and bodily mortifications (tapas, penances, extreme austerities, attempts at purification) to purify oneself or hedonism, debauchery, and excess with the excuse that "anything can be used in the service of liberation, including the very poisons -- alcohol, drugs ("Crazy Wisdom"), sanctified or twisted sexuality (tantric sex), meat eating and cannibalism (as in Aghori holyman practices), fasting and self-starvation (inedia), self-mummification (sokushinbutsu)...
I went to a Buddhist retreat needing something to happen; nothing happened.
My friend, a regular American woman into yoga, also went but not expecting anything, hoping for anything, "needing" anything; something happened.
I asked, "How?! How is this happening? What did you do differently?"
She claims she didn't "do" anything. She just sat. She just attended to the present moment with bare awareness, almost like that R.E.M. song, "Stand in the Place Where You Are." She didn't say that. She mentioned thinking about the song "Just Breathe" for inspiration sometimes.
I asked, "You're thinking about music?"
She answered, "No, but intrusive thoughts come and go. Sometimes by habit I engage them before mindfully-remembering and then letting them go, letting them cross like clouds in a vast open sky." And she mentioned visualizing the in-and-out breath as steam in a steam room or a small whirligig (windspinner) at her nose turning as the breath moved.
I asked, "You spend your time visualizing?"
She answered, "No, but sometimes to focus, I imagine some indicator of the breath just to help get focused."
I asked, "How do you stay energized and focused for so many hours of the retreat schedule day?"
She surprised by answering that she used a little peppermint under her nose.
I asked, "You spend your time huffing essential oils?"
She answered, "No but it's a nice pick me up in the morning, and it's good to feel a chill on the spot above the lip where I place my calm attention."
I started to see the pattern. Everything I asked and conceived was about getting and gaining.
And everything she answered was about letting go, relaxing, and staying aware without "thinking" (i.e., ruminating, perseverating, proliferating, drifting away on a tide of discursive thinking).
A Buddhist retreat, like a Christian church service, is not somewhere to go to gain. It is a place to go to lay down the burden and let go a little, release, share, give, abandon, listen, allow with radical acceptance of what is. Imagine only ever going to church (mass, temple, the sabbath ritual) with a laundry list of wishes for the God. How well was that ever going to work? But a person with a purer heart goes just to receive the Word or the Spirit or advice embedded in the sermon to give more donations to the church or whatever nonsense most sermons are on nowadays. Surely that purer person would get more out of the experience than the person with the list treating the God of that church like a restaurant, ATM, or the lap of Saint Santa Claus (Nicholas).
So let us follow in the example of the woman who "succeeded" in getting what everybody else on that retreat was after. About three other women got it, too, including Buddhist meditation teachers Shaila Catherine (Wisdom Wide and Deep: Jhana and Insight) and Dr. Nikki (The Persian Buddhist: Dr. Nikki).
Oddly, strangely (coincidentally?), these three women are all from California, but the long retreat was on the east coast at IMS with a rare enlightened master. I do not now recall if there was a male among the very small group of retreatants/meditators who "succeeded" in getting somewhere very deep with their meditation. But it was impossible to overlook the fact that even if there were, it was still 75% women who succeeded. So I asked her about this.
She answered, "I did notice, and I asked the Teacher, and he explained, 'It's easier for women.'"
I asked, "Why in the world would it be easier for women? Surely, they have it harder than men in this world, which after all we are told is 'a man's world.'"
She agreed, and she mentioned that she asked him the same question, and the great master, a successful scholar-practitioner not teaching only from theory but having a great deal of direct practical personal experience with the historical Buddha's Path, answered. He explained that it is how women are (by nature at this time) and how they are treated now (by injustice). Their way, as anyone can see in terms of American sex-role stereotyping and gender asymmetries (that they are treated less than, overlooked, underestimated, ignored, disregarded, and all that) actually gives them an advantage in meditation and spiritual progress.
I said, "Why? Why would that be?"
She answered, as it came right back around to slap me in the face and punch me in the gut, that it is because women, generally, are NOT striving, struggling, needing, demanding, insisting, interfering, pushing, muscling, and all the "wrong" (disadvantageous, self-defeating, dysfunctional) things we men generally do.
I asked, "Well, isn't everyone there -- having paid and taken time off work and putting in all those hours of silence, getting up early, eating only in the morning, detoxing from technology, giving up their cell phones, social media, and email accounts -- doing EXACTLY that?!
She answered, "Yes, except for the four of us, for some reason. It's not like we knew each other or knew what the others were doing. We were each just minding our business, not socializing, not looking around, not taking walks, not arguing, not demanding, not all of that stuff that everyone else [being American] were in the habit of doing."
I said, "Oh, I see! It's exactly all that grasping, needing, struggling, striving, and kicking @$$ that is getting in everyone's (well nearly everyone's) way!
She answered, "It would seem so."
Then I realized I was pushing her for these answers, and she was kind enough, because we had known each other for so long and been such friends, and because I encouraged her and made sure she got to this retreat, that she tolerated this interrogation of sorts. I was startled by what she was saying, and she was saying precious little unless I pushed. I realized anyone with common sense and common decency would never push like this or ask pointed questions. But this is how I pressed that very teacher to answered and explain things, which he did as he kindly inquired about my practice and how I was doing and why I was so worried or interested in what anybody else was doing. (I didn't have enough sense to trust in him that when I was ready, I would learn all these things directly and not need to be so bullheaded in asking). But because I had not made progress, I'd been left to wonder what I was doing wrong, aside from everything. It was only my luck, my precious good karma, that I had the good fortune of knowing more than one person who had done it right (or was currently doing it "right" in the sense of the eight path factors of "right mindfulness, right effort, and so on) that I could see by comparison where I veered off. I already knew about my veering off. What I needed to know, for myself and Wisdom Quarterly readers was, What's the right road, the right path, the right practice? Now I was getting a dose of it. I had only been "a little" off but that little had grown to a complete derailing and going off the road, as a boat traveling a long distance -- with course correcting along the way -- would end up way off track like a wayward Columbus. I was stressed out in asking all these things.
She answered without stress, gently smiling at my silliness, manliness, foolishness, and blindness.
But there is an extraordinary thing I realized/remembered as I was talking to her about these things (Dhamma), these matters so rare in the universe that only someone with a real kalyana-mitta can ever hope to hear, and it came when I formulated a preface to a question like a lawyer would, establishing common ground, being on the same page. I wanted to ask her about her level of attainment and that of the others. But to do so, I needed to establish that she was ahead of all the others on the retreat, or was it the case that the elder and much more experienced meditator and teacher Shaila Catherine was ahead, and where was Nikki Mighafori in the ranking, and for that matter, at what level was the teacher?
She answered no answer, just a perplexed look, a series of sounds and utterances that gave me to believe we were not sharing common ground and not on the same page.
I pushed, "Look, regular people are 'uninstructed ordinary worldlings,' right?"
She answered, "Okay?" as if confused by my very lowest common denominator question.
And I kept pushing, and any Aryan (any "noble" disciple, any attained person of whatever ever rank, stage, or level) is greater than that, right?
She answered more perplexed, "Okay??"
I pushed to the point of breaking, "What? You won't give me that? There are ordinary people and there are attained people, and they're not the same because of a 'change-of-lineage' (gotrabhu), riiiiight? The Buddha said as much! It's foundational to the whole Teaching in this school of Buddhism. This is not hard. This is not a trick question..."
She responded, "And why are you asking?"
I, exasperated, kept pushing through, as if I were doing a set of heavy weights at the gym and just needed to get a certain number of reps in even if it hurt, "I'm trying to establish that there's a difference. There are ordinary people there and extraordinary. And among the latter group, there are gradients..."
She looked puzzled, dismissive, not catching on, "Okay???"
I barked, "Well, come on! There's that, right? And this is when she blew my mind. Did you, dear reader, know that enlightened people (in the specific Buddhist sense of the word bodhi and not what other traditions, religions, or systems think or mean when they use the exact same word) DO NOT THINK OF THEMSELVES as better than anyone? Sure, you did. Anyone can figure that out. They know there's no ego; they go lording it around over anyone's head. BUT, did you know, enlightened people (of whatever stage or level) DO NOT THINK OF THEMSELVES as worse than anyone? Sure, come on, that can be deduced by anyone who gives it a little thought. "Saints" (Aryans, the noble ones) are nice. Here's the mindblower: Reader, did you know that enlightened people DO NOT THINK OF THEMSELVES as equal to anyone? 🤯 (See the Pali canon sutta "With Khema" AN 6.49: Khema Sutta—translated by Bhikkhu Sujato for suttacentral.net) And this is what was happening here. We were getting snagged and tangled up on the very first presupposition of stages and levels. It's not that she didn't know or had forgotten that there were levels, but what had happened is that she had DIRECTLY REALIZED that in reality she is no better, no worse, and not equal to others. These Aryans just don't think that way. It doesn't occur to them. They don't frame things that way anymore. And they may not even remember ever having done so, or so it would seem as I tried to remind her that this is how the whole world thought, including the Buddha, if we can deduce this from his teaching that there were levels of attainment and therefore it is possible to designate someone as higher, lower, or equal to someone else, anyone else.
She just looked at, as if remembering, then came back to herself, "And????" leading me to make my point, whatever my point was originally going to be. I didn't remember, and there was no sense in asking if we could not agree on that much for starters. This was a nonstarter.
"Wow," I thought, the things in the ancient sacred texts are really true: Aryans are this way or that, whether it makes sense to us or not, whether it fits our frames, whether we agree or would have it otherwise. Buddhism (the Buddha Dharma), what the Buddha taught, was not "hammered out by mere reasoning." The Buddha directly saw these things, knew these things, taught a path-and-practice for others to be able to DIRECTLY know and see these things. I bowed to her and left it at that for the moment. There are some things we are not meant to know before we are ready to know it. And all of this, it seems, was none of my business. It would become my business when I directly experienced these things and became one who knows-and-sees. This is a teaching for the wise, after all, not for those sunk in worldliness, distraction, delusion, resentment, aversion, fear, greediness, selfishness, self-centeredness, or all manner of wrong view arising from ignorance, delusion, and holding views.
And now I realize that one way to talk about all this might be through the Taoist video at the top of this article. Maybe on this path we are becoming what we always were and have been -- nobody. Certainly, nobody special. Not better, not worse, not equal. The worldly mind will completely reject this out of hand. It's preposterous! This is a patriarchy founded on a hierarchy as taught by the oligarchy and a lineage of worldly rulers all the way up to the first heaven. And we must submit to them because that's the way God wants it. 🙄 That's ludicrous and preposterous, but it just might be closer to the truth than the way we've been carrying on here in the world IF "the God" we are talking about is the Monad (the One in Gnosticism, the Brahman not Brahma in Buddhism, possibly even the Tao in Taoism). That GOD doesn't want or not want, doesn't look on needing it to be one way or another. In that sense, there is just being. We can just be (though technically there is no "being," only becoming, this ceaseless impersonal process of radical impermanence as everything falls apart and rebuilds all the time, marked by three universal characteristics the Buddha taught again and again, implicitly and explicitly: All things are radically impermanent, utter unable to ever fulfill us, and impersonal whether we imagine there to be a stable "self" or not. That's reality. Here we are over here never really in touch with what's real due to all the distractions, talking, ruminating, thinking, and everything else coming at us all at once. If we slow down, let things be, allow, accept, welcome experience as it is without needing to change or "improve" it, we can quite possibly make quick progress to the end of all suffering and the arising of liberating-insight, the wisdom that has gone beyond, that which we set as our goal when setting off on a spiritual path. So "be nobody." After all, that's what really are already, and the sooner we get right with it, the happier we are likely to be so we can see things sa they really are and always have been.
Friends, this is the talk I gave last week presented here edited by Wisdom Quarterly:
.
The War of Opinions
Should I write DC a strongly-worded letter?
When we are belligerent and violent, there are always two wars happening simultaneously, the War of Bombs and the War of Opinions.
The War of Bombs requires the War of Opinions as its fuel. If we end the War of Opinions, we simultaneously end the War of Bombs.
Is this what John Lennon and Yoko Ono meant?
We are all responsible for the War of Opinions, so we can end it at any time. The way we end the War of Opinions is by thinking then saying this: "Whatever opinion you hold, I have compassion for you, and whatever opinion I hold, I have compassion for myself."
If we choose these mental positions, we will never have to agree with each other to see the end of belligerence, violence, war, disputes, arguments, and doing harm.
The true cause of violence is not disagreement; it is how we think about each other and feel about each other when we disagree with each other.
Violence can only happen if it is acceptable for us to withhold compassion from those with whom we disagree. This is the cause of war.
Our differences of opinion do not cause violence. What causes violence is that we are willing to withhold compassion from others, any others, because of their opinions.
There is only one reason to withhold compassion from anyone: to actively build more violence on this planet. That's what our withheld compassion does.
If we are trying to accomplish something other than that by withholding compassion, then we are using the wrong tool. If we want to build peace, the tool that will build it is compassion-for-all.
The trouble with these times [is that they aren't a-changin' enough] is that many are trying to build peace by withholding compassion from those who disagree with them. That action builds war. So they are trying to build peace with that which only builds war.
That is like saying, "I'd like to build a house to sleep in, a good strong dwelling, so I'm going to build it out of water." [What do we think we are, fish, mermaids, aquatic plants?]
Water is useful for many things, but we can't cut it into blocks and build shelters with it. [What if we freeze it first? Igloo ice, sure, but this is water we're talking about, not permafrost ice in the arctic.]
Our misunderstandings are so basic to our belief system that we do not see that we are trying to build a house with something we cannot build a house with. That's how elemental our misunderstandings are. But that's also how powerful our opportunities are.
All we need to do is say, "Now that I can see that I've been trying to build a house with blocks of water, let me try again, but with blocks of wood, and see what happens." Voila: a beautiful, solid house.
A house made of water would not be nearly so nice or durable...or livable at all.
Not by hatred but by...this is an eternal law.
And so it is with peace. We can say, "Let me try using compassion-for-all to build peace, and see if that works any better than withholding compassion." And it will work every time. That is an eternal and universal law.
One can't build walls with wet fluid water; one can't build true and lasting peace with hatred of the people who disagree with us.
Our hatred builds something: It builds more of the Era of Belligerence.
It does not build peace in the world. It also does not build peace for us personally — in our day-to-day experience, our family and circle of friends, our workplace and our minds/hearts.
What builds peace for us, in our personal experience, is to say this: "I disagree with that point of view yet still have compassion for the person who holds it."
That builds the kind of deep peace that makes it easier for us to do everything we have to do throughout the day. It makes it easier to be a parent, easier to be a friend, easier to be a whatever.
A war brings these forces to our attention, but they are always at play, in smaller ways, within our lives. Disagreements break out in the home and the workplace. And we always make more peace for ourselves when we feel and think this:
"I disagree with the way my boss (spouse, child, friend, whoever) sees this situation. Still, I hold deep compassion for this person."
Similarly, the fire of war requires certain conditions to ignite and burn and grow.
Remove the War of Opinions and, no matter how many lit matches are thrown onto the fire of war, it will not ignite.
Compassion-for-all is like soaking fuel used in the fire of war. No matter how many flames are dropped on wet wood, it won't catch on fire. Our compassion-for-all ends this war and every war.
I serve my king with no question, Sir. - Good boy
When our compassion ends nowhere, there will be peace on earth. When our compassion goes everywhere, there is no ready fuel for war.
What will happen when we start to pair compassion-for-all with whatever opinion (view) we hold?
What will happen is that we will spend more time in our Peace Mind, which is the higher portion of our consciousness. And when we do this, we'll see new solutions—solutions that already exist, except that we cannot see them yet because they can only be seen from the more loving portion of consciousness.
When we have compassion for others, we free them from our hatred, vitriol, animosity, belligerence, so they visit their Peace Minds more often, too.
Republican gals love soldiers who kill for God.
And when we are all in our Peace Minds, new solutions will be so easy to see that we almost won't be able to comprehend how we ever stayed at war or disagreeing for so long.
Solutions to our problems already exist. Whether we can see them yet depends on our perspective. Where are we placing conscious attention in our own consciousness? Is it our Peace Mind?
It's not that this conflict, or any conflict, is based on an unsolvable problem. It's that we cannot yet see a solution that will resolve this issue from our current perspective.
Move our perspective, and the preexisting solution becomes apparent.
What's the one thing we can do to serve the world? We can learn to transition our own perspective upwards so we can see more solutions and bring more innovations to humanity.
What's another thing we can do? We can pair compassion with everything we think and feel. Compassion can be added to any thought, like this:
"I greatly disagree with what that leader has done, and I have compassion for everyone who lives in that country, even for the leader herself," or "I think that's a terrible thing to do, and I have compassion for the person who has done it." Just add one in.
No consensus of opinion needs to be reached to end the War of Opinions. We can end war without a single opinion ever changing.
We end it by adding our compassion-for-everyone to any opinion we have.
That ends the war, because now it's not a War of Opinions that we're seated within—it's simply a landscape of opinions that are allowed to exist.
It's not a War of Opinions when there is compassion-for-all present. Now it's a community of unique human individuals who compassionately respect each other. We came here to be unique.
We did not come here to create a consensus of opinion. We came here to be in a vibrant (lively and diverse) community of original thinkers, coexisting, more than tolerating but appreciating differences.
Peace Class, free, Wednesdays on Zoom
We came here to learn how to do that in peace.
What makes that possible is this phrase: Regardless of how we see things, we have compassion for one another. That choice-of-thought builds the kind of peace we came here to build.
Nagarjuna: Nāgārjuna (from Sanskrit Nāga + Arjuna, Chinese Lóngshù 龍樹, Tibetan Klu sgrub); circa 150 – c. 250 CE) was a philosopher and Mahāyāna Buddhist monk from South India. He is considered the founder of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school [2, 3]. He is widely considered to be the most important Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself [4, 3]. Indeed, at least in Tibetan Buddhism, he is called the "second Buddha" [5]. He was a well-known defender of the new Mahāyāna movement. His treatises (śāstras) are the foundational texts of a school of Buddhist philosophy known as the teaching of emptiness (Śūnyatā-vāda) or Middle Way School of Madhyamaka...
[The Buddha explained:] Now, there comes a time, meditators, when, sooner or later,
after the lapse of a long period [of devolving], this world-system passes
away.
When this happens, beings have mostly been
reborn in the World of Radiance, and there they dwell made
of mind, feeding on joy, radiating light from themselves,
traversing the air, continuing in glory; thus, they remain
for a long period of time.
Now, there comes a time, meditators, when, sooner or later, this
world-system begins to evolve again. When this happens the
Palace of Brahmā appears, but it is empty. And some being
or other, either because its span of years has passed or its merit has become exhausted, falls from the World of Radiance, and
comes to life [is reborn] in the Palace of Brahmā.
There also this being lives made of mind, feeding on joy, radiating light from
itself, traversing the air, continuing in glory; thus, does it remain for a long, long period of time.
Now there arises, from dwelling there so long
alone, a dissatisfaction and a longing:
By merely wishing, I am the Creator!
“O, would that other
beings might come and join me in this place!” And, just then,
either because their span of years had passed [in that other world] or their merit [to carry on there] became exhausted, other beings fall from the World of
Radiance and appear in the Palace of Brahmā as
companions, in all respects like Brahmā [other than their later arrival].
On this, meditators, the one who was first reborn thinks: “I am Brahmā [Supreme], the Great (Maha) Brahmā, the Supreme One,
the Mighty, the All-Seeing, the Ruler, the Lord of All, the
Maker, the Creator, the Chief of all [the Alpha and Omega, the I am that I am], appointing to each its place, the Ancient of Days, the Parent of all that are and are
to be. These other beings are of my creation. Why is
this so? A while ago I thought, 'Would that they might
come!’ And on my mental aspiration, behold the beings
came!”
I am who/that/what I am [of which they speak] and I am everlasting!
No goddesses allowed.
“And those beings themselves, too, think thus: 'This must be
Brahmā, the Supreme, the Mighty, the All-Seeing, the Ruler,
the Lord of All, the Maker, the Creator, the Chief of All,
appointing to each a place, the Ancient of Days, the Parent of all that are and are to be. And we must have been created
by that being. Why? It is because, as we see, it was that being who was
here first, and we came after that.”
On this, meditators, the one who first came into existence there
is of longer life and more glorious and more powerful than
those who appeared afterward. And it might well be, meditators,
that some being on falling from that state, should come
hither [to be reborn].
Well, they're allowed, just don't call them goddesses like Sophia, Mother Mary, wife Asherah
.
And having come hither [to the human plane] that being might go forth from the
household life into the homeless state [of a monastic]. And having thus
become a recluse that person, by reason of ardor, of exertion, of
application, of earnestness, of careful thought, reaches such rapture of heart that, rapt in heart [jhana], he calls to mind his last
dwelling-place but not the previous ones.
He says to
himself: “That illustrious Brahmā [Supremo], the Great Brahmā, the
Supreme One, the Mighty, the All-Seeing, the Ruler, the
Lord of All, the Maker, the Creator, the Chief of All,
appointing to each its place, the Ancient of Days, the Father
of All that are and are to be, that being by whom we were created is steadfast, immutable, eternal, of a nature that knows
no change and will remain so forever and ever. But we
who were created have come hither as being
impermanent, mutable, limited in duration of life.”
This, meditators, is the first state of things on account of which,
starting out from which, some recluses and Brahmins (shramanas and brahmanas), being
eternalists as to some things and non-eternalists as to
others, maintain that the soul and the world are partly
eternal and partly not eternal. More
Misconstrued as the "creator" deity
We're not allowed to question in Christianity
Buddhism is a nontheistic (not atheistic) religion. It does not include the belief in an ultimate creator deity or any eternal being, divine or otherwise [4][5][6].
The universe (multiverse) comes into being due to causes and condition, but the Buddha did not declare an ultimate first beginning to it. It is cyclical and all beginnings, like all endings, repeat. There a "laws" that govern this impersonal process but not an ultimate creator God.
This may be hard to understand because there are gods, many of them, and they of different kinds and orders: devas, brahmas, asuras, maras, nagas, and so on. They abide on different planes, of which there are at least 31; however, these general planes contain countless worlds. All of these worlds are divided into three spheres: sensual, fine material, and immaterial.
Among these "gods" or deities are powerful beings who wield the power of creation and other, higher order beings who enjoy the creation of others. These, however, are not ultimate creations; that is to say, they are not really making new "things" such as a new soul (atta) or a new ultimate materiality or mentality. To give an example, say there were a pile of tiny bricks and a bucket of mortar and one were to release bricklayers to have at it. How many structures could they create? How many fabulous Lego-toy like "creations" could they put together? Presumably, they could fashion together a countless number of "things," but -- in an ultimate sense -- what is there but the same old building blocks? What is there but just ultimate materiality (form) arranged in an immaterial way (name) that looks new but is only really bricks, mortar, and arrangement?
Countless worlds in 31 Planes in three spheres
Buddhist texts posit that deities (brahmas, which are a subset of devas or "shining ones") such as Maha Brahma ("Great Supremo") are misconstrued as a creator [7].
During the vivarta kalpa (some previous aeon), a deity from Abhassara (radiant) plane was reborn on the lower Maha Brahma plane. As many living beings forget about their past life as soon as they are reborn, this also happened with Maha Brahma. No longer being aware of the higher planes of existence, this being felt alone in the universe (or world-system, cakkavala).
This being longed for the presence of others. After some time, other deities (devas) from higher planes were also reborn on those brahma planes as ministers and companions, an entire retinue [8].
Seeing this happen and having wished for it, this being falsely believed, "I am their creator." This belief, according to Buddhist texts (like the Brahmajala Sutta), was then shared by those other deities.
Eventually, however, one of those deities passed away from that world and was reborn on the human plane. Through meditation, that person gained the power to remember past lives [7].
That person went on to teach what was remembered from that previous life in that glorious (but relatively low) heaven, namely, that Maha Brahma was the creator of this universe.
There are countless world-systems ("universes"?) in 10,000 directions, each with its own Maha Brahma and Mara and Sakka, all of which are really stations (positions, seats, thrones, chairs, offices held by living beings).
The teaching of this person led to the widespread human belief in a creator god, according to the Pali canon [7], which refers to the Buddha's words and other teachings preserved in the Buddha's language (Pali or the lingua franca of Magadhi). More
From Dīgha Nikāya ("Collection of Long Discourses") No. 1: Brahmajāla Sutta ("The Supreme or All-Embracing Net of Views Discourse") translated by Prof. Rhys Davids)
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