Just a few more words for anyone interested. I've given the thread a read and a couple of things.
First, a few mentions of "truth" and of how there can be "only one". As I see it and have come to understand it, "truth" for Christianity is not so much a proposition, and not a creed as such (Thomas Merton has said that doctrines are more parameters set against total error than definitions of truth), but is centred upon a Person.
So it is a very real and pertinent question to ask exactly what we mean by "person" when Christian truth is considered. Which asks questions of ourselves, of just what we consider our own "self" to be.......the
persona we seek to present to the world, often seeking to "justify" itself, or maybe something deeper
known only to God.
From my own reading I have found that Buddhism, with its "anatta" (not-self) teaching, touches upon this in many relevant ways. And those who have sought the "true self", in Christianity, have often given expression to an experience of reality very close to that witnessed to in the Buddhist tradition. So much so that a Christian mystic such as St John of the Cross has been acknowledged as a Dharma brother by some Ch'an (zen) Buddhists.
Anyway, whatever, maybe there are ways of seeking communion that go beyond words, creeds and doctrinaire propositions.
True communication on the deepest level is more than a simple sharing of ideas, conceptual knowledge, or formulated truth...............And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless, it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.
(Merton, in a speech given in Bangkok, on his Asian Pilgrimage)
The second thing was the mention of meditation, associating such with the "satanic". It seems this has been adequately answered by others here so there is not much to say. Only that there are many forms of meditation, and that they have been spoken of, and practiced, by many devout Christians such as John Main.
The third thing concerns the claim being made that this world is "unreal" as far as Buddhism is concerned. As was mentioned before, there are many expressions of the Buddhist faith, but as far as this world being "unreal" is concerned I think it needs to be stressed that much is "unreal" to many of us as we go about creating our own "realities". The Buddhist position, at least as I have come to understand it, is not so much that things are illusory, but that their separateness in the fabric of Reality is illusory. And this in a very real existential way, as expressed by a short story in the Jewish tradition.....
Whenever the rabbi of Sasov saw anyone's suffering he shared it so earnestly that the other's suffering became his own. Once someone expressed their astonishment at this capacity to share in another's troubles. "What do you mean 'share'?" said the rabbi. "It is my own sorrow; how can I help but suffer it?"
Last (sighs of relief.....
) the word "suffering" in Buddhism is a translation of
dukkha (Pali) . It really needs to be understood in its full context before any claim is made that "Buddhism seeks to avoid suffering". Buddhism seeks to
understand suffering. By "understanding" it, it can indeed be "overcome/avoided". But it has been pointed out often that if the Buddhist path is understood and pursued as a means of avoiding suffering we are "plunging headlong down a path of spiritual selfishness......that is diabolical."