HOW DO I GET TO BUDDHA (OR CHRIST)? How do I get to OZ? Who do I fix the car? How do I lose weight? All the questions about HOW, WHEN, and WHERE are about location in time. The assumptions is that you are at X and you want to get to Z. The question is about the distance of time to get there and. which path. The paradigm is a flat map that your partner has open while you are driving, and you had better follow directions and not make a wrong turn. This is our common sense everyday reality that we assume without question that is the only reality. Buddhism or the Buddha (the Dharma teaching) questions that assumption, or questions the question. The practice of Buddhism is Buddhism and the practice is a Question.

Okay, let use a different paradigm or map to get to the core of this, a metaphor for a new way of being in reality. Turn on your GPS navigator while your parter has the flat map open. Right away, there is a shift in perspective. On the flat map you are like an ant on a flat table. Everything is in a grid and you move on the map. The map doesn’t move or adjust to you. The map is space/time (it takes time to move for X to Z) and you are a thing in it. You come and you go, but the map, the world stays the same. This map/world was here before you were born and it will be here after you die. We are the Many in the One world

Now shift to the GPS. Notice that you remain in the center of the world/map and when you move the world/map reboots around you, sensitive to your steps. And if you could zoom out to the end of the cosmos, you would still be at the center and the whole cosmos would orientate itself around you, as if you were God.

In the flat map you are IN the world as an object. In the GPS you are the center of the world as Subject. Bot of these maps a valid, and both will get you to. your destination. But in the GPS map, no matter where you turn, you are always at the center. And because you are always at the center, always at home, you can’t sin. The navigator always says when you make a turn this way or that, maybe not listening to the direction, Turn Right…turn left…you are always going to your destination, no matter which way you turn, and the navigator never calls you an idiot. While your flat map navigator may call you that if you don’t follow the one and only correct path.

So if you ask the way to the Buddha, you have to map options. The common one is the flat map, and you can read this book, study that teaching, mediate, do yoga, and you will wonder if you are there yet. On this map everything is clear and distinct and certain. Everyone has a certain way to get to Buddha.

If you use the GPS map you are going to be caught in irony. You are already at the center and at home, but at the same time you have miles to go before you awake. That’s ironic, isn’t. You are home and you are not home. Buddha likes jokes.