“I’ve studied deeply in the philosophies of religion, but cheerfulness kept breaking through.” — Leonard Cohen
“It all comes back to . . .appetite for fruitful activity and a high quality life.“–George Bernard Shaw
The New Buddhist Methodist Church is actually a Taoist Buddhist Jewish Methodist Sufi Quaker Bahai online/offline community of old and new friends who have agreed to play this game together in order to brighten each other’s lives, and the lives of those around us.
Colin Wilson observed that a person’s search for a meaningful life tends to make him or her an “Outsider,” at least in the beginning, relative to the interests of most of his or her contemporaries. This search, Wilson suggested, “ends . . .no one knows where; but its road runs through religion. Religion is not the end; it is only a rest house on the way.”
Wilson wrote that back in the 1950’s. Here in this new millennium many of us intuit that the end of the search is not quite so far off or mysterious, and might best be described in Ekhart Tolle‘s phrase, as “The Power of Now.” What we are searching for are both new and old methods that help us live artistically, gracefully, in the Power of Now.
The New Buddhist Methodist Church, Satsang and Art Studio is a “life game,” and a website, and a community for those who have this appetite for Tolle’s “Power of Now,” which leads inexorably to Shaw’s “fruitful activity and high quality life.”
Nevertheless, as we all can attest, even with this appetite, or perhaps because of it, we often experience ourselves, in one way or another, as Outsiders in the old millennium sexist, militaristic, voyeuristic, materialistic dysfunctional culture, where such an appetite for authentic life is often thwarted, not fully satisfied.(If that last mouthful of a sentence makes sense to you, then yes, this life game, this site and this community are all designed for you! Welcome aboard.)
My ideal is that you can come to this game, this website as if you were going to church, or the meditation hall or satsang, or going to a poker game, or skiing or dancing, or out to your studio, wherever it is you regularly go to refresh, re-create, play games and have fun. This site is intended to help you remember, if only a little, that life is for living, laughing, loving. Whatever method you use to have fun, to laugh, love and be who you most want to be, that’s the method we’re interested here in discussing and sharing. (If you aren’t having fun on this website, or on this planet, it’s probably not for you!)
My goal as Senior Librarian of this New Buddhist Methodist Church, Satsang and Art Studio (hereafter, for convenience, referred to as simply the New Buddhist Methodist Church or even NBMC) is simply to bring together in one place many of the various methods we New Millennium Artists might use to love more deeply, to laugh more fully, to know ourselves and our creator more clearly, more tenderly, more skillfully. In other words, methods to help us move from the church and meditation hall into the art studio! We understand this as the direction of human evolution.
Obviously, collecting such methods, describing such methods (this is the New Buddhist Methodist Church, after all) is not a one man job. So I encourage your participation and feedback. We have a whole new culture, new earth to create. Yes, it’s a thousand year job, but we do it a day at a time, beginning today.
Charles and John Wesley, the brothers who accidentally founded Methodism or the Methodist Movement back in the mid 1700’s, were likewise interested in finding and practicing methods that led to sanctification, e.g., what we might call a life of peace and love and creative good humor. My personal connection with the Methodist movement functioned, as it did for many others, as my first diving board into the smorgasbord of methods here waiting for us on this planet.
I look forward to hearing of your experience and expression of these new methods. Towards peace and prosperity—Bear Gebhardt
