मध्यमक 

	Whatever is dependent arising We declared that to be emptiness. That is dependent designation, And is itself the middle way.	”
—Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:18 all things arise in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions.

All religions ,and most of the people practicing those religions , seem to believe that they are the sole owners of the truth and that everybody else is simply wrong. I believe this to be  a very dangerous way of behaving . Even worse is that people interpret holy writings in their own subjective way . Reading through a translation of , say"the Lotus Sutra ", we are left scratching our heads as to the meaning of various obscure descriptions and having someone tell us that they know exactly what those passages mean ,even though they don't speak ,read or write the language the book was written in , or come from that particular culture ,doesn't help in understanding what was meant.
  Take for example  when the Buddha says that Kashyapa will become a Buddha named Bright Light in a  kalpa called Great Adornment in a land called Light Virtue. How can we possibly know what that means, what significance ' or connotation , it has in the context of attaining buddhahood. In the original language of the Buddha these terms must have had some specific meaning. How do we find out what that is ? The Indian culture is still there in north eastern India although it is a Hindu culture , except for Bangladesh and a lot of Assam .

So , my conclusion is that all the reading , going to retreats, lectures, chanting and the like really don't help . Enlightenment is achieved by a "peak " experience ( Maslow ) that pushes you over the edge of illusion and forces you to accept the truth ,whatever it is .Is it the same for everyone ? I highly doubt it. I shouldn't really say that all the searching etc doesn't really help because in a way it sets up the "peak " experience but you can achieve it without all the rigamarole.Very few people do .

Change is extremely difficult on a personal level or on a collective level. Look at the Catholic church ,it just doesn't seem capable of joining the forward movement of human society . Our own organisation , as a collective , remains open and forward thinking but individual members who have been practising for a long time are unable to let go of out of date ideas that worked 20 or 30 years ago. To believe that our practice makes us special is a serious mistake and divides us from the rest of the spiritual community .
           I heard an experience of a member who has been practicing for a long time and it was centered on the fact that he had two surgeries which went extremely well because he is a practising Nichiren Buddhist . He found the right docter , was diagnosed quickly etc.He was protected because of the Mystic Law. I went through exactly the same thing before I started practising with the same results. What's the difference ?

"the spectacle is not a collection of images ,but a social relation among people mediated by images ".Guy Debord

Taken fron the " Society of the Spectacle " by French philosopher Guy Debord.

                        "Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness."time" has ceased, "SPACE " has vanished. We live in a global village , a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space.We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling ,the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us "
Marshall McLuhan

" The medium is the messge ". Marshall McLuhan

We are the environment . A must see website not only for Buddhists but everybody.
ecobuddhism

Reading the "Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra " . Came across a very troubling piece of dialogue where Ikeda is talking about how people decide what is the right religion for them. Endo, one of the SGI , leaders in the discussion ,pipes up with the statement that as far as he's concerned Nichiren Buddhism is the only religion.(page 31) Ikeda makes no comment.

One thing , or rather 2 things, that we must be careful of is to not let faith turn into attachment and dogma.I have found myself slipping into this mindset and need to monitor myself constantly;it's easy to see it in others and there are many examples  I can think of in our SGI organisation.So ,lets be very wary.