Penetrating the Heart of Reality - abandon notions and concepts

     Our faith must be alive, always growing, like a tree. It is our true religious experience that nourishes our faith and allows it to grow. In the Buddhist tradition, religious experience is described as awakening(bodhi) or insight(prajna). It is not intellectual, not made of notions and concepts, but of the kind of understanding that brings more solidity, freedom, joy and faith. For genuine awakening to be possible, we must let go of notions and concepts about nirvana, and about God. We must let go not just of our notions and concepts about the ultimate but also of our notions and concepts about things in the phenomenal realm. In the Buddhist practice, we contemplate impermanence, non-self, emptiness, and interbeing to help us touch the phenomenal world more deeply, release our notions and concepts about things and penetrate the heart of reality. When we touch "things-in-themselves,"  we see that they are quite different from our notions and concepts about them. Our notions and concepts are the result of wrong perceptions. That is why, in order to have direct access ti their reality, we have to abandon all of our wrong perceptions. When nuclear scientists want to enter the world of elementary particles, they too must abandon their notions of things and objects. French scientist Alfred Kastler said,"Objects or things that have always been thought of as constituents of nature must be renounced." In the same way, we must abandon our notions of God, Buddha, nirvana, self, non-self, birth, death, being, and non-being.