Neil Toyota and Gregory Williams

Part of my past is that after I had two partners die, there was a very messy breakup, and then the death of a best friend. There came to me a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, so I attempted suicide. 

I woke up from a coma 72 hours later, and it was at that moment that I thought, “I wasn’t supposed to die. I’m supposed to live. I need something. I want to live." It was given to me. I didn’t know this word at the time (or I knew the word but I didn’t know its meaning, and I’d certainly not integrated it into my life) but I felt that I was experiencing grace. Part of my exploration has been looking at grace.

 One of the reasons why I may have migrated away from Buddhism is because the concept of grace was not included. I did not hear about soul. I did not hear about grace. I didn’t hear about God. Those words and those ideas kept bubbling up for me.

I like the word ‘hope.’I learned in my years in gerontology of running nursing homes and assisted living facilities, that hope is essential to the human spirit in terms of going forward. You have to have some reason to look forward. I have a belief in what I’m doing. And I have a belief that there is something there. I’ll call it Buddha. 

I believe that we have Buddha nature, which was a very different teaching when I went to Buddhism from Christianity. We’re inherently good, and it’s just the stuff that’s in the way that’s keeping us from being the good. So, the thing to do in life is to remove the bad; the things prevent us from being as good as we can be, and from growing the good qualities. I believe these things, but I also don’t know things. There’s a lot that I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen when I die, but I have hope.