Personal Narrative: My Experience At Deer Park Buddhist Center

I had the opportunity to visit Deer Park Buddhist Center back home in Wisconsin. Deer Park is a hotspot for Buddhism across the Midwest, and it serves as a haven of learning and growth for Buddhist monks from all over the world. Before venturing into Deer Park, I had very little knowledge on what it meant to be a Buddhist. I labelled their beliefs as foreign to me, simply because I have never taken it upon myself to learn more about what the Buddhist community actually is. After experiencing a religion so different than my own, I feel like my perception towards religion as a whole has changed. Previously, I had only personally experienced Christian religions. I have learned about different religions through this class, but I didn’t realize that there is a limit to what you can learn in the …show more content…
I feel like all religions share a core spiritual purpose. All religions are meant to pursue the Ultimate, and each religion offers the way to that Ultimate through “Enlightenment”. I did a little research on the side and came across something called Baha’ism. Baha’ism essentially says that all religions are rooted in truth. All main religions have the same spiritual truth and come from the same God. My experience at Deer Park was very meaningful to me, and I feel like I learned a lot about the world around me. Though it wasn’t the specific things that were going on during the worship service (I couldn’t understand anything, even the Howa, which was in English, was very hard to wrap my head around) that had meaning to me, it was the experience as a whole which opened my mind to things that I had previously never thought about. I understand that I know almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, but I feel like my world has been opened. I am no longer looking at things from a basic Christian view, I am trying to understand how things are perceived from a world