Buddhism’s big week: Dalai Lama’s visit shines light on its many flourishing forms
Buddhism’s big week: Dalai Lama’s visit shines light on its many flourishing forms |
- Buddhism’s big week: Dalai Lama’s visit shines light on its many flourishing forms
- Miracle tales and being shit free
- A life lesson about "faith" I've learned on Maui, bodyboarding
- What is suffering?
| Buddhism’s big week: Dalai Lama’s visit shines light on its many flourishing forms Posted: 12 May 2013 09:00 AM PDT
She still wanted a spiritual practice, but one that valued questioning. "Buddhism encourages you to investigate every piece of information you're given, and that really appealed to me," said Bennett, who works in Madison in the field of health care advocacy. "All of us want to be good people, but how? Buddhism provides a path and instruction on how to gain wisdom and compassion." It's a big week for Buddhism in Madison — one of many in the last four decades because of the… Read the original article » Read More @ Source |
| Miracle tales and being shit free Posted: 12 May 2013 12:00 AM PDT I came to the opinion a long time ago that religion, in general, is man's attempt to give meaning to the suffering he eventually finds in life. In short, it's an attempt to bring a small amount of order out of a lot of chaos even if the order is fictional and imagined. Some religions do this well, but they have to sell miracle tales in order to do it based around a fictitious, almighty character. Religious salesman know how gullible people are who have been kicked around by life's misfortunes. So miracle tales do work in the way of a placebo effect, especially seemingly impossible ones like bringing the physical body back to life after it has been buried for a long time. By comparison, Buddhism is not an easy religion to sale for the average religious salesman. The Buddha is essentially saying, "Yeah dude, life is shit. You're born and then you die with a lot of pain in-between." For those who are shopping for a religion, Buddhism (early Buddhism, that is) doesn't have any great miracle tales. What early Buddhism tells us is that the Buddha transcended the shit. The part of him, before his awakening, that was glomming onto the shit, found itself, after awakening, shit free. No longer would he lock onto and interface with a life of samsara expressed in and through the human body. The problem with religions that rely on miracle tales, especially those which need an almighty god, they have to control the critical faculties of man's spiritual nature that has the ability to accomplish what the Buddha accomplished. Such miracle religions find the enlightenment of the Buddha to be an anathema because it locates the absolute as transcending the world. Contrary to this, they need people to believe the absolute is in the world and will one day show up and make everything right. But it never does. For Buddhism, the absolute is not something in the form of a miracle god or a creator god. It is the first-person that is absolute but is unable to recognize itself; so it attaches to things not itself in the belief they are itself. By doing so, it imprisons itself, continually. It lives a life of delusion going from one illusory condition to the next. It cannot awaken because it takes dreams to be reality. It it is completely inverted.
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| A life lesson about "faith" I've learned on Maui, bodyboarding Posted: 11 May 2013 11:00 PM PDT Whenever I go to Maui, I learn something. Not from a book, holy or otherwise. Not from a person, revered or otherwise. From experience. The best teacher. Usually from one of my favorite experiences, bodyboarding, which I'm only able to do in warm wavy water, something Hawaii has in abundance (in my home state, Oregon, we've got great ocean waves, but, damn, they're cold.) Bloggings about some of the past life lessons I've learned on Maui can be perused here, here, and here. What follows are insights gained on my most recent Maui visit. After some middling-good wave days, OK but not Wow'ish, the ocean swells on Napili Bay became the way I like them: big, and breaking nicely over reef rocks midway in the bay. By 8 am my bodyboarding-crazed brain had spurred me to paddle out, the only person sane or crazy enough to be in the water at that time. I caught a nice wave right away. And proceeded to ride wave after wave after wave, until my 64 year old body said "enough, dude." It was a peak experience. Catching large waves makes me feel absolutely great. No matter what happens after bodyboarding (a.k.a. boogieboarding), after just one ride on a big breaking wave I know this has been a well-lived day. Returning to our condo, I rested. I picked up a book I'd been reading, Galen Guengerich's God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age. Some of what he wrote helped me understand conceptually what experientially I know every time I catch a breaking wave. Here Guengerich is speaking of a form of "faith" that is much different from blind belief in religious dogma. But if our faith is not acceptance of supernatural revelation, what is it? Let me be candid. Faith is something no one fully understands. It peers into the realm of mystery and transcendence, of meaning and purpose, of value and satisfaction. In the modern world, people of enlightened faith live on the boundary between things we know for certain and things we can never fully comprehend. ...Faith requires a leap of the moral imagination to connect the world as it is to the world as it might become... Faith looks at what is and imagines what might be. I didn't agree with everything Gunegerich wrote in his "Keeping the Faith" chapter. But these words rang true to me. There's a moment in bodyboarding, as in surfing (I've never surfed, but I've caught a lot of waves, just as surfers do) when you're on the edge. You don't know. You're not sure. You're in the realm of maybe. Maybe I'm going to catch this wave. Maybe I'm not. Sometimes I'm almost certain that I will; sometimes I'm almost certain that I won't. Those varieties of certainty become more accurate with experience -- knowing that when a wave like this, is acting like that, and I'm positioned here, such-and-such will happen. Still, there's always that maybe. A big part of what makes bodyboarding so satisfying and fun is maybe. Uncertainty. Even when I'm caught in the curl of a wave, feeling "this is going to be a good ride," surprises can happen. Waves can act in mysterious ways. I've been dumped upside down so quickly it made my head spin (literally). And I've had a wave pass me by that I figured I was almost sure to catch. When life is certain, it lacks meaning. For me, at least. I'm always just talking about me, when I'm speaking about meaning. There's no meaning without a me. And for me, I'm the only meaning-making me I know directly. Your experience of life may be different. However, I suspect that if you reflect on the happiest, most satisfying moments you experience, they will include a big dose of "maybe." Certainties feel mechanical. Gears revolving, producing an expected outcome. Click, click, click. Certainties aren't human. They aren't natural. The laws of nature, though orderly, usually don't produce completely calculable life experiences. Fortunately. If I knew exactly what was going to happen every time I see a large wave approaching and I position myself to catch it, bodyboarding wouldn't be nearly as much fun. The joy I feel doing it is much enhanced by living on that mysterious boundary Guengerich speaks of. The boundary between what is, and what will be. Which also is the boundary between what was, and what is. We are part of something much bigger than ourselves. I prefer to call it "cosmos" rather than "God." But, hey, words can't encompass it; knowledge can't explain it; expectations can't predict it. When the part of the cosmos that is me is engaged with the part that is ocean waves, I feel these things acutely. I don't know. I'm clueless. Mystery always looms over, under, in front, and back of me. Whether out in the ocean or inside my brain, I can't predict with total accuracy what will happen next. This is what "faith" really is: being OK with that. It isn't being certain. About God, life after death, salvation, or anything else. It's waiting for the next wave of life to arrive (yeah, they do keep on coming; no stopping them) with open arms, mind, and heart. Not understanding. Not knowing. Not being sure. Just feeling, "I am you, and you are me, and we are all together." (So sang someones famously, sort of.) |
| Posted: 11 May 2013 10:00 PM PDT
But what do we mean by suffering? There's an unfortunate tendency for us to think of suffering in grand terms: the person with terminal cancer or a broken leg, the refugee, the starving child in a third world country. So suffering seems to be a special event. But actually, all beings suffer. We all suffer, every day.
If you look closely at your mental states over the course of any given day, you'll probably notice that you spend a lot of time dipping in and out of suffering of one sort of another. And if you look around you at the people you see, it's a fair bet that at that moment half of them are suffering right at that moment. How many of them are showing signs of being happy?  If you like my articles, please click here to buy one of my books, guided meditation CDs, and MP3s, including The Heart's Wisdom, which includes all four lovingkindness meditations. We tend to ignore our own suffering, and often don't recognize it in others either. But why? One reason might be that we take our suffering for granted, and another might be that we get caught up in the stories we tell ourselves. When you're working on your computer and the machine is running more slowly than you want, you probably feel frustrated. You probably don't say "I'm suffering, let me have compassion for myself." You're probably to busy saying "This computer's too damn slow!" So you're caught up in the plot-line of this all being the fault of the computer, and you just take for granted that it's the computer that's making you feel bad. You might not assume that you could feel any other way. When someone else is suffering, we often get caught up in the story lines there as well. When you're with someone who's in a bad mood, how often you think, "Ah, this person's suffering. What can I do to ease her pain?" You probably think something more like, "Jeez, she got out of bed on the wrong side this morning! I'd better steer clear." We'll often think of this person's situation purely in terms of how it affects us. We probably don't even think of this person as suffering, most times. We might be brusque or obstructive with them, and end up adding to their suffering. So I'd suggest, as you observe your own experience and notice what's going on with others around you, that you become more mindful of all the small ways in which we suffer pain. And if you can keep your awareness in your heart, keep the lovingkindness phrases running through your mind, drop the stories, and see if you can respond to this widespread suffering with compassion. Read More @ Source |
Like many Westerners, Mary Bennett turned to Buddhism when the faith of her childhood stopped working for her.
In cultivating compassion we're responding, with kindness, to the suffering we encounter in life — especially others' suffering. And the essence of compassion is wishing that beings be free from suffering.| You are subscribed to email updates from BuddhaRocks ☸ To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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