Den says:

"I need to build my world again after it was in ruins this past year. All I have now is my husband, kids,  a few connections and spiritual path. That is not enough. The void persists.

I seek hooks to further my life. To expand it. To make it stronger.

And I don’t know where to start from. One close person pushes me to seek harder, to try harder. But I believe that I must not hurry. Neither should I kill time with series or other ‘glue’.

All I know is that I should listen to myself very hard. Find the long forgotten inner melodies.

It is hard and I often feel lost, empty, afraid of life’s complexity and scale.

I don’t want *any* time-wasters. I need to find hidden parts of myself. That is why such things as going to cinema or dating do not feel like a solution to this particular problem.

I need to revive my sphere of interests."

Anita replies:

"Something in your share and search to rebuild your world reminds me of the original Never Ending Story, a movie 1984. The land of Fantasia was destroyed by the Nothing and all that was left of it was one grain of sand. ALL was gone, all the creatures and the beauty of the vast, limitless land except for one single grain of sand. What now, the child hero asked the child goddess? She said: you can re-build a whole NEW land of Fantasia from that one grain of sand. I am very much in that process at the present time, going back to basics, I think it is about looking at the same things I looked at before, what is in front of me now, with a Beginner’s Mind; not from the points of views of old assumptions, old false beliefs, distorted thinking…. not looking at stuff from what I SHOULD be seeing…

Does any of this mean anything special for you?"

I can so relate to this. My world has been anything but smooth over the past year. I abandoned my friends on FB, lapsed my Buddhist path and despaired of my children. I have had both hips replaced and everyday seems to blur into the next one. I have become a chronic insomniac. What to do... what to do...

A Remedy for Despair

by

Bhikkhu Bodhi

© 1998

Most of us live in the cramped cold cages of our private projects, frantically struggling to stake out our own little comfortable place in the sun. Driven in circles by anxious yearnings and beckoning desires, we rarely ever glance aside to see how our neighbor is faring, and when we do it is usually only to assure ourselves that he is not trying to encroach upon our own domain or to find some means by which we might extend our dominion over his.

Occasionally, however, it somehow happens that we manage to detach ourselves from our obsessive pursuits long enough to arrive at a wider clearing. Here our focus of concern undergoes a remarkable shift. Lifted above our habitual fixation on myopic goals, we are brought to realize that we share our journey from birth to death with countless other beings who, like ourselves, are each intent on a quest for the good.

This realization, which often topples our egocentric notions of the good, broadens and deepens our capacity for empathy. By breaking down the walls of self-concern it allows us to experience, with a particularly inward intimacy, the desire all beings cherish to be free from harm and to find an inviolable happiness and security. Nevertheless, to the extent that this flowering of empathy is not a mere emotional effusion but is accompanied by a facility for accurate observation, it can easily turn into a chute plunging us down from our new-found freedom into a chasm of anguish and despair.

For when, with eyes unhindered by emotively tinged blinkers, we turn to contemplate the wide expanse of the world, we find ourselves gazing into a mass of suffering that is vertiginous in its volume and ghastly in its intensity. The guarantor of our complacency is the dumb thoughtless glee with which we acquiesce in our daily ration of sensual excitation and ego-enhancing kudos. Let us raise our heads a little higher and cast our eyes about, and we behold a world steeped in pain where the ills inherent in the normal life-cycle are compounded still more by the harshness of nature, the grim irony of accident, and the cruelty of human beings.

As we grope about for a handle to prevent ourselves from plummeting down into the pits of despondency, we may find the support we need in a theme taught for frequent recollection by the Buddha: "Beings are the owners of their kamma, the heirs of their kamma; they are molded, formed and upheld by their kamma, and they inherit the results of their own good and bad deeds." Often enough this reflection has been proposed as a means to help us adjust to the vicissitudes in our personal fortunes: to accept gain and loss, success and failure, pleasure and pain, with a mind that remains unperturbed. This same theme, however, can also serve a wider purpose, offering us succor when we contemplate the immeasurably greater suffering in which the multitudes of our fellow beings are embroiled.

Confronted with a world that is ridden with conflict, violence, exploitation and destruction, we feel compelled to find some way to make sense out of their evil consequences, to be able to see in calamity and devastation something more than regrettable but senseless quirks of fate. The Buddha's teaching on kamma and its fruit gives us the key to decipher the otherwise unintelligible stream of events. It instructs us to recognize in the diverse fortunes of living beings, not caprice or accident, but the operation of a principle of moral equilibrium which ensures that ultimately a perfect balance obtains between the happiness and suffering beings undergo and the ethical quality of their intentional actions.

Contemplation on the operation of kamma is not a cold and calculated expedient for justifying a stoical resignation to the status quo. The pathways of kamma are labyrinthine in their complexity, and acceptance of this causal order does not preclude a battle against human avarice, brutality and stupidity or stifle beneficent action intended to prevent unwholesome deeds from finding the opportunity to ripen. Deep reflection on kammic retribution does, however, brace us against the shocks of calamity and disappointment by opening up to our vision the stubborn unwieldiness of a world ruled by greed, hate and delusion, and the deep hidden lawfulness connecting its turbulent undercurrents with the back-and-forth swing of s

Surface events. While on the one hand this contemplation awakens a sense of urgency, a drive to escape the repetitive round of deed and result, on the other it issues in equanimity, an unruffled inner poise founded upon a realistic grasp of our existential plight.

Genuine equanimity, which is far from callous indifference, sustains us in our journey through the rapids of Samara. Bestowing upon us courage and endurance, it enables us to meet the fluctuations of fortune without being shaken by them, and to look into the face of the world's sufferings without being shattered by them.

Coping with physical pain

Full disclosure: I'm pretty good at dealing with physical pain. I bear pain silently and stoically. Mostly. 

But as somebody said, "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." Pain and suffering are not the same thing. Pain is a physical sensation; suffering is how we choose to experience it. Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote,

The Buddha compares being afflicted with bodily pain to being struck by an arrow. Adding mental pain (aversion, displeasure, depression, or self-pity) to physical pain is like being hit by a second arrow. The wise person stops with the first arrow.

In the dentist's most people don'g even wait for the first arrow. They jab themselves with second one -- aversion, displeasure, depression and self-pity -- as soon as I hear "open wide." Obviously, this points to an area of my practice that needs more work. This example also shows us that pain and suffering really aren't the same thing, because we can have suffering without pain. Can we also have pain without suffering?

The word suffering has a special significance in Buddhism. In his teachings of the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha said that life is suffering. Of course, the Buddha didn't speak English; what he really said was that life is dukkha. Dukkha is not just about painful things. Anything that is temporary, limited or imperfect is dukkha. The most pleasant experience you ever enjoyed was dukkha, because it ended.

Although we associate the word suffer with unpleasantness, the word means many things -- to abide, to accept, to bear, to endure, to support, to sustain, to tolerate, to experience, to feel, to know. In other words, suffering is about relating to something else. In order to have relationship, there must be at least two things -- a sufferer and an object of suffering.

And here we touch on the heart of the matter -- Who is it that suffers? What is the self? And,What is separate from the self? Suffering depends on self-reference, with perceiving oneself as a finite entity plagued by some outside Other. Perhaps suffering isn't a bad translation fordukkha after all.

We read in the Tripitaka (Visuddhi Magga):

Mere suffering exists, no sufferer is found.
The deeds are, but no doer of the deeds is there,
Nirvana is, but not the man that enters it.
The path is, but no traveler on it is seen.

When touched with a feeling of pain,
the ordinary uninstructed person
sorrows, grieves,
and laments, beats his breast,
becomes distraught.
So he feels two pains,
physical and mental.

Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and,
right afterward,
were to shoot him with another one,
so that he would feel
the pains of two arrows.

–The Buddha

Let’s start with a basic question: What is pain?

Physical pain is the response of the body and the nervous system to a huge range of stimuli that are perceived as noxious, damaging, or dangerous. There are really three dimensions to pain: the physical, or sensory component; the emotional, or affective component— how we feel about the sensation; and the cognitive component—the meaning we attribute to our pain.

Let’s say you’ve got a pain in your back. You can’t lift your children; getting in and out of the car is difficult; you can’t sit in meditation. Maybe you can’t even work. That’s the physical component. But you’re having to give up a lot, and you’re going to have feelings about that—anger, probably—and you’re susceptible to depression. That’s the emotional response. And then you have thoughts about the pain—questions about what caused it, negative stories about what’s going to happen. Those expectations, projections, and fears compound the stress of the pain, eroding the quality of your life.

There is a way to work with all this, based on Buddhist meditative practices, that can liberate you, to a very large extent, from the experience of pain. Whether or not you can reduce the level of sensory pain, the affective and cognitive contributions to the pain—which make it much worse—usually can be lessened. And then, very often, the sensory component of the pain changes as well.

You mean that once you’ve changed your relationship to the pain, the physical discomfort may decrease?

That’s the key point: You change your relationship to the pain by opening up to it and paying attention to it. You “put out the welcome mat.” Not because you’re masochistic, but because the pain is there. So you need to understand the nature of the experience and the possibilities for, as the doctors might put it, “learning to live with it,” or, as the Buddhists might put it, “liberation from the suffering.” If you distinguish between pain and suffering, change is possible. As the saying goes, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”

There have been studies looking at how the mind processes acute pain at the sensory level. Subjects are randomized between two groups, then given the cold pressor test, where a tourniquet is placed around your bicep, then you stick your arm into ice water. There’s no more blood flow, so your arm gets very painful very fast. They measure how long you can keep your arm in the water as a function of whether you are given an attentional strategy, such as paying attention to the sensations and really moving into them and being with them as nonjudgmentally as you can—a mindfulness strategy, in other words—or a distraction strategy, where you just try to think about other things and tune out the pain. What they found was that in the early minutes of having your arm in the ice water, distraction works better than mindfulness: You’re less aware of the discomfort because you’re telling yourself a story, or remembering something, or having a fantasy.

But after the arm is in the cold water for a while, mindfulness becomes much more powerful than distraction for tolerating the pain. With distraction alone, once it breaks down and doesn’t work, you’ve got nothing.

The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program uses the body scan as well as sitting meditation to manage pain. Can you explain how the body scan works?

The body scan is a variation on a traditional Burmese practice called sweeping, from the school of U Ba Khin, that S. N. Goenka teaches in his ten-day Vipassana retreats. The traditional method involves tuning in to sensation in a narrow horizontal band that is slowly brought down through the entire body, as if you were giving yourself a CAT scan. This is analogous to the way certain metals, such as zinc, are purified in a circular zone furnace. I thought it would be hard for people in chronic pain to sit for forty-five minutes, so I modified the practice. It is done lying down, starting at the toes and moving up through different regions of the body.

This practice is a way of getting out of the head and developing intimacy with the body. The challenge is, can you feel the toes of your left foot without wiggling them? You tune in to the toes, then gradually move your attention to the bottom of the foot and the heel, and feel the contact with the floor. Then you move to the ankle and slowly up the leg to the pelvis. Then you go to the toes of the right foot and move up the right leg. Very slowly you move up the torso, through the lower back and abdomen, then the upper back and chest, and the shoulders. Then you go to the fingers on both hands and move up the arms to the shoulders. Then you move through the neck and throat, the face and the back of the head, and then right on up through the top of the head.

And all the while, you’re in contact with the breath. I tend to have people feel the breath moving in and out of the body region they’re attending to, so that there’s a sort of dual awareness. As you move up the body, you’re learning how to focus on a particular region, then let go of it and move on. It’s like cultivating concentration and mindfulness simultaneously, because there is a continual flow. You’re not staying with one object of attention.

Does the body scan work like a relaxation practice?

The body scan is a meditation practice, not a relaxation exercise. Relaxation is done with a goal in mind. Meditation is about nonstriving and emptiness. If you get into thinking, “I’m doing this meditation to take away my pain,” you’re coming at it with the wrong motivation. Meditation doesn’t “work” or not “work”; it’s about being with things as they are.

What if your pain is so bad that it’s hard for you to concentrate on anything else?

You have a number of choices. Let’s say you have lower back pain. You can say, “I’m going to try to focus on my toes, even in the presence of back pain. The back’s always there; I’ll get to it sooner or later. Why don’t I see if I can really learn to focus my attention where it’s being asked to focus?” Often, when you do that, the felt sense of the pain in the back lessens.

But if the pain is too great, you can go to the region where the pain is and let the breath merge with it. Breathe in and feel the breath, or in your mind’s eye see the breath moving down into the lower back. Then on the out-breath, as the breath lets go, see if you can allow the mind to let go. You’re not trying to shut off the sensations from the lower back—just to experience the fullness of whatever happens as you let go.

Then in the next moment, the sensations and the feelings and the thoughts might all come flooding back, and you’ve got the next in-breath to work with. So it’s a practice.

You develop an observer’s attitude toward the pain?

Basically, you’re intentionally bearing witness to the pain rather than distancing yourself from it; we’re not teaching mindfulness as a dualistic practice. Nevertheless, there’s a sense that there’s the pain, and there’s the observing of the pain. It’s important to understand that as an intermediate step toward ultimate liberation. It means that I can rest in awareness, then ask myself, “Is the awareness in pain in this moment?” And the answer invariably is, “As I look at it right now, the awareness of the pain is not in pain.” When you realize you can rest in this awareness, the pain may be just as intense, but you’re now cultivating equanimity and clear comprehension. You’re seeing the pain as it is, as sensation. There is a knowing that it is not pleasant. But the interpretation that the pain is killing me, or ruining my life, and all the emotions and stories that go with that, are seen for what they are. In that seeing, they often go into abeyance.

What do you tell people who say, “My practice isn’t working: I’m still in pain”?

When you think that your practice should be working, then you’ve already fallen out of your practice and into expectations that the practice is going to achieve some kind of prefigured, desirable result. This need to get rid of is its own form of ignorance, and we need to look at our “I” statements. A worthy object of attention and inquiry is: Who is suffering? Who is in pain? We can ask that, but rather than coming up with an answer qua thought, we can drop into not-knowing and experience simply being aware.

Not that “simply being aware” is easy. When pain arises, the same challenge occurs as when the breath arises. That’s one reason to practice when we’re not in a lot of pain - to cultivate strong practice so we can rely on it when it becomes extremely difficult to practice.

You seem to be saying that pain is just like the rest of life, only more so.

If you pay attention to the little episodes of pain in your life, you can learn how to work with the bigger episodes because you learn about anicca, impermanence; anatta, no-self; and dukkha, suffering. The meditation orientation is not about fixing pain or making it better. It’s about looking deeply into the nature of pain - making use of it in certain ways that might allow us to grow. In that growing, things will change, and we have the potential to make choices that will move us toward greater wisdom and compassion, including self-compassion, and thus toward freedom from suffering.

Some forms of pain are harder to deal with than others, aren’t they? Lower back pain, for example.

Lower back pain tends to be more complex because every time you stand up or move in any way, you may be exacerbating the inflammation or instability. But over time, you can actually dramatically transform your relationship to your back. What we’re talking about is the deep structure of rehabilitation.

The deep meaning of “rehabilitation,” which is related to the word “habitation,” is “learning to live inside again.” And the deeper Indo-European root is ghabh-e, which means “giving and receiving,” like tonglen, the Tibetan Buddhist practice. So rehabilitation is an exchange, in which you’re willing to move into the interiority of your being and work at the boundary with what is, with full awareness and compassion. If you work that edge patiently, with perseverance, motivation, and kindness, if you give yourself over to it with mindfulness, there is the very real possibility of returning home to your body and learning to live inside. We all need to learn to live inside again. We don’t have to have pain to wake up to the fact that we might be happier if we inhabited the totality of our lives.

  

A little something extra

This quote is often attributed to the Buddha. It is in fact the words of Finnish poet Anselm Hollo used the exact same wording as Jack Kornfield in his translation of Palladas:

"each morning we’re born again
of yesterday nothing remains
what’s left began today"

(Corvus: Poems, page 32).

Karma and Rebirth

By Barbara O'Brien

Karma is created by the intentional acts of body, speech, and mind. Only acts pure of desire, hate and delusion do not produce karmic effects. Once set in motion, karma tends to continue in many directions, like ripples on a pond.

What Is Karma? The Sanskrit word karma means "volitional act" or "deed." The law of karma is a law of cause and effect, or an understanding that every deed produces fruit.

Karma is not mysterious or hidden. Once you understand what it is, you can observe it all around you. For example, let's say a man gets into an argument at work. He drives home in an angry mood, cutting off someone at an intersection. The driver cut off is now angry, and when she gets home she yells at her daughter. This is karma in action -- one angry act has touched off many more.

However, if the man who argued had the mental discipline to let go of his anger, the karma would have stopped with him.

What Is Rebirth? Very basically, when the effects of karma continue across lifetimes it causes rebirth. But in light of the doctrine of no-self, what exactly is reborn?

The classical Hindu understanding of reincarnation is that a soul, or atman, is reborn many times. But the Buddha taught the doctrine of anatman -- no soul, or no-self. The various schools of Buddhism approach this question in somewhat different ways.

One way to explain rebirth is to think of all existence as one big ocean. An individual is a phenomenon of existence in the same way a wave is a phenomenon of ocean. A wave begins, moves across the surface of the water, then dissipates. While it exists, a wave is distinct from ocean yet is never separate from ocean. In the same way, that which is reborn is not the same person, yet is not separate from the same person.

Popular Misconceptions of Karma

Karma means “deed” or “action” in Sanskrit. However, action is not substituted for karma, as karma carries much more weight than the simple understanding found in action. Karmais one of the most popular and perhaps least understood concepts in Buddhism. Karmicactions can be behaviors as well as thoughts and emotions.

There are multiple ways to consider karma. One way is “local” karma; actions in the present (including mental actions) have an impact on future experiences. Another is “remote” karma; actions performed in this lifetime have an impact on future rebirths. Remote karma, of course, depends on the idea of rebirth, which may be an alien idea to many people in the Western world. From a scientific perspective, there is no evidence for rebirth. However, your own direct experience can reveal the working of local karma. What you think now will affect how you feel later. What you do now will bear fruit at some future point in time. This is different from a universal balance, that is, “you reap what you sow,” which is a common misconception of karma.

Consider local karma like this: You can't kill someone in the morning and then have a peaceful meditation in the afternoon. Here are some of the most common misconceptions about karma.

Misconception: Karma Is Retaliation from an Outside

Force How many times have you heard someone say, “She has bad karma,” referring to someone who has had a run of bad luck. In the West, karma has often been interpreted as equal to the principle of “an eye for an eye” — the retaliatory principle that you are punished with the same punishment you inflict on another. However, this is a misconception and misunderstanding of the Buddhist meaning of karma. According to the Buddha's teaching, you are not made to pay for past mistakes, nor are you rewarded for your past good deeds — but you are, in fact, what you do or intend to do. More to the point, karma is the process by which your actions shape your life.

Since the Buddha did not acknowledge the presence of a theistic power, karma would not be associated with an external, objective judge. In the words of Shantideva (an eighth-century Buddhist teacher), “Suffering is a consequence of one's own action, not a retribution inflicted by an external power…We are the authors of our own destiny; and being the authors, we are ultimately…free.”

Misconception: Karma Involves All Actions

Karma only involves intentional actions. Therefore, if you were to step accidentally on a spider, you would not invoke karma. You unintentionally stepped on the spider. There was no intent to hurt the spider.

However, if you decide beforehand that you are going to kill the damn spider that is living in the garage and stomp on him with malice aforethought, you will experience the karmicramification of an action that is laced with hatred and aversion (remember, one of Three Poisons). If you understand karma as one moment conditioning future moments, you can see the interdependent chain of cause and effect. When your mind is clouded by aggression, this will generate particular effects. When your mind is occupied by peace, this will generate its own particular effects. This effect will be on your own mind moments and on your behavior that, in turn, affects others.

“It is mental volition, O monks, that I callkarma. Having willed, one acts through body, speech or mind.” — The Buddha

It might be helpful to set aside notions of “good” and “bad” karma because this distinction just creates confusion and reinforces misconceptions. Instead, think of skillful and unskillful actions. When remembering that actions include behavior and also mental actions (thoughts, feelings, and images that you intentionally engage with and nurture), you will discover that certain actions lead to beneficial results, that is, you feel good and others around you feel good.

If you walk down the street smiling, you will feel good and others around you will feel good. This is acting skillfully (“good karma”). You will also discover that certain other actions lead to harmful results, that is, you feel bad and others around you feel bad. If you yell and criticize and kick the dog, you will be lost in feeling bad, later experience regret, and adversely impact those around you. This is acting unskillfully (“bad karma”). Acting from the Three Poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion is unskillful, while acting from their opposites — generosity, kindness, and wisdom — is skillful.

  

A Facebook Debate

Something a little off the beaten track, but no less interesting for that.

Hi there, Josh here, and I'm going to piss off some of you by talking about Buddhism.

Mainly, by insisting to you that it is a religion.

"But Josh! I'm a Buddhist atheist, so surely, you are wrong!"

Ok. Well let's look at that; "Buddhist atheists" view the Buddhist teachings as philosophy, right? And since they only see it as philosophy, they're not following a religion.

I'm down with that... but I'd argue, then you're not really a Buddhist - merely a fan of the literature.

Before you balk at that, how many of you remember the uproar it caused when someone popped up claiming to be a "Christian atheist" a month or so back?

Man, people were pissed! It was kind of funny. Countless readers commented about how that was impossible!

Not that you can't be an atheist who reads the bible - I do that myself copiously - but that a "Christian" does not make.

You can even be an atheist who reads the new testament, and thinks Jesus is an OK guy to model your life after. I'd encourage you to read the thing again, as he actually came off as a prick to me, but that doesn't make you a Christian. Just a fan of a character in the book.

No more serious, necessarily, than dressing up like Superman and trying to help people. Little weird, but that's fine, I like weird.

A Christian is someone who believes in the concepts of Christianity - which involves a LOT of supernatural bullshit.

And a Buddhist follows Buddhism, which contains within it some fantastic bullshit of its own.

Karma, for instance, isn't exclusive to Buddhism, but it is an element of it. The idea that your actions - both positive and negative - create "seeds" that will grow into "appropriate" counter-action...

Bullshit.

And reincarnation! That you'll come back as something as something else, determined largely by your karma. This is a Buddhist belief.

Now... I said early on that you can be an atheist who appreciates Buddhist literature on a philisophical level. That's fine. You can even call yourself, then, a "Buddhist atheist" if you'd like.

Whatever makes you happy.

But strictly speaking, Buddhism is a religion. And it contains supernatural bullshit, like all the others.

If you call yourself a "Buddhist atheist" because you like some of their writings, then next time you may have a hard time arguing against a "Christian atheist."

Which you totally should argue against, especially since the last several I've seen never bothered to even read the bible. - Josh

• Dan Hettmannsperger III The person who wrote this clearly does NOT understand Buddhism and therefore knows not whereof they speak. The Buddha denied very clearly the existence of the Soul [Atman] and therefore denied both reincarnation and an afterlife of any kind. Second, the Buddhist understand of Karma is completely different from the Hindu understanding which is entirely based on the supernatural, while the Buddha's understanding is merely sound psychology.

  Tuesday at 07:01 · Like · 1
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  Innerparty Member O'Brien sorry to butt in. however the house of samsara is very much a buddhist belief. within the house reincarnation is eternal until enlightenment is reached through the human level of the house. This was taught to me many years by a buddhist monk in the uk. ive also read it in several buddhist books.

  Tuesday at 07:05 via mobile · Like
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  Innerparty Member O'Brien karma very much determines which level of the house you are born into, in later reincarnations.

  Tuesday at 07:08 via mobile · Like
• 

  Innerparty Member O'Brienhttp://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra_(Buddhism)

  

  Saṃsāra (Buddhism) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  en.wikipedia.org

  Saṃsāra (Sanskrit, Pali; also samsara) is a Buddhist term that literally means "continuous movement" and is commonly translated as "cyclic existence", "cycle of existence", etc. Within Buddhism, samsara is defined as the continual repetitive cycle of birth and death that arises from ordinary beings'...

  Tuesday at 07:11 via mobile · Like
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  Dan Hettmannsperger III Those in the know understand that the meaning of samsara is more clearly understand (like much in Buddhism) as allegory as relates to the mind and it's various states.

  Tuesday at 14:32 · Like
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  Innerparty Member O'Brien ah but dan , sorry to say this, but you now sound like a Christian saying the bible is allegory...

  Tuesday at 20:15 via mobile · Like
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  Dan Hettmannsperger III Christians who say the Bible is allegory are correct, since there is no other reasonable way to understand it. Certainly this is how the Jews and Hindus have understood their scriptures for more than a thousand years. Christians are for the most part dogmatists and literalist and this is the main source of their idiocy.

  Yesterday at 01:28 · Like
• 

  Innerparty Member O'Brien ok. so are you an allegorical buddhist ? Honestly, Buddhists believe this stuff. I have spoken with many of them. When i was 22 i was seriously considering buddhism, after talking with a spiritusl leader. I have several books he gave me. They believe the world is an illusion of our mind. A trap for it, in samsara forever. They actually believe we are reincarnated throughout eternity. I guess its ok to take the good bits from any religion. But buddhism is a religion. Its defined as one. They believe these things. This is the reason i rejected it back then, because no matter how intetesting it was, I did not believe my life is an illusion.

  Yesterday at 01:37 via mobile · Like
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  Dan Hettmannsperger III I've actually read the sutras and the works of all the more significant Buddhist scholars. The Buddha himself denied the existence of a soul, so there is no reincarnation and no afterlife. He was very clear on that point. Samsara and Nirvana are merely states of mind, and yes there are many myths attached to the person of Siddartha Gautama. it is unfortunate that some Buddhists take these fables as historical...but fortunately their numbers are small. Most Buddhists understand that the Buddha was merely a man with a gifted insight into the human condition.

  Yesterday at 02:19 · Like
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  Dan Hettmannsperger III BTW~ The idea that "The world is an illusion" is correct if you understand what is meant by this. It is not to say that the world is a mirage. What this means is that our view of the world and this life as essentially static and unchanging is the illusion. Our belief in our own independent and separate "self" is the illusion. This is not to say that Dan Hettmannsperger III 'doesn't exist' as if I were a phantom. This is to say that I am intimately connected through time & space to my parents....my children....like a link in a chain....and that because I eat and breath I am intimately connected to the planet....both the earth and the air....as well as the oceans (I need water) and the sun (I need light) and so forth. Make sense Innerparty Member O'Brien? 

  Yesterday at 02:24 · Edited · Like · 1
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  Innerparty Member O'Brien it does indeed. self grasping. However, samsara is not a state of mind. It is a clearly defined doctrine with rebirth the main theme. Read the description in the link above. It describes six levels of existence , from gods through to animals and hell. Actions in one life , karma, determines where you go in your next life. I refuse to believe this is allegory. Ancient man knew what he was making up, the same as the Christians or the jews. The allegorical belief is a cop out by modern man because the myth sounds ridiculous today.

  Yesterday at 03:43 

  
  

  * Dan Hettsmannsperger is my sensai.