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Post by silver on Dec 24, 2017 12:21:46 GMT -5
This comes from another forum I frequent:
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Post by silver on Dec 24, 2017 15:34:21 GMT -5
A Christmas devotional, suitable for any day of the year~
Mettañ ca sabba-lokasmim Manasam bhavaye aparimanam Uddham adho ca tiriyanca Asambadham averam asapattam
Cultivate an all-embracing mind of love For all throughout the universe, In all its height, depth and breadth — Love that is untroubled And beyond hatred or enmity.
~Metta: The Philosophy and Practice of Universal Love
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Post by silver on Dec 29, 2017 3:03:04 GMT -5
Article from Sweeping Zen:
Producing Clouds and Rain by Koun Franz
Koun Franz April 24, 2012 Articles
In Shobogenzo Zazenshin, Dogen writes, “Love a true dragon instead of a carved one.” This comes from a popular story of a man in China who loved dragons. He collected figurines and paintings. He read what he could and fancied himself to be quite the expert on dragon lore. People knew him as the guy who is really, really into dragons. Well, an actual dragon heard about this man and thought it would be a pleasure to go and meet such a big fan, so she traveled to the man’s house and stuck his head in the window. When the man walked into the room and saw, there among his little figurines, the face of a real dragon, he fainted from fear (or wet his pants, or lost his mind, depending on who’s telling the story). I think most people–myself included–hear this story first as a warning not to shy away from the difficulties of practice. Don’t spend all your time thumbing through the latest catalog from Dharmacrafts–sit. Just sit. Or, perhaps, don’t choose the teacher who tells you how great you are–choose the one who frightens you a little, who challenges you in ways that surprise you, who seems to put obstacles in your way. On a larger level, we can understand it as a reminder that by avoiding those things that frighten us or make us uncomfortable, we limit ourselves and our potential. It’s a great story. I think about it often, and it always feels relevant.
But more interesting than this story, to me, is what Dogen says next: “However, know that both carved and true dragons have the ability to produce clouds and rain.” This is huge. This is shushō ichinyo (修証一如, the perfect singularity of practice and realization). This points to what, for me, is the most exciting thing in the Zen world–that form and substance are not separate. Dragons produce clouds and rain–that is part of their power. Producing clouds and rain is a dragon. And a dragon is a dragon is a dragon. The man in the story didn’t need to find a “true” dragon in his living room in order to meet a true dragon. Through his intimacy with the figurines–through his intimacy with his life–he could have faced them, and so when the curious dragon stuck her head in the window, the man could have met her with open arms. Or shooed her away, as a pest. Or ignored her.
Moment to moment, we act in the world and ascribe meaning to our actions. I help a stranger who dropped her coins on the floor–it means I’m a nice guy. I break my diet–it means I’m lazy. This is automatic and mostly unconscious, but when we enter a spiritual or religious context, we actually do it deliberately. We imagine that the ability to recognize and interpret meaning is what makes us informed or deep or aware. It also makes us feel safe. For many people, bowing as one does in a Buddhist temple feels too foreign, too strange to be comfortable. So, with all the best intentions, we offer those people explanations of what it all means: “The hands coming together is the dissolution of opposites.” “You’re holding a flower in your hand and offering it to all beings.” “You’re not bowing to the Buddha–you’re bowing to buddha nature.” I’ve heard a lot of these. But Zen practice, at its heart, is just bowing without reserve, and letting that action stand on its own. If we can completely bow, then that’s the true bow; but if we talk ourselves through it, imagining that this is merely a physical representation of some deeper philosophical concept, then that is an imitation of a bow. The encounter passes unnoticed.
If you practice zazen, you can ask yourself: “What do I think it means? What do I think it means about who I am, or who I’m becoming? What do I think is the point? What am I trying to achieve?” The extent to which we can then let go of those questions is the extent to which we can do zazen, which is to say, the extent to which zazen can be zazen. This is true in every second of our lives, in every action. It takes great faith and courage, I think, to let one’s life, in this moment, be as it is.
Each moment of each day is producing clouds and rain. Each moment is shaking the sky with its own power. With this action, right now, we can make the heavens and earth tremble and roar. But to do that, we need to see the dragon in all directions, all around us, inside us, in the soles of our feet and in our hands and with the same eyes that we use to look on the world. Let go of “real” and “unreal.” “Unreal” is about what we cannot yet see. Nothing unreal exists.
(All quotations are taken from “The Point of Zazen” in Kazuaki Tanahashi’s Treasury of the Dharma Eye)
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Post by silver on Jan 12, 2018 13:14:47 GMT -5
Here's a brief article by Jack Kornfield that I'd like to share with you: Believe in Your Goodness Robert Johnson, the noted Jungian analyst, acknowledges how difficult it is for many of us to believe in our goodness. We more easily take our worst fears and thoughts to be who we are, the unacknowledged traits called our “shadow” by Jung. “Curiously,” writes Johnson, “people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. . . . It is more disrupting to find that you have a profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bum.” Our belief in a limited and impoverished identity is such a strong habit that without it we are afraid we wouldn’t know how to be. If we fully acknowledged our dignity, it could lead to radical life changes. It could ask something huge of us. And yet some part of us knows that the frightened and damaged self is not who we are. Each of us needs to find our way to be whole and free. In these often cynical times, we might think of original goodness as merely an uplifting phrase, but through its lens we discover a radically different way of seeing and being: one whose aim is to transform our world. This does not mean that we ignore the enormousness of people’s sorrows or that we make ourselves foolishly vulnerable to unstable and perhaps violent individuals. Indeed, to find the dignity in others, their suffering has to be acknowledged. Among the most central of all Buddhist psychological principles are the Four Noble Truths, which begin by acknowledging the inevitable suffering in human life. This truth, too, is hard to talk about in modern culture, where people are taught to avoid discomfort at any cost, where “the pursuit of happiness” has become “the right to happiness.” And yet when we are suffering it is so refreshing and helpful to have the truth of suffering acknowledged. Buddhist teachings help us to face our individual suffering, from shame and depression to anxiety and grief. They address the collective suffering of the world and help us to work with the source of this sorrow: the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion in the human psyche. While tending to our suffering is critical, this does not eclipse our fundamental nobility. The word nobility does not refer to medieval knights and courts. It derives from the Greek gno (as in gnosis), meaning “wisdom” or “inner illumination.” In English, nobility is defined as human excellence, as that which is illustrious, admirable, lofty, and distinguished, in values, conduct, and bearing. How might we intuitively connect with this quality in those around us? Just as no one can tell us how to feel love, each of us can find our own way to sense the underlying goodness in others. One way is to shift the frame of time, imagining the person before us as a small child, still young and innocent. Or, instead of moving back in time, we can move forward. We can visualize the person at the end of his life, lying on his deathbed, vulnerable, open, with nothing to hide. Or we can simply see him as a fellow wayfarer, struggling with his burdens, wanting happiness and dignity. Beneath the fears and needs, the aggression and pain, whoever we encounter is a being who, like us, has the tremendous potential for understanding and compassion, whose goodness is there to be touched. jackkornfield.com/see-the-inner-nobility-in-all-beings/
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Post by zin on Jan 12, 2018 15:51:11 GMT -5
Here's a brief article by Jack Kornfield that I'd like to share with you: Believe in Your Goodness Robert Johnson, the noted Jungian analyst, acknowledges how difficult it is for many of us to believe in our goodness. We more easily take our worst fears and thoughts to be who we are, the unacknowledged traits called our “shadow” by Jung. “Curiously,” writes Johnson, “people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. . . . It is more disrupting to find that you have a profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bum.” Our belief in a limited and impoverished identity is such a strong habit that without it we are afraid we wouldn’t know how to be. If we fully acknowledged our dignity, it could lead to radical life changes. It could ask something huge of us. And yet some part of us knows that the frightened and damaged self is not who we are. Each of us needs to find our way to be whole and free. In these often cynical times, we might think of original goodness as merely an uplifting phrase, but through its lens we discover a radically different way of seeing and being: one whose aim is to transform our world. This does not mean that we ignore the enormousness of people’s sorrows or that we make ourselves foolishly vulnerable to unstable and perhaps violent individuals. Indeed, to find the dignity in others, their suffering has to be acknowledged. Among the most central of all Buddhist psychological principles are the Four Noble Truths, which begin by acknowledging the inevitable suffering in human life. This truth, too, is hard to talk about in modern culture, where people are taught to avoid discomfort at any cost, where “the pursuit of happiness” has become “the right to happiness.” And yet when we are suffering it is so refreshing and helpful to have the truth of suffering acknowledged. Buddhist teachings help us to face our individual suffering, from shame and depression to anxiety and grief. They address the collective suffering of the world and help us to work with the source of this sorrow: the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion in the human psyche. While tending to our suffering is critical, this does not eclipse our fundamental nobility. The word nobility does not refer to medieval knights and courts. It derives from the Greek gno (as in gnosis), meaning “wisdom” or “inner illumination.” In English, nobility is defined as human excellence, as that which is illustrious, admirable, lofty, and distinguished, in values, conduct, and bearing. How might we intuitively connect with this quality in those around us? Just as no one can tell us how to feel love, each of us can find our own way to sense the underlying goodness in others. One way is to shift the frame of time, imagining the person before us as a small child, still young and innocent. Or, instead of moving back in time, we can move forward. We can visualize the person at the end of his life, lying on his deathbed, vulnerable, open, with nothing to hide. Or we can simply see him as a fellow wayfarer, struggling with his burdens, wanting happiness and dignity. Beneath the fears and needs, the aggression and pain, whoever we encounter is a being who, like us, has the tremendous potential for understanding and compassion, whose goodness is there to be touched. jackkornfield.com/see-the-inner-nobility-in-all-beings/Thanks for this! Re: the bolded.. I am not much familiar with Buddhism, does it say that there are 'forces' of greed, hatred, etc? Or was this a figure of speech? I am interested in the forces subject in general..
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Post by silver on Jan 12, 2018 17:42:13 GMT -5
Here's a brief article by Jack Kornfield that I'd like to share with you: Believe in Your Goodness Robert Johnson, the noted Jungian analyst, acknowledges how difficult it is for many of us to believe in our goodness. We more easily take our worst fears and thoughts to be who we are, the unacknowledged traits called our “shadow” by Jung. “Curiously,” writes Johnson, “people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. . . . It is more disrupting to find that you have a profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bum.” Our belief in a limited and impoverished identity is such a strong habit that without it we are afraid we wouldn’t know how to be. If we fully acknowledged our dignity, it could lead to radical life changes. It could ask something huge of us. And yet some part of us knows that the frightened and damaged self is not who we are. Each of us needs to find our way to be whole and free. In these often cynical times, we might think of original goodness as merely an uplifting phrase, but through its lens we discover a radically different way of seeing and being: one whose aim is to transform our world. This does not mean that we ignore the enormousness of people’s sorrows or that we make ourselves foolishly vulnerable to unstable and perhaps violent individuals. Indeed, to find the dignity in others, their suffering has to be acknowledged. Among the most central of all Buddhist psychological principles are the Four Noble Truths, which begin by acknowledging the inevitable suffering in human life. This truth, too, is hard to talk about in modern culture, where people are taught to avoid discomfort at any cost, where “the pursuit of happiness” has become “the right to happiness.” And yet when we are suffering it is so refreshing and helpful to have the truth of suffering acknowledged. Buddhist teachings help us to face our individual suffering, from shame and depression to anxiety and grief. They address the collective suffering of the world and help us to work with the source of this sorrow: the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion in the human psyche. While tending to our suffering is critical, this does not eclipse our fundamental nobility. The word nobility does not refer to medieval knights and courts. It derives from the Greek gno (as in gnosis), meaning “wisdom” or “inner illumination.” In English, nobility is defined as human excellence, as that which is illustrious, admirable, lofty, and distinguished, in values, conduct, and bearing. How might we intuitively connect with this quality in those around us? Just as no one can tell us how to feel love, each of us can find our own way to sense the underlying goodness in others. One way is to shift the frame of time, imagining the person before us as a small child, still young and innocent. Or, instead of moving back in time, we can move forward. We can visualize the person at the end of his life, lying on his deathbed, vulnerable, open, with nothing to hide. Or we can simply see him as a fellow wayfarer, struggling with his burdens, wanting happiness and dignity. Beneath the fears and needs, the aggression and pain, whoever we encounter is a being who, like us, has the tremendous potential for understanding and compassion, whose goodness is there to be touched. jackkornfield.com/see-the-inner-nobility-in-all-beings/Thanks for this! Re: the bolded.. I am not much familiar with Buddhism, does it say that there are 'forces' of greed, hatred, etc? Or was this a figure of speech? I am interested in the forces subject in general.. In this case, I'm pretty sure it's figure of speech. Buddhism just seems weird and supernatural to most of us westerners. Sometimes it sure seems like there are supernatural forces of both good and 'evil' - It's that 2-sided coin thingy.
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Post by silver on Jan 17, 2018 23:43:18 GMT -5
UUUUUUUUUUUUUuuuuuuuuuuuu
What is Papañca?
by Andrew Olendzki| September 1, 2006
Papañca as defined by Andrew Olendzki, the editor of Insight Journal.
papahcabkirata paja nippapanca tatbagata
“People delight in proliferation, the Tathagata in nonproliferation.” —Dbammapada 254
Papañca is one of those delightful Pali words that rolls off the tongue (or bursts through the lips, in this case) and hits the nail on the head. It points to something so immediate, so pervasive, and so insidious that it deserves to join the English language and enter into common usage. The exact derivation of papañca is not entirely clear, but its sense hovers somewhere between the three nodes of 1) to spread out or proliferate; 2) an illusion or an obsession; and 3) an obstacle or impediment. The place where these three meanings converge in experience is not hard to locate. Sit down with your back straight and your legs folded around your ankles, close your eyes, and attend carefully to your experience. What do you see? Papañca.
This term is used to describe the tendency of the mind to 1) spread out from and elaborate upon any sense object that arises in experience, smothering it with wave after wave of mental elaboration, 2) most of which is illusory, repetitive, and even obsessive, 3) which effectively blocks any sort of mental calm or clarity of mind.
These are the narrative loops that play over and over in the mind, the trains of thought pulling out of the station one after another and taking us for a long ride down the track before we even know we’re aboard. Bhikkhu Bodhi, eloquent as always, calls papañca “the propensity of the worldling’s imagination to erupt in an effusion of mental commentary that obscures the bare data of cognition” (from note 229 in Majjkima Nikaya (MN)).
Does this sound familiar yet?
Vipassana meditation has to do with looking deeply into the mind and body to discern the various processes unfolding in each moment that fabricate the virtual world of our experience. The riot of conceptual proliferation is often the first thing one sees, because it is the shallowest and busiest part of the mind. For most of us, the monkey mind chatters incessantly as it swings from one branch to another, seizing first this thought, then that idea, then a host of miscellaneous associations, memories, and fantasies. The basic themes around which all this activity swirls, according to the insights of the Buddha, are craving, conceit, and views. We could watch this show all day and learn very little.
However, as the mind gradually steadies, upon the breath or some other primary object of attention, it gains some strength and becomes calmer. Then it is better able to see the stream of consciousness for what it is, a sequence of mind states unfolding one after another in rapid succession. As the foundations upon which mindfulness are established become more stable, one can look upon the flow of experience rushing by instead of being swept away by it. At this point we can begin to explore the inner landscape and, guided by the teachings of the Buddha, discover how things come to be as they are in our little world.
Mind, it turns out, is layered, nuanced, and deep. Working backwards from the surface toward its depths, we first notice that papañca, the perambulations of mental proliferation, are based upon thoughts. As the Honeyball Discourse (MN 18) puts it, “What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates.” Mental proliferation is simply thinking run amok. While it is not necessarily a problem to think (though of course “right thought” is preferable to “wrong thought”), once we get to the level of mental proliferation we are seriously off course and nothing good can come of it.
Looking more closely, we can further discern that thinking is itself based upon perception. “What one perceives, that one thinks about,” says the Honey-ball. Perception is the mental function that makes sense of what we are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, or thinking. It provides cognitive information about the objects of experience in the form of images, words, or symbols, which are learned in culturally specific ways. We see our world through, as, and by means of perceptions, and more often than not project them onto the world.
Way down under all these layers of mind is a simple moment of contact, the simultaneous coming together of a sense organ, a sense object, and a moment of consciousness that cognizes one by means of the other. This basic awareness is merely an episode of knowing, carrying no content or qualities of its own. All the color and texture of experience, so to speak, are provided by the other concomitant mental factors, such as feeling, perception, and the endless permutations of volitional formations. Awareness itself, if we can reach it under all the whirl and spin, is tranquil, luminous, and unadorned.
As the mind moves through the stages of assembling experience, from awareness to perception to conception to proliferation, it moves farther and farther into the realm of macro-construction. At each step we see less of things as they are and more of things as we construe them to be. Meditation practice works to reverse this process. In the phrases used in the early texts, one abandons obsessive perceptions and thoughts, cuts through mental proliferation, and rests at ease in nonproliferation. And it might not surprise us to hear that those who overcome papañca cross beyond grief and sorrow. However busy it looks from this side, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
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Post by silver on Jan 22, 2018 23:06:41 GMT -5
Found this on a thread / other forum - 'Meditation / Vibration' -
"I was kind of like a high vibration junkie for a while, but ended up not finding wisdom in it.
In other words, if someone is angry and criticizes you, it doesn't matter how high your vibration is. You're still going to believe a self is criticising a self. You're still going to be delusional and act accordingly.
But if you harness the power of high vibes to realize Emptiness, then it's not just a temporary escape from suffering.
As far as I can tell, many spiritual people cultivate a high vibration and use it only to feed their delusions because their motivation comes from selfishness to gain more things or more status, chasing after the eight worldly dharmas and creating a more insane ego.
The Secret, for example, is not Dharma, but a way to strengthen delusions."
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Post by silver on Jan 27, 2018 12:57:20 GMT -5
Article sent to me this morning via email ---
Learning Buddhism: Getting Beyond Paradox And Confusion
By Rick Bateman | Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 12:10 am |
As Zen Buddhist priest and best selling author Steven Hagen writes in Buddhism Is Not What You Think, at the entrance to many Buddhist temples in Japan are the guardians of the truth, Paradox and Confusion. They are so placed because it is well understood that along the path you will encounter these two.
The learning of Buddhism does not proceed down a purely rational path. Parts of it are highly rational to be sure, but it is not entirely so. This is most obviously seen given the emphasis placed on the fact that enlightenment can only be grasped through experience, through “no-mind”. Reason is required for a part of the journey however it must be abandoned at some point to complete the journey.
Also it does not proceed in a linear manner but rather an iterative manner. Let’s call it “Learning To See The Elephant.” We are all familiar with the blindfolded men and the elephant story. Each feels a different part and so describes an elephant differently. From their individual perspectives, until they have had a chance to thoroughly examine the entire elephant, they cannot possibly know what an elephant actually looks like. Meanwhile, as they proceed from one part to another, their idea of “elephant” is constantly being revised.
Learning Buddhism is like this. Instead of an elephant, we must learn the nature of Eight Fold Path. At each step along the path, there will be times when it does not seem to make sense, just as an animal being a large flat sheet (elephant’s ear) does not make sense. Also there will be times when the blindfolded man at one end of the elephant will not agree with description of the elephant coming from the blindfolded man at the other end.
We can examine the entire elephant but we will still not fully understand until our blindfolds are removed and we “see”. Only with this “insight”, this knowing that is beyond thinking or words, do we truly come to understand just what an elephant is.
Thus we study the Eight Fold Path. Right View points the way, then we journey along the remaining seven steps and with each step our blindfold loosens until it falls away and – we see! And when we see we arrive back at Right View. Only this time instead of it being a direction it is a deep understanding. We no longer seek Right View but have Right View. Now we set out on the path again but this time with a different agenda. We are no longer seekers but lovers, happy to explore the territory again and again.
Let’s consider another reason Buddhism cannot be learned simply as a mental exercise.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, the answer to all of the following physics questions was “No”.
Can an object exist as a particle and a wave at the same time?
Can an object move from one place to another without any time involved?
Can a object’s twin exhibit identical changes at the same time regardless of the distance between them?
Can an object change its behavior or properties depending on whether it is being observed or not?
This “no” response was based on the “rigid frame” model of the physical universe, the clockwork reality of Newton and Copernicus.
Yet by the end of the twentieth century the answer to all of these questions is “Yes.” The difference is that the model of the universe as a “rigid frame” was demolished by Quantum Theory, a model of the universe as a field of potentials where the properties and behaviors of objects depend on conditions.
Richard Feynman, one of the leading researchers of Quantum Theory stated, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” The physicists knew they were involved in a process of discovery. They knew that they had to let go of the rigid frame mindset forever or they would never be able to understand what they were seeing.
Similarly, if you try to learn Buddhism with a purely Western philosophical mindset, you are using the same rigid frame approach as the physicists. You will never actually get to practicing Buddhism but instead you will forever be stuck niggling over details like two blindfolded men. A determination to fit Buddhism into a rigid frame is really a function of the ego as it finds yet another way to remain in control.
Buddhism is both an art and a science. It is therefore best learned from a perspective of a middle way, through a process of practice, discovery and experience in addition to study and reflection, without attachment to either. One must return to Shunryu Suzuki’s “Beginners Mind,” proceeding then like an archeologist, unearthing a vast city long forgotten in the jungle as it slowly reveals its marvels and majesty.
No matter how scholarly your approach to Buddhism may be, there is ultimately no final authority outside your own heart for the simple reason that the Buddha’s original words were never written down. It was 500 years after his death before his teachings were written down. To put that in perspective, consider how long ago the year 1510 was.
The teachings were originally written in Pali, Sanskrit and Prakrit. Yet according to Thich Nhat Hanh in The Heart Of Buddha’s Teaching, the Buddha spoke none of these languages but instead a local dialect called Magadhi or Ardhamagadhi.
These writings were in turn translated to English and it was not always possible to find equivalent English words. The English version of the Four Noble Truths states, “The cause of suffering is desire” yet in many other sutras The Buddha states that we should desire to be good students of the dharma and good parents, employers or governors.
In his day it is likely he would have used different words to clarify the different meanings. So when we read, “The cause of suffering is desire” we must remind ourselves that Buddha’s original choice of words would have reflected the subtle meanings of his own language, culture and time.
Thus we cannot simply accept the written teachings literally but must use the Buddhist practices of loving-kindness, compassion, mindfulness and meditation to come to understand.
For all these reasons and more, there is no final authority on the Buddha’s teachings but what we have does provide us with a sufficient map. However only our own hearts journey through the real territory will enable us to finally arrive, to ride that elephant through the gates guarded by paradox and confusion, into the marvelous and majestic city of Nirvana.
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