… the bargain we made with fate comes apart. Fate cannot be bargained with.
…we see images of perfection
Nor is it just physical form which we are told should match a standard of perfection. We are constantly encouraged to live our lives in certain ways and, in particular, to acquire certain things which we are somehow convinced will bring us happiness.
For Siddhartha, everything was already at hand. He was provided with everything he could possibly desire. His father wanted him to become successful in the world and brought him up to be accustomed to luxury and power. None of this, however, yielded him the happiness that we all seek. He had everything from the beginning, yet he still suffered. Riches and self-indulgence do not bring happiness. Perhaps Sidhartha learned this lesson earlier than most people because of his circumstances.
By seeing their true nature, however, he could remain undefeated by them.
The Buddha…what he is overthrowing is the idea that the spiritual quest consists of a flight from suffering.
The Buddha says they is no shame in being imperfect.
Again and again he teaches us that one does not practise in order to reach enlightenment: practise is enlightenment and enlightenment is practice.
People are happy when they live noble lives.
Fundamentally, we want to live lives that we can feel good about. We accumulate wealth, status, power and pleasures as a means to this end, as we believe, but when life pushes us to an extremity, our bluff is called.
Don’t expect your path to be free from obstacles – without them the fire of your enlightenment will go out: find liberation within the disturbances themselves.
Life is everything life is. It includes birth and death, health and disease, success and failure, meeting and parting.
Birth implies death. Health implies disease. Youth implies aging.
Night is as dignified as day.
The Buddha points out, however, that the real trouble is that we perpetuate the disturbance ourselves by the way we either deny or overemphasize our natural response to it.
We hide our feelings and fear to gives ourselves away by asking for help.
The reason that other people all seem to be all right is that they are pretending too.
The Buddha taught his disciples to beg so they learned not to be ashamed of need.
The noble person has the capacity to live vibrantly in a world which is intrinsically both wonderful and terrible. This is not achieved by repressing feelings, nor by being ruled by them, but by accepting them, valuing them and wisely containing them. Such is the making of character.
The idea that an enlightened person is one without needs and feelings one of the most dangerous of all pitfalls that lie scattered along the spiritual path.
He belief, overt or implicit, that enlightenment will be reached when we only get emotions of one particular kind or when ‘bad’ feelings have been eliminated is a kind of madness and quite untrue.
If we believe that we should not have to meet affliction, then we consider its arrival to be, in some way, unfair. We therefore seek compensation by looking for treats.
It is when we are in flight from affliction that we do ourselves the most serious psychological and, sometimes, physical injury.
The idea that spirituality will be a kind of insurance policy which will ensure that we never have to experience grief again is spiritual greed.
Much of what passes for religion and spirituality is actually a kind of spiritual materialism in which the search for treats is just as keen as that of a child in a sweet shop.
Buddhism does not offer an escape in to metaphysical paradise. It offers the opportunity to become master of the fire.
Nirvana is not a metaphysical entity. I suggest that it is a practical term describing the art of mastering the fire within us. This is a metaphor which would be transparent to ordinary people. It does not require belief in ultimates and absolutes. It points not toward metaphysics, but toward practice.
He did not ask that people never experience suffering or raving again. He asked that we open our eyes to the reality of these phenomena in the life of this world, rise above them, harness their energy and live spirited lives. On this path we will meet many obstacles and personal problems within enlightenment and we will meet them with spirit and character.
Out of our fears and cravings we build an identity for ourselves.
Getting caught I point scoring is simply a waste of energy.
Every time that greed of hate gets the better of us, we have suffered another injury to our spirit.
No comments:
Post a Comment