Best Of
Re: Just for fun: the random, useless announcements thread!
@adamcrossley said: Thanks for letting us know. If we throw a party, we promise to clean up afterwards
Yeah, and be smart - no tell-tale pile of empties behind the garden shed!
Are you going to Italy? Whereabouts are your family from?
Yes.
Piemonte, Lago Maggiore, just under the pre-Alp mountains. It's blissful there. I know, 100% for a definite fact, I will NOT feel like coming home. At. All.
federica
Re: Spontaneity
I have had a similar problem, but in an area that is superficially different from Buddhism as such. This is in art, in painting specifically, but I think my experience in that area relates to Buddhist practice as well.
I had a creative blockage and was unable to paint in any way that would produce a decent result. Very frustrating, I assure you. Where had I gone wrong? After squirming for a long while in the discomfort of unmitigated dukkha, I embarked on a period of meditation-assisted analysis - Buddhism, at least in part, consists of just such an intensive analysis of the problems one is experiencing, and meditation represents a stepping back from the problems enough that an objective-even if subconscious - analysis can take place.
So I analyzed, painted, and meditated in steady rotation. Made catalogs of brush strokes and the results of those brush strokes, different ways of beginning and finishing, and endless exploration of techniques until it at last became clear that I knew far too many of these techniques, and that the spontaneity of creative impulse had been entirely obscured.
And yet this very thoughtless spontaneity had been substantially responsible for the dukkha-blockage in the first place - I could not, when I began, trust my impulses. After all this meditation, all this analysis, I began to feel that, perhaps, I could trust those impulses again, and to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones - the skillful from the unskillful, without having to think about them very much.
The path of Buddhism seems like this to me. If one works hard, at some point, the monkey will let go of the banana and the hand can be pulled out of the trap spontaneously.
Fosdick
Re: Letting go of motivation
I feel @federica and @person have it right. 
It is important to know if we are highly strung or strung up or have let go so much we are unravelled to the point of losing the thread ...
I feel @Kerome is offering insight both personal and applicable to many of us ... 
We are the strings, the forum is the lute and the interaction is The Dharma Music 
lobster
Re: Thoughts on the Lotus Sutra
I would have been interested in your deep dive @lionduck ...
The impression i am getting from a lot of Mahāyāna sutras is that they were written later, and are more stories and not so closely related to the Buddha as a real person.
Kerome
Re: Free The Dharma
Free The Dharma
The Dharma has never been imprisoned.... however it has been obscured by the veil of ignorance, built up over years of conditioning ..It's the mind that needs freeing ...
What is the real cost? Not attending training?
More self imposed hard labour in Samsara
From what I gather... to tame/train the mind is free .....for the self disciplined....
Shoshin
Re: Just for fun: the random, useless announcements thread!
@federica said:
1: please post this in the site questions sub-forum newbuddhist (dot) com2: mark it for "at"Linc's attention, but bear in mind he is preoccupied with tragic events right now so don't expect an immediate answer.
Wait, are Linc and Brian the same person?
Re: What place does surrender have in Buddhism?
Sometimes I think of this teaching. Surrender to this reality?
Rest in natural great peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.Rest in natural great peace.
Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche
Jeffrey
Re: What place does surrender have in Buddhism?
Great quote from @Jeffrey
Identification is Misery
Junaid was going through the market-place of the town with his disciples. And it was his way to take any situation and use it. A man was dragging his cow by a rope, and Junaid said ’Wait’ to the man, and told his disciples ’Surround this man and the cow. I am going to teach you something.’
The man stopped – Junaid was a famous mystic – and he was also interested in what he was going to teach these disciples and how he was going to use him and the cow. And Junaid asked his disciples ’I ask you one thing: who is bound to whom? Is the cow bound to this man or is this man bound to this cow?’ Of course, the disciples said ’The cow is bound to the man. The man is the master, he is holding the rope, the cow has to follow him wherever he goes. He is the master and the cow is the slave.’
And Junaid said ’Now, see.’ He took out his scissors and cut the rope – and the cow escaped.
The man ran after the cow, and Junaid said ’Now look what is happening! Now you see who is the master; the cow is not interested at all in this man – in fact, she is escaping.’ And the man was very angry, he said ’What kind of experiment is this?’ But Junaid said to his disciples ’And this is the case with your mind.
All the nonsense that you are carrying inside is not interested in you. You are interested in it, you are keeping it together somehow – you are becoming mad in keeping it together somehow. But you are interested IN it. The moment you lose interest, the moment you understand the futility of it, it will start disappearing; like the cow it will escape.’
And if that is not Buddhism, well you are right ... 
https://sufi-stories.com/story/you-are-right
lobster