Best Of
Re: Buddhist quotes
' If all things that came before your eyes were agreeable, and all sounds that met your ears were pleasant, your whole life would be poisoned and wasted'
this is among my favorite sayings, but, embarrassingly, I can not now remember its source. As a matter of fact, I do not even accurately recall precisely how it is worded - the 'poisoned and wasted' part is all I am completely certain about. If anyone can fill in the blanks, I'd be much obliged if they did so.
Fosdick
Re: Letting go of games
This morning, I found myself trying to explain my position on games to a group of older people online who knew next to nothing about games. To my surprise, almost the first thing I found myself talking about was how games fulfil dreams — that for almost every dream there was a game out there — and that they can be a great way to experience stories and myth.
I found myself drawing on my memories of the high points of my gaming life, to explain the reasons people play and the kind of things games teach… the universal game themes of strategy, sequence, tactics, reward and challenge, resource useage. The building blocks of a game experience. And how the real high points have nothing to do with actual gaming but with progressing the story.
One thing a gaming life leaves you with is the memory of having been part of some great stories, of having seen myths play out with your character centre stage. Yes, it’s entertainment, but is it really that different from a book, a theatre play or a movie? It seems to me that this is part of the shared mythological experience of our time, the campfire stories of a technological age.
All this is leaving aside the endless killing of enemies which most games encourage to fill up their game loops, which is deplorable in my opinion. But it is endemic from open-world games such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider to story-driven adventures such as Mass Effect, they all use this paradigm.
Jeroen
Re: No Buddhist Quotes
“There are no impediments to meditation. The very thought of such obstacles is the greatest impediment.”
— Ramana Maharshi
Jeroen
Re: No Buddhist Quotes
“Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with Gods and Goddesses is no reason to not know your zip code. Keeping it together means keeping conscious at all levels—all planes—with no attachment to any of them.”
— Ram Dass, Be Here Now
Jeroen
Re: No Buddhist Quotes
“Truth gets you high. There is no doubt about it. Lies bring you down. To lie to another person you have to see them as “him” or “her” or “them”, i.e., as an object. Such distance that the act of lying creates turns out in the long run to cost more than the lie gained for you in the first place. Once you understand the workings of karma you see that there is no escape from the effects, both short and long term, of your acts, i.e., acts done in the service of the ego.”
— Ram Dass, Be Here Now
Jeroen
Re: No Buddhist Quotes
“Rain water falling upon the roof of a house flows down to the ground through spouts shaped grotesquely like a tiger’s head. One gets the impression that the water comes from the tiger’s mouth, but in reality it descends from the sky. In the same way the holy teachings that come from the mouths of godly men seem to be uttered by those men themselves, while in reality they proceed from God.”
— Ramakrishna
Jeroen
Re: Buddhist quotes
“To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to go beyond ourselves. To go beyond ourselves is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to free our body and mind, and to free the bodies and minds of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no- trace continues endlessly.”
— Dogen Zenji
Jeroen
Re: Hello Old Friends
It is not so much that we eliminate desires. Rather, it is that we come to render negative desires irrelevant. We come to not be swayed or controlled by our desires.
Lionduck
Re: Metta Ray Burns
@paulysotoo Do you only have the affectation of fluent gibberish? 
I speak it at appropriate times. Not everyone understands it. That does not make it helpful. Who are you here to help. Apart from yourself?
lobster
Commitments and unresolved karma
Yesterday I came across @how saying “maybe it’s just another aspect of be here now” and I realised it was the title of Ram Dass’s book, which can these days be downloaded for free in pdf format. So I found it and started reading it in the deep of the night.
“Now, though I am a beginner on the path, I have returned to the West for a time to work out karma or unfulfilled commitment. Part of this commitment is to share what I have learned with those of you who are on a similar journey. One can share a message through telling ‘our-story’ as I have just done, or through teaching methods of yoga, or singing, or making love. Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.”
— Ram Dass, Be Here Now
I found the passage above near the end of the first part of the book, where Ram Dass talks about his experience going from being a Harvard professor to being a Baba in India. It speaks to why he wrote the book, that in a way each of us on this path have by nature of walking the spiritual roads taken on some karma to serve as a guide for generations who come after us.
Each generation copes with different circumstances, for example I think games are a problem for this generation, and so is the trend for remote contact with gurus through Zoom or Skype, and so are smartphones. There are different things you can write about. So I wonder if Ram Dass may be right to write about ‘commitment or unresolved karma’.
Jeroen