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Share the knowledge of wholesome deeds
In the past I learned from my christian friends that a good deed disclosed is a wasted deed in the eyes of God. That a good deed should be done and never spoken of. This is a fairly widely held belief in my area of the world.
I now understand the reasoning behind this belief. The doing of the good deed is not for the purpose of bragging. The fear is that incentivizing this disclosure leads to an expectation of praise as the sole purpose behind doing good deeds. It becomes a trade of sorts rather than a wholesome deed and loses some merit as result of desire for praise as payment.
However keeping good deeds to oneself reduces the number of good deeds witnessed by others. Good deeds witnessed by others inspire others to carry out good deeds. It amplifies good deeds and proliferates the idea of doing good deeds. More people do good deeds as a result. I've experienced this just recently with the sharing of picking up trash while hiking.
Knowledge and expression of good deeds should be shared as it amplifies the reach of the good deed. If the concern is bragging and desire for praise, simply check the intentions of the expression for this desire and remove it to the best of ability before expressing the good deed to others.
Happy deeding.
Re: Letting thoughts come and go
This will not be new information but is something I use to check myself occasionally when my own mentally starts dominating a sitting.
One of the analogies of letting thoughts come and go that I've liked, came from the abbess of a Zen Monastery that was in close proximity to the main freeway.
She likened thoughts (in formal meditation) to that freeway traffic.
That a meditator was like someone sitting under a busy bridge that was active with that traffic and was simply practicing the art of allowing it all to arrive and pass overhead without trying to attach, detach or ignore any of it.
Learning how to be that witness that can observe all the coming and going of that traffic without becoming a hitchhiker or a traffic cop in response to it.
Here, a differentiation between the observer and the observed can become established enough to stop empowering our habituated identity reactions to the traffic.
Here, it is possible to awaken to and fully reside within this present moment, completely aware of our arising, living and departing thoughts, and yet no longer be identity bound by that traffic.
It was not a bad teaching on a hilly section of highway, where heavy trucks could randomly and noisily apply their jake brakes in their long descent past us despite being in a monastically pastoral pine setting.
how
Re: The spiritual person after the search is over
@Jeroen said:
Meditation shouldn’t become a burden, if you force yourself in any way you lose the point. Don’t will the mind to become still, just let it do its thing and recognise these are merely thoughts. You don’t have to do anything, don’t get carried away, just observe and be refreshed.
Good reminder. Willing the mind still is the mind still willing. Just be still, no need to will.
Re: The spiritual person after the search is over
Buddhism approaches things differently from the new age audience to which Touber writes, that is true. It specialises in the long path, while Tijn’s public are after a much quicker fix, hence also the name of his book, a crash course in enlightenment.
I think here we also come across the difference of a religion, where in Buddhism you take refuge, and the attitude of a seeker, who may or may not ever stop seeking. And in the east you have more support for these attitudes. There is not such an immersive form of wisdom in the west as in the east, and I think whatever we can do to grow it here is a good thing.
In a way what we search for is a connection to ourselves, to the source of our being which has gotten obscured and tired over the course of our years of life. Lao Tzu says that a man of knowledge gains something every day, while a man of Tao loses something. In a way this process of returning to the source, of laying down burdens, of becoming ever more in tune with the way of existence is reinvigorating.
Meditation shouldn’t become a burden, if you force yourself in any way you lose the point. Don’t will the mind to become still, just let it do its thing and recognise these are merely thoughts. You don’t have to do anything, don’t get carried away, just observe and be refreshed.
Jeroen
Re: Zazen & Metacognition: Beginner's thoughts
From Dreamers and their Shadows:
"Don't move, Just die. Over and over.
Don't anticipate. Nothing can save you now,
because you have only this moment.
Not even enlightenment will help you now,
because there are no other moments.
With no future, be true to yourself and express yourself fully.
Don't move. Just die. Over and over."
taiyaki
Re: Buddhist quotes
"Peace is within oneself to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering. It is not found in a forest or on a hilltop, nor is it given by a teacher. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering. Trying to run away from suffering is actually to run toward it."
-- Ajahn Chah
Re: Thoughts on Plogging: Mindfulness of Dog Poo, Beer cans and broken wine bottles
I find that the routes that I clean upon, slowly end up being littered much less than they formally were.
It's almost as if, litter encourages more littering behavior, the way if one person pulls out their cell phone for a gander, those in close vicinity often follow suite, or how one yawner in a group elicits the yawns of their fellows. Now I even see others cleaning up on my routes in-between my ploggings.
One commercial market that supplied a lot of take-out food and used to be a perpetual dumping zone for cast-off food containers, after 10 or 15 of my plogging passes, now sends out some of its employees at the end of the day on litter patrol.
I think it encourages folks to see the connectedness of a shared space within life's terrarium, rather than as isolated entities of a me-first mentality.
how
Re: Buddhist quotes
"Enlightenment is Absolute Cooperation with the Inevitable !"
~Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello~
( in other words Go with the flow )
Shoshin1
Re: The spiritual person after the search is over
Thinking that the path towards suffering's cessation is only a transition from the material to the spiritual, misses the point that this path's destination is really about a transcending of all attachments, not just the ones we might consider to be unrefined.
The sides of this path are littered with the remains of teachers who somehow forgot that this fundamental truth still applied to them.
As long as a seeking, by either a teacher or a student, remains attachment bound, it will contribute to suffering's creation.
When that seeking allows some transcendence of what we cling to, reject or ignore, it illuminates the way toward suffering's cessation.
The quicker we can act as if we are not separate beings that can be divided off into self & other, teachers & students, enlightened and unenlightened, the quicker that our mental equivocations stop obscuring the path towards suffering's cessation that's just the next step to take...even when its often 3 steps forward, two back.
how
The spiritual person after the search is over
There is a book I was reading, its called A Crash Course in Enlightenment by Tijn Touber, who regularly writes articles for the monthly magazine Happinez. You’d be right to notice a few immediate spiritual red flags — crash course, enlightenment, journalist, hip magazine title — and to be honest it’s not a very good book. It does raise an interesting question though, what is the spiritual person like who has given up seeking?
He mentions a few people as examples of his ideal: Robert Muller (a high-ranking diplomat at the UN), Piero Ferrucci (a psychotherapist in the psychosynthesis movement), Aqeela Sherrills (an american specialising in bringing peace to neighbourhoods suffering with gang violence). All of whom seem successful, accomplished, people who bring consensus, health, and peace. This ends up being Tijn’s vision of what a person who has given up on seeking can contribute.
Tijn used to be a musician and was reasonably succesful, until one day he gave it all up and started searching for enlightenment. After fourteen years of searching (and interviews), he woke up one morning and thought, if I haven’t become enlightened by now I never will be, and he joined the ranks of those who hold ‘we are already enlightened’. He gave up meditation, seeking and abstinence. And instead of being disillusioned he started talking about his journey.
It seems to me he is not entirely wrong. The Zen Peacemakers founder Bernie Glassman was also an engaged buddhist who accomplished much, one can take one’s buddhism and do a lot of good. But I don’t think Tijn is entirely right either, in that he still seems very concerned with the world, not far on the path of letting go. I don’t think he has reached the point where his vibration will be helping lots of others just by his existing. Perhaps at his level his answer is right.
It is said that even a bad spiritual teacher is better than none at all.
Jeroen