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it's "me" again
genkaku
Northampton, Mass. U.S.A. Veteran
In the start-up arena of Buddhist practice, there is identification and naming of those items that hinder the path. "Attachment," perhaps, or "ego" or "suffering" or "anger" or "impatience" or ... well, you can name them better than I. Secretly or not so secretly these "barriers" are the stuff someone might wish to vanquish or tame or just plain get rid of. And so the sword of practice is raised against our enemies. It's no easy task, identifying, investigating, watching like a hawk, being defeated and then rising again, enjoying the break-throughs only to fall flat on your ass. It's no job for sissies.
Blood, sweat and tears and the years pass.
But what crossed my mind today and I wondered what you might think: At some point -- some unnameable point -- there must be a loving and clear-headed return to all the enemies we may have worked so hard to defeat. The "self" that was transformed into "no self" (for lack of a better term), is returned because there is no other choice but "self." It may be a newly-minted "self," but is it really all that different from the same fool who identified and categorized and then set off to clarify this life?
The Zen teacher Rinzai once lit a fire under his monks when he addressed the assembly and said tartly, "Your whole problem is that you do not trust yourselves enough."
I dunno ... just wondering what your take might be.
Blood, sweat and tears and the years pass.
But what crossed my mind today and I wondered what you might think: At some point -- some unnameable point -- there must be a loving and clear-headed return to all the enemies we may have worked so hard to defeat. The "self" that was transformed into "no self" (for lack of a better term), is returned because there is no other choice but "self." It may be a newly-minted "self," but is it really all that different from the same fool who identified and categorized and then set off to clarify this life?
The Zen teacher Rinzai once lit a fire under his monks when he addressed the assembly and said tartly, "Your whole problem is that you do not trust yourselves enough."
I dunno ... just wondering what your take might be.
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Comments
by the late Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing:
"True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality: the emergence of the "inner" archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual reestablishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the Divine, no longer its betrayer."
http://www.mindfire.ca/Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion & Psychoses.htm
IMO there is nothing to strive for, nothing to perfect, nothing to defeat. Maybe I might have began this path with some idea of perfecting myself or defeating my shadows, this I have given up knowing as Dipa Ma states "Your mind is all stories"
I am starting, just starting, not to believe my mind anymore.
So I'm pretty sure that 'I' does exist, but not in the way that I perceive 'I' to exist.
The Theravada writer, Walpola Rahula says:
'It must be repeated here that according to Buddhist philosophy there is no permanent, unchanging spirit which can be considered 'Self', or 'Soul', or 'Ego', as opposed to matter, and that consciousness should not be taken as 'spirit' in opposition to matter. This point has to be particularly emphasized, because a wrong notion that consciouness is a sort of Self or Soul that continues as a permanent substance through life, has persisted from the earliest time to the present day."
It's all very confusing isn't it? I'm taught that if I keep listening and reading about these sort of teachings, contemplating and then meditating on them, that it all will become clearer.
Why does it have to be the same again, genkaku?
Or is that 'same, but different' (or relive your karma again!)
That's a poor answer, but it's not something easily put in words. The mind just wants to be happy, and that's what we spend our lives trying to do... satisfy that want. Since nothing is stable, we can never truly satisfy our cravings. When we see the instability and the selflessness of reality, the wanting itself goes away, and we never need to ask questions again to find peace. We simply are at peace all the time!
For those that can see that we are made up of the same elements, and at the break up of the body, release those same elements back to nature, then one can see that there is a point of reference when referring to the ending of something. And so the idea, thought, knowledge and understanding of "self" can be believed to have and ending. Just knowing this is sufficient enough to believe that "self-less" can be understood and achieved, and once it is achieved it should definitely not return, just as those elements do not return.