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What Not
lobster
Crusty Veteran
in Philosophy
Previously on What a Yam ...
https://newbuddhist.com/discussion/23799/who-am-i/p1
What knot are you now?
- Emptying?
- Full of it, not it or thought streams?
- Emotional, mental, a point of being?
IMHO not that I am humble or worth having an opinion on I AM A YAM (also available as a mantra)
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Comments
Yams are yum, and sweet potatoes too...
But I thought it was interesting. Advaita has a tradition of self-enquiry, or vichar, which Papaji also talks about. Unlike his guru Ramana he says “do it once, properly, and be done with it.” I haven’t found it to be so simple, finding who you are by enquiring within only helps if you get an answer, and who is supplying that answer?
Papaji sometimes tells a story about who you are, as a movie screen. All that you experience displays itself on that screen, actors and emotions and events, but when it finishes, you the screen are left clean and untouched. I found it a good analogy for what happens to us during our lives. It is in a way an emptying, finding a certain distance from what happens, looking at yourself as the screen means you are no longer identified with the action.
And in a way, this is what anatta or no-self is also all about. I’m not convinced there is so much difference between the Advaita approach of one-ness and everyone being a drop of water travelling towards the ocean, and the Buddhist approach of there being no-self at all. They both convince you to take a step back from identifying with the body and the mind.
I find we are touched by our karma, experiences - wether real or virtual. We also are an expression of our present reality.
There are subtle but important differences between a yam and no-yam, a picture of a yam, Buddha as a Yam, a carved god yam and so on ... to the far shore preferably ...
We are shaped by what we have gone through previously, that accumulation of past moments has brought us here where we are today. To say that we are an “expression of our present reality” makes little sense in this context, the present is the accumulation of all the past. That scar didn’t get onto my leg by itself.
Sometimes during ones life it is good to let the mind lie fallow... to not fill it up with lots of expressions but to - entirely on purpose - do very little with it for an extended period, to just let the dust settle. It takes a while. Six months, a year. Such a period is an emptying, but it is also a time when a new understanding forms, and elements of the old understanding drop away.
We are NOT our karma, experiences, scars, eye sense, sense of I etc.
That is all yam jam.
To make sense of the present moment we have to ... [who guessed] be in the present moment despite not being a completely empty guest ... unless we are ...
There is no ignorance,
and no end to ignorance.
There is no old age and death,
and no end to old age and death.
There is no suffering, no cause of suffering,
no end to suffering, no path to follow.
There is no attainment of wisdom,
and no wisdom to attain.
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/heartsutra.html
Aye Caramba! Who would have thought it ...