Buddhist view of reality...?

TheFound

Guys, I've been wondering tonight...

HOW much should things, 'blow your mind'?! in terms of like Buddhist practice and overall human development,
because recently I've been pondering a lot of things, and trying to feel things in different ways according to Buddhist concepts of like; emptiness, interconnectedness, impermanence, you know like the rapid succession of mental formations, samsara ,stuff like this.....

and it really blows my mind......it's kind of scary sometimes...we are on...a giant rock, flying through space.....and there are these SUPER just...awesome forces, like impermanence..........is more powerful than god, or all the storms in the universe you know.

....and like all things share some dark and indistinct reality, when you strip away concepts and discriminations off of them...

I tend to freak out a bit, because I'm so used to normal things, I think maybe I'm having a conflict with the established 'self' of 'me'....does that happen eventually to boddhistavas or buddhas? they end up detaching from themselves? or something...cause I FEEL you know, if i follow buddhism, and the precepts and 8 fold path all that stuff, I wouldn't be ME anymore...i'd be something else..

TheFound

you know cause, what makes up ME..... almost in total, are a bunch of direct violations of buddhist ideals and teachings ...lol

fivebells

The thing is, Buddhist practice, and Buddhist teachings as they relate to the practice, are concerned with personal experience. They have nothing to do with assertions about an external world which is independent of and shapes personal experience. The Buddhist teaching of nonself, for instance, says nothing about an intrinsic quality of personal existence. It simply describes how the personal experience of a self-concept arises. When you clearly apprehend the experiential basis of a self-concept, you see that it's not solid, and not a reliable basis for understanding your experience. Does that mean you're not "you" anymore? Perhaps, but only to the extent that you identified with the self-concept. Does it mean that there is no "you?" You get into some pretty murky water when you try to pin down exactly what that might mean. It's a poorly formed question.

For the most part, the rest of life goes on the way it did before. The practical result is that sometimes you see a little more space, a little more flexibility, in the ways that you can relate to what you experience. You're less concerned with preserving a self-concept, and more concerned with responding to your circumstances as they are. If your life were composed primarily of "violations of Buddhist ideals and teachings," that wouldn't be forcibly changed by Buddhist practice. (But it sounds damned painful, to me.)

stuka

Heya, TF,

It doesn't really mean that "you're not 'you'", it's just that there are a lot of flaws in our self-concepts, which are due to our inability to really see ourselves as we are. Same goes with our concepts about others and the world at large, as well. We tend to only pay attention to part of all that is there, and cling to those half-baked concepts as we make snap judgments and flawed assumptions about ourselves and others.

It is usually quite an unsettling experience for a person to see and hear themselves on camera or on tape. This is because we tend to see ourselves quite differently from how others might see us, or how we would see ourselves if we were looking from a different perspective from the "me-centered world" that our senses present to us. It represents the same sort of indictment of self-concept (and "other-concept") that is at the heart of the Buddha's teachings. The idea behind all this is to learn to not judge things (including and especially ourselves and others) on just face value, and to try to see things from other perspectives. It encourages a measure of care in our affairs, of carefulness. And it develops compassion for others, helping us to understand that just as we act in certain ways when we suffer because we suffer, so do others. Knowing that others' anger arises out of suffering in one form or another can set us on a course in which we try to work with them to quench that suffering. Same for ourselves: we can catch ourselves acting out, or stop ourselves before acting out, and trace the intentions back to some sort of suffering and deal with that.

So, the ME you speak of changes, but the change is for the good, and you don't disappear into thin air or become something that you don't want to be. These teachings and practices are designed so that we grow as people, we become better people through them.

fivebells

Wow, that is so much clearer than what I said.

stuka

Thanks. Nice hat, by the way.