Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Enlightened beings
Im curious as to your beliefs about enlightened beings as far as what they can or can't do (or do or don't do). Like feeling hate or having sensual cravings.
0
Comments
Every person has brief moments during the day when feel-image-talk doesn’t arise. At those moments there’s no sense of self. The only difference between an enlightened person and a non-enlightened person is that when the feel-image-talk self doesn’t arise during the day, the enlightened person notices that and knows that to be a clear experience of no-self. The non-enlightened person actually has that experience hundreds of times a day, when they’re briefly pulled to a physical-type touch or an external sight or sound. For just a moment there is just the world of touch-sight-sound. For just a moment there is no self inside that person but they don’t notice it! But just because they don’t notice it doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.
Interesting
In a nutshell... nothing unwholesome remains. What else is there to be said?
i dont like typing upalabhava because i'm forced to question whether i've spelt it correctly.
Here's a quote from Wikipedia: Basically all mental suffering, all dukkha, begins with Ignorance (of reality) which leads to Greed, Aversion and Delusion. We seek to control our lives, imagining we are a separate thing or "self" and viewing all else as "outside" or "not me" and are largely driven by a self-centered view that removes us from the rest of the world. In truth we are dependently arisen phenomena that are interrelated with our environments and each other, not created or new to the world but brought forth by the dissolution and transformation of other phenomena as conditions dictated. We imagine in our birth we came into the world and stand apart, are somehow special, but we come "from" the world and will return every atom to the world in due time. We are each unique in ways, and our species unique, but we all share the same nature.
The Dharma teaches us of such things as Impermanence, Karma and Conditionality... but we must make the connection that these are all aspects of one function of reality: Change. Everything changes, constantly, based on fundamental laws beyond our ability to control. Contrary to this reality, everything we do in this life is to cement a permanent identity, to control what changes or to stop change so that things are just-so.
All of our unfulfilled desires cause us suffering, but even more subtle are the desires that are fulfilled. We find pleasure in the arms of a lover, but as soon as the experience is over the mind clings to "next time", and we repeat these patterns over and over throughout our lives, always needing; always experiencing a dissatisfaction that life isn't just how we want it, when we want it to be so (the same could be said of watching a beloved TV show or getting on the computer). We become attached, love selfishly another human being, and in our complete inability to control their feelings fall to the suffering of love unfulfilled. We eat well, exercise and still end up getting cancer or hit by a bus. We choose to believe what others tell us, only to find disappointment and a struggle against our own eyes and against others... against the world and a nature that just eludes us.
Could go on forever with examples, but it's basically about the difference between what our minds want, and how reality actually is. That difference, that ignorance, is all that keeps us seeking peace, rather than being peaceful. The Buddha discovered and taught of a way that we can change our minds on a deep level and come into harmony with the Dharma, and when we can see clearly the truth and reasons behind all things, we do not act contrary to this nature; we find a peace and imperturbability of mind that adapts to and accepts change with equanimity, while striving toward the betterment of all life with an all-encompassing compassion that sees all as one. An awakened one, even when unwell, finds no dissatisfaction in life.
Hope that helps a little.
I think he just means that which makes up the person when he says "feel-image-talk". When you are enlightened the 3 obscurations (ignorance, aversion, greed) are removed, but you (the 5 aggregates) remain until they are dis-aggregated upon death. Feel-image-talk is the interface with which you can interact with the world.