The Irony of Samsara

With thanks to MindMindful

http://mindmindful.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/the-irony-of-samsara/

    Imagine this scene: a layman sits in front of his house, eating a fish from the pond behind the house, holding his son in his lap. The dog is eating the fishbones and the man kicks the dog. Not an extraordinary scene one would think, but Venerable Shariputra commented:

    He eats his father’s flesh and kicks his mother away, the enemy he killed he dandles on his lap, the wife is gnawing at her husband’s bones, samsara can be such a farce.

    What had happened? The man’s father died and was reborn as a fish in the pool, the layman caught his father, the fish, killed it, and was now eating it. The layman’s mother was very attached to the house so she was reborn as the man’s dog. The man’s enemy had been killed for raping the man’s wife; and because the enemy was so attached to her, he was reborn as her son. While he ate his father’s meat, the dog — his mother — ate the fish bones, and so was beaten by her son. His own little son, his enemy, was sitting on his knee.

____________________________________________________________

Samsara: literally meaning “continuous flow”, is the cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth or reincarnation within Hinduism, Buddhism, Bön, Jainism, Sikhism, and other Indian religions. In modern parlance, samsara refers to a place, set of objects and possessions, but originally, the word referred to a process of continuous pursuit or flow of life. In accordance with the literal meaning, the word should either refer to a continuous stream of consciousness, or the continuous but arbitrary drift of passions, desires, emotions, and experiences.   (Wiki)

Inch time foot gem

A lord asked Takuan, a Zen teacher, to suggest how he might pass the time. He felt his days very long attending his office and sitting stiffly to receive the homage of others.

Takuan wrote eight Chinese characters and gave them to the man:

Not twice this day
Inch time foot gem. This day will not come again.
Each minute is worth a priceless gem.

Meditation (Nature Zen Music) – YouTube.

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Eight weeks of mindfulness meditation can rewire the brain and control depression symptoms

Eight weeks of mindfulness meditation can rewire the brain and control depression symptoms.

NaturalNews

 Is it possible to sort of “rewire” your brain so you can better control imposing symptoms of depression and angst? The short answer, according to recent new research, is yes, and it all it takes in large part is some “mindfulness meditation.”

According to a study which appeared more than a year-and-a-half ago, in the January 2011 journal of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers reported that an eight-week program called mindfulness meditation was able to make measurable changes in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.

The study is the first to document meditation-created changes to the brain.

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” said the study’s senior author, Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program.

“This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing,” she said.

Regions of the brain affected by PTSD and stress.

Documented physical changes in the brain

In previous studies, Lazar’s group and others discovered structural differences between brains of experienced practitioners of meditation and those who had no history of it. In particular, researchers observed a thickening of the cerebral cortex in regions associated with attention and emotional integration, says a summary of the study at Science Daily. Those earlier studies, however, were unable to discover a link between the physical cortex changes and meditation.

That all changed with Lazar’s latest study. In it, she and her team took MRIs of the brain structure of 16 participants in the study two weeks before and two weeks after they took part in the eight-week program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness.

Besides weekly meetings which included practicing mindful medication – a practice that focuses on nonjudgmental awareness of feelings, sensations and state of mind – participants also were exposed to audio recordings of guided meditation practice and were asked to keep track of how much time they spent meditating each day. For comparison, MRIs were taken of a control group of non-meditators over a similar period of time.

Mindfulness (Photo credit: Cathdew)

Those who meditated did so for an average of 27 minutes each day, according to the research team, practicing mindfulness exercises. Their subsequent responses to a mindfulness questionnaire as the study progressed indicated strong improvements compared to pre-study responses.

An analysis of MRIs that focused on regions where meditation-associated differences were found in earlier studies showed increased brain densities in the hippocampus, which is known to be important for learning and memory, as well as structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection.

None of the changes, however, were seen in the control group.

“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life,” Britta Holzel, PhD, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany, said.

“Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change,” she added.

Mindful meditation’s increased brain benefits becoming better known

Other researchers were equally enthusiastic.

“These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of mindfulness-based training,” said Amishi Jha, PhD, a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates mindfulness-training’s effects on individuals in high-stress situations, who was not involved in the study.”

They demonstrate that the first-person experience of stress can not only be reduced with an eight-week mindfulness training program but that this experiential change corresponds with structural changes in the amygdala, a finding that opens doors to many possibilities for further research on MBSR’s potential to protect against stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said.

This research appears to be similar to a separate body of work that has shown that with as few as 11 hours of mindful meditation, the white matter of the brain that aspartame destroys, can begin to grow back.

Sources:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/y1710645t8641841/

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110121144007.htm

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/036313_meditation_depression_brain_function.html#ixzz1yzVk5078

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“The World As I See It” by Albert Einstein 1931

“The World As I See It” by Albert Einstein – Waking Times : Waking Times.

June 23, 2012 | By admin

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.“

Albert Einstein, 1931
Waking Times 

Einstein at his home in Princeton, New Jersey

“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…

“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.

“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…”

“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

“This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

Albert Einstein (signature)

The text of Albert Einstein’s copyrighted essay, “The World As I See It,” was shortened for our Web exhibit. The essay was originally published in “Forum and Century,” vol. 84, pp. 193-194, the thirteenth in the Forum series, Living Philosophies. It is also included in Living Philosophies (pp. 3-7) New York: Simon Schuster, 1931. For a more recent source, you can also find a copy of it in A. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, based on Mein Weltbild, edited by Carl Seelig, New York: Bonzana Books, 1954 (pp. 8-11).

Carlos Castaneda: What is Fake?

Carlos Castaneda: What is Fake? – Waking Times : Waking Times.

Waking Times

June 23, 2012 | By admin 

Francesco Sammarco, Life Arts Media
Waking Times

Castaneda, Don Juan, Tibetan Master Norbu, Parmenides, Liars, Infinity and Ayahuasca

Tibetan Master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, world authority on Dzogchen Buddhism, about 3 decades ago, in the early 80′s, reportedly said – during a retreat in the very first community that he founded in Italy (Arcidoss, Tuscany) in 1982 – that “the way of Castaneda is the closest possible to Dzogchen Buddhism” (Cosimo Di Maggio, personal communication). Ten years later, in 1992, Norbu wrote “Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light”, and in 1993 appeared Castaneda’s “The Art of Dreaming”. An interesting coincidence.

“Whatever is profound, loves masks [...] every profound spirit needs a mask.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Scholars, journalists, academics and detractors alike all love the tale of Castaneda’s – and his main teacher, the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan – being a fraud. It’s far too easy to stop to the first three books of Castaneda, and then think it’s all made up. There is much more than those three books and Don Juan – whomever he may have been – in Castaneda. There is a wealth of knowledge going through the very end of his work, through his last books, public seminars, all the way through “The Way of the Warrior: A Journey of Applied Hermeneutics” which non-specialist detractors might not be overly familiar with, not to count the previous (unauthorized yet intriguing) spontaneous “Nagualist Newsletter” platform.

What is fake? Saying that we live in a world where death is the hunter? That we are surrounded by infinity and yet do not have time? Or that we live in an unfathomable universe and in a very mysterious world? That sorcerers discovered the existence of the ‘flyers’, predatory creatures and energetic parasites? That our earth is a gigantic living sentient being? That a warrior should use death as an adviser and choose to walk a path with a heart? That we ought to be fluid, unpredictable, free from routines, practice ‘not doing’ and prepare ourselves for the final journey to infinity? Or else, more, that we should recapitulate our lives to free old, trapped energy? Or even that we ought to practice Chinese martial arts? This list could go on forever, and I will just add we were told of ‘Mescalito’ as being a teacher and a protector, then to loose personal importance, erasing our personal history, and the solidity of our world being, merely, an illusion. It’s the destiny of all profound spirits to be misunderstood and not be welcomed by their time. Our society, our world, our trapped consciousness and awareness is too immature and too unprepared to accept the full blow of the Nagualist teachings of Don Carlos and Don Juan to our consolidated sense of reality.

Sure, Carlos indulged with lots of women, and this might not have been really part of the Toltec teachings…but that was his predilection. So did ancient Chinese emperors, Taoist alchemists, masters and sages pursuing their path to immortality. True, he may have gone a bit too far in dismantling the sense of personal importance of his female “favourites”, often queuing up for the privilege of being the chosen ones, and have an intimate encounter with their enlightened master. At times it all looked much a power game. And may be – at times – it was. He exercised his personal power (of which, at some point, he had a lot). And – in the process – also manifested with them another attribute of the Toltec Nagualist teachings of Don Juan: ruthlessness.

There is a disturbing element out there – namely, the presumed disappearance and suicide of his female cohort-s, after his death (?) – an element this, which might not necessarily have been part of the original teachings of Don Juan, as they were passed on to Carlos at least.
We may choose to see this event in a few different ways. Either as a failed attempt to reach the Nagual and abruptly resulting in the physical (& energetic) death of all of his cohorts. Or else, as a partially successful attempt to reach the Nagual, however, resulting in the physical (& energetic) death of his adopted daughter, yet, accompanied by the ultimate flight to freedom of the rest of his female clan (their bodies, remember, have never been found and might have accomplished the supreme feat of turning into conscious energy and join the realm of inorganic beings). Or else more, we may choose to see this cult suicide-s as an act of blind loyalty of people – Castaneda’s female cohorts – who have been misguided by a sorcerer who indulged in dark practices and was warned several times by Don Juan not to mingle too much with the realm of inorganic beings.

But then, what do we know? Warriors burning with a fire from within and turning themselves into conscious energy (at the magical time of death) imply that their bodies will physically disappear? Or will their bodies and bones remain on this earth and decay, whilst their consciousness is transformed, maintained and transported on to other energetic levels and continues to exist in infinity, maintaining its individuality? That is, the final journey to freedom?

Aside from the bones shown in the BBC documentary made in 2008 no much is known about the final destiny of the ‘witches’. Did they reach Freedom?? It may take a Nagual to answer these questions, or perhaps some good, revelatory Ayahuasca sessions may do it.  I just recollect the words of Don Juan: “Some men of knowledge deliberately choose death”.  To live or to die made no difference to those people. He personally chose to live as he liked laughing, but not because this was better on an absolute scale of values. Yet, this is not to be taken as a universal truth for everybody either, as this is related to the ‘man of knowledge’, only. And at some point Don Juan also tells us that “to look for death is to look for nothing”. So, as in all great traditions of knowledge, there is ambiguity.

Even the ancient oracles, including the famous Greek one at Delphi, were intrinsically and dangerously ambiguous. This ambiguity is not Castaneda’s own trademark, is the ambiguity of teachings that come from other, non-human, worlds and realities. Parmenides was an initiate in the cult of Apollo Oulios (‘Apollo the Healer’, as well as ‘Apollo the Destroyer’) at Velia and also his priest. He was a healer, a scientist, a sage, a philosopher and expert in the ancient practice of incubation. He is more famous for being considered by modern scholarship as the “father of logic”, that is, for being with his rational thought and teachings, at the very fabric of our Western world. Yet Parmenides is the same man who received by an unnamed goddess, during his magical, ecstatic, shamanic journey of descent in the underworld, the revelation that the earth was a sphere. It was the fifth century B.C. For two thousand years this revelation was attacked as false, negated and ridiculed. Truth’s tragic destiny. Socrates, ‘the wisest and most just of all men’, was put to death simply for not recognizing the gods of Athens and introducing new ones. Castaneda – though he lived to tell the tale – shares his fate with that of many great men of antiquity, misunderstood and charged with falsehood, illegitimacy, untruthfulness, impiety.

Few years ago I received in dreaming a vivid vision of spiralling galaxies spinning at different speeds in the universe. Then I saw large glossy pictures of these colourful galaxies bond in an Album. This Album was essentially a book from Castaneda with lots of photos of galaxies inside it (nothing of the sort still exists, btw). Then I had a revelation: “Castaneda’s books come from the stars”, meaning, the Nagualist teachings brought to light and passed on to us by Carlos do come from infinity. Verify this with Ayahuasca, if you can. Not by chance, the kind of Nagualist Toltec teaching practiced by Don Juan, Castaneda and their cohorts was called “sorcery of infinity” (rather than simply “shamanism”).

As for the “authenticity” of Don Juan, it’s an old issue, and he may have certainly used a fictional name to protect a necessary the bond of confidentiality of his mentor, informant and teacher. There is, however, a big difference from using a fictional name to using a fictional character. 
Claudio Naranjo, interviewed by Massimo De Feo, when asked whether Don Juan Matus really existed or not, replied:

“I cannot doubt that Don Juan ever existed, because Castaneda, when he did not write yet any book, made me a proposal to go to see Don Juan, who – according to him – made an invitation for me to come to see him. Castaneda told me: ‘Enter in my car, we will reach Sonora in nine hours’, but I had a problem with the passport, with the visa for the United States, it was an entry-only visa, and if I would have gone to Mexico, I wouldn’t have been able to come back”. I did not know Don Juan but it would have made no sense for Castaneda – when he still wasn’t famous – to invent it, and then I was his confident, and was used to say:  “You are the only person that I perceive as a journey companion; it’s not like in the world of anthropology, there they don’t believe me.”

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The True Path

Just before Ninakawa passed away the Zen master Ikkyu visited him. “Shall I lead you on?” Ikkyu asked.

Ninakawa replied: “I came here alone and I go alone. What help could you be to me?”

Ikkyu answered: “If you think you really come and go, that is your delusion. Let me show you the path on which there is no coming and no going.”

With his words, Ikkyu had revealed the path so clearly that Ninakawa smiled and passed away.

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On Buddha and the Extra-Terrestials

From grantlawrence.blogspot.com

Found this on my draft folder. Don’t even know how it got there. But I really enjoy Grant’s take on the issue. Unfortunately, his blog is accessible by subscription only so I cannot ask him for permission. So I’ll use this paragraph as the request.

Lou

Axial Age

The time when the Buddha was born, along with Zoroaster, Confucius, Socrates, Plato,  and Aristotle. Also during that time was Lao Tse. A few hundred years later, Jesus.

Hungry ghosts: full with everything yet still yearning for something else.

Three jewels

Five truths: Do not kill, lie, steal, consume intoxicants, or engage in sexual misconduct.

The Buddha and extra-terrestrials

By Grant Lawrence

Buddhist temporal cosmology describes how the universe comes into being and is dissolved. Like other Indian cosmologies, it assumes an infinite span of time and is cyclical. This does not mean that the same events occur in identical form with each cycle, but merely that, as with the cycles of day and night or summer and winter, certain natural events occur over and over to give some structure to time.

The Buddha would not have been bothered by the presence of Alien life in my estimation. He would have understood that the universe is teaming with life and that under certain conditions certain types of life forms would develop. He would also have known that their will be some more technologically advanced civilizations and some less technologically advanced civilizations.

The Buddha wouldn’t have condemned Aliens as necessarily demonic, although there are certain types of demonic entities. The Buddha would have known that beings exist with certain types of consciousness and they display their level of compassion and understanding by the choices they make.

The Buddha of 2500 years ago was clearly a progressive thinker and a humane person. He preached against the trade of human beings. He allowed woman to become ordained. He was a severe critic of the Indian caste system. The Buddha also spoke out against treating people as untouchables, although this is still an accepted notion among many Indians. The Buddha advocated the humane treatment of animals.

He was not God and didn’t claim to be. Rather he said that the human life offered a great opportunity to reach enlightenment. He said he was awakened and we could be too.

The Buddha would have embraced ETs as another being in an infinite number of beings.

But he also understood that although beings are infinite there is still only one consciousness. The Buddha understood that their our many levels of consciousness, but that we all shared in consciousness.

The ET, like the rest of life, would be embraced as part of the infinite. All of life, the Buddha taught should be respected and cared for. ET would be no different.

Even today most of humanity is constricted in their view that human life is only that which has value. Some even believe human life has little value. The Buddha understood all life has value.
Once we come to that conclusion as a society, we will have made great strides in living in health and in happiness.

http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2010/09/bodhi-bit-buddha-and-extra-terrestrials.html

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A Warrior’s Song

A Warrior’s Song « The Sacred Art of Language.

Re-Blogged from The Sacred Art of Language

With thanks to Ben

Have you ever stood beneath the stars

In silence, in solitude

Drinking in the mystery

And the loneliness of existence?

 

Have you ever been humbled

By the endless vastness of the universe

And keenly felt

Your insignificance?

 

Have you ever been face to face

With death?

Do you know in your bones

That the grave awaits?

 

That one day your name

And even your greatest deeds

Will be washed away without a trace?

 

Warrior – tomorrow is not guaranteed

Oblivion is all that’s sure

This moment just may be your last.

 

Waste not another second

Remembering the failures of your past!

 

Seize this day

And don’t ask why

This life was never yours to keep.

 

Embrace your fate

With head held high!

 

Stand at the edge of the great unknown…

 

And leap!

~ Ben

Insomnia Series: Tai-Chi Musik 1

Tai-Chi Musik 1 – YouTube.

Why not learn Tai Chi if you cannot sleep ?

 

The tai chi master Yang Chengfu (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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The Buddha Teaches a Lesson on Forgiveness

The Buddha Teaches a Lesson on Forgiveness – Waking Times : Waking Times.

Waking Times

June 11, 2012 | By admin

Waking Times

The Buddha was sitting under a tree talking to his disciples when a man came and spit on his face. He wiped it off, and he asked the man, “What next? What do you want to say next?” The man was a little puzzled because he himself never expected that when you spit on somebody’s face, he will ask, “What next?” He had no such experience in his past. He had insulted people and they had become angry and they had reacted. Or if they were cowards and weaklings, they had smiled, trying to bribe the man. But Buddha was like neither, he was not angry nor in any way offended, nor in any way cowardly. But just matter-of-factly he said, “What next?” There was no reaction on his part.

Buddha’s disciples became angry, they reacted. His closest disciple, Ananda, said, “This is too much, and we cannot tolerate it. He has to be punished for it. Otherwise everybody will start doing things like this.”

Buddha said, “You keep silent. He has not offended me, but you are offending me. He is new, a stranger. He must have heard from people something about me, that this man is an atheist, a dangerous man who is throwing people off their track, a revolutionary, a corrupter. And he may have formed some idea, a notion of me. He has not spit on me, he has spit on his notion. He has spit on his idea of me because he does not know me at all, so how can he spit on me?

“If you think on it deeply,” Buddha said, “he has spit on his own mind. I am not part of it, and I can see that this poor man must have something else to say because this is a way of saying something. Spitting is a way of saying something. There are moments when you feel that language is impotent: in deep love, in intense anger, in hate, in prayer. There are intense moments when language is impotent. Then you have to do something. When you are angry, intensely angry, you hit the person, you spit on him, you are saying something. I can understand him. He must have something more to say, that’s why I’m asking, “What next?”

The man was even more puzzled! And Buddha said to his disciples, “I am more offended by you because you know me, and you have lived for years with me, and still you react.”

Puzzled, confused, the man returned home. He could not sleep the whole night. When you see a Buddha, it is difficult, impossible to sleep again the way you used to sleep before. Again and again he was haunted by the experience. He could not explain it to himself, what had happened. He was trembling all over and perspiring. He had never come across such a man; he shattered his whole mind and his whole pattern, his whole past.

The next morning he was back there. He threw himself at Buddha’s feet. Buddha asked him again, “What next? This, too, is a way of saying something that cannot be said in language. When you come and touch my feet, you are saying something that cannot be said ordinarily, for which all words are a little narrow; it cannot be contained in them.” Buddha said, “Look, Ananda, this man is again here, he is saying something. This man is a man of deep emotions.”

The man looked at Buddha and said, “Forgive me for what I did yesterday.”

Buddha said, “Forgive? But I am not the same man to whom you did it. The Ganges goes on flowing, it is never the same Ganges again. Every man is a river. The man you spit upon is no longer here. I look just like him, but I am not the same, much has happened in these twenty-four hours! The river has flowed so much. So I cannot forgive you because I have no grudge against you.”

“And you also are new. I can see you are not the same man who came yesterday because that man was angry and he spit, whereas you are bowing at my feet, touching my feet. How can you be the same man? You are not the same man, so let us forget about it. Those two people, the man who spit and the man on whom he spit, both are no more. Come closer. Let us talk of something else.”

This article originally appeared at YouAreTrulyLoved.com, an interesting source of inspiring ideas.

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