The mind is not separate from the body, the body is not lesser and the mind or spirit greater. They cohabit this nexus which we identify as ourselves. What Buddha would also point out is that identification of a self is in itself a mistake. There is no self there. There are only the co-dependent arising, abiding and disspating of bodies, minds people and things. . . . → Read More: Gentle realizations: Meditation on the body
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I am starting a series of what I am calling Gentle Realizations with this post. They are things that I come up with when I ask myself what I would like to tell my children and grandchildren concerning the important things in life and the spirit. Some of these are paradoxes at the heart of human being. And this one is one of . . . → Read More: Gentle realizations: The mind is used to investigate the mind Every once in a while I get just a glimpse of the sublime. Walking down Madison Ave. in Midtown one is surrounded by luxury goods shops, upscale boutiques, antiques and well dressed men and women going about their business. Among them I walked too, and thoughts of Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse’s exposition of the “four seals” of Buddhism in “What Makes You NOT a Buddhist” resonating in my mind. . . . → Read More: Madison Boddhisattva Our societies are descending into a mire in which hope vanishes, prospects are annihilated, life is cheapened, and where the only winners are the misanthropes, the ‘haters’, the seekers of scapegoats in the form of the ‘alien’, the Jew, the ‘different’, the ‘other’. As the lights are literally going out, with families ‘choosing’ to have their electricity supply discontinued in order to put food on the dinner table, thugs ‘patrol’ the streets in search of the ‘enemy’. Nazi ideology is getting another chance, like hunger and dispossession, to infect, once again, our social fabric. And as our institutions, our trades unions, our cultural norms and organisations are turning into empty shells, little, if anything, stands in the way of the bigots, the racists, the exploiters of generalized pain and helplessness. Alas, the serpent’s egg is hatching again in Europe, and for the same reasons it did back then. . . . → Read More: Greek tragedy I picked up Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child. I may have read this back in the 70’s or 80’s as I seem to remember bits of discussion about Miller’s work from then. I was particularly struck by this statement: “I understand a healthy self-feeling to mean the unquestioned certainty that the feelings and needs one experiences are part of one’s self. This certainty is not something one can gain upon reflection; it is there like one’s own pulse, which one does not notice as long as it functions normally.” . . . → Read More: Alice Miller: Remembering the child in us In my earlier post on Buddhist psychology I noted that the feeling sense is part of the thought process, prior to understanding, integral to the mind formation as an atom is to a molecule. Now via Kurzweil I came upon new research review which supports the fact that our feelings of attraction and repulsion are basic parts of perception: New research from Carnegie . . . → Read More: Science catches up with Buddhism The immortality projects of singularity science bring with it a serious question of what it will be to continue to exist as a self. I look at Eastern and Western concepts of self in this thought about transcendent projects. . . . → Read More: The persistence of the self |
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