| Oct 3 @ 5:32 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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October 2
In the ancient meditation instructions, it is said that at the beginning, thoughts will arrive one on top of another, uninterrupted, like a steep mountain waterfall. Gradually, as you perfect meditation, thoughts become like the water in a deep, narrow gorge, then a great river slowly winding its way down to the sea, and finally the mind becomes like a still and placid ocean, ruffled by only the occasional ripple or wave.
October 3
We need to shake ourselves sometimes and really ask: “What if I were to die tonight? What then?” We do not know whether we will wake up tomorrow, or where. If you breathe out and you cannot breathe in again, you are dead. It’s as simple as that.
As a Tibetan saying goes: “Tomorrow or the next life—which comes first, we never know.”
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| Oct 4 @ 10:12 AM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning |
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yashaenka
Posts: 4,639
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Existence is like a circle on one side it says Life, on the other side it says Death.
Call Life a cat, call death a dog where one chases the other endlessly it seems without pause. Every time the cat passes go [life] it thinks I exist therefore I am, every time the Dog passes End [death] it says I am not, therefore I do not exist.
If rebirth has any presence in this then the chase is on again but with the cat chasing the dog in a reverse direction. Then both the Cat and Dog say I exist therefore I am when passing go, and I do not exist as they pass End.
This clouds the mind so much with obscurity that the mind just dissolve the picture of this, then seeks some true reality... 
Well it seemed funny to me!
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| Oct 5 @ 1:40 AM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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[size=4]October 4
It is said that when Buddha attained enlightenment, all he wanted to do was to show the rest of us the nature of mind and share completely what he had realized. But he also saw, with the great sorrow of infinite compassion, how difficult it would be for us to understand.
For even though we have the same inner nature as Buddha, we have not recognized it because it is so enclosed and wrapped up in our individual ordinary minds.
Imagine an empty vase. The space inside is exactly the same as the space outside. Only the fragile walls of the vase separate one from the other. Our buddha mind is enclosed within the walls of our ordinary mind. But when we become enlightened, it is as if the vase shatters into pieces. The space “inside” merges instantly into the space “outside.” They become one: There and then we realize that they were never separate or different; they were always the same.
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| Oct 5 @ 2:27 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning |
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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October 5
All the spiritual teachers of humanity have told us the same thing, that the purpose of life on earth is to achieve union with our fundamental, enlightened nature. It says in the Upanishads:
There is the path of wisdom and the path of ignorance. They are far apart and lead to different ends. . . . Abiding in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go aimlessly hither and thither like the blind led by the blind. What lies beyond life shines not to those who are childish, or careless, or deluded by wealth.
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| Oct 6 @ 5:52 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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October 6
One technique for arousing compassion for a person who is suffering is to imagine one of your dearest friends, or someone you really love, in that person’s place.
Imagine your brother or daughter or parent or best friend in the same kind of painful situation. Quite naturally your heart will open, and compassion will awaken in you: What more would you want than to free your loved one from his or her torment? Now take this compassion released in your heart and transfer it to the person who needs your help: You will find that your help is inspired more naturally and that you can direct it more easily.
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| Oct 8 @ 7:49 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning |
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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October 7
The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in its continual living experience of presence, in its bliss, clarity, peace, and, most important of all, complete absence of grasping.
The diminishing of your grasping is a sign that you are becoming freer of yourself. And the more you experience this freedom, the clearer the sign that the ego and the hopes and fears that keep it alive are dissolving and the closer you will come to the infinitely generous “wisdom of egolessness.” When you live in that wisdom home, you’ll no longer find a barrier between “I” and “you,” “this” and “that,” “inside” and “outside”; you’ll have come, finally, to your true home, the state of nonduality.
October 8
I remember a middle-aged American woman who came to see Dudjom Rinpoche in New York in 1976. She came into the room, and sat in front of Dudjom Rinpoche, and blurted out: “My doctor has given me only a few months to live. Can you help me? I am dying.”
To her surprise, in a gentle yet compassionate way, Dudjom Rinpoche began to chuckle. Then he said quietly: “You see, we are all dying. It’s only a matter of time. Some of us just die sooner than others.”
With these few words, he helped her to see the universality of death, and that her impending death was not unique. This eased her anxiety. Then he talked to her about dying and the acceptance of death. And he spoke about the hope there is in death. At the end, he gave her a healing practice that she followed enthusiastically. Not only did she come to accept death, but, by following the practice with complete dedication, she recovered her health.
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| Oct 10 @ 9:26 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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I don't know what happened to yesterday. 
October 10
Once there was a Dzogchen yogi who lived unostentatiously, surrounded, however, by a large following of disciples. A certain monk, who had an exaggerated opinion of his own learning and scholarship, was jealous of the yogi, whom he knew not to be very well read at all. He thought: “How does he, just an ordinary person, dare to teach? How dare he pretend to be a master? I will go and test his knowledge, show it up for the sham it is, and humiliate him in front of his disciples, so that they will leave him and follow me.”
One day he visited the yogi and said scornfully: “You Dzogchen bunch, is meditate all you ever do?”
The yogi’s reply took him completely by surprise: “What is there to meditate on?”
“You don’t even meditate then,” the scholar brayed triumphantly.
“But when am I ever distracted?” said the yogi.
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| Oct 11 @ 11:13 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning |
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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October 11
Isn’t it extraordinary that our minds cannot stay still for longer than a few moments without grasping after distraction? They are so restless and preoccupied that sometimes I think that living in a city in the modern world, we are already like the tormented beings in the intermediate state after death, where the consciousness is said to be agonizingly restless.
We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don’t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.
Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home.
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| Oct 12 @ 3:02 AM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning
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uncrazy
Posts: 1,539
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BandTMom
What a very interesting description of the state of consciousness at death.
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| Oct 14 @ 8:40 AM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning |
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yashaenka
Posts: 4,639
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Isn’t it extraordinary that our minds cannot stay still for longer than a few moments without grasping after distraction? In a conceptual world the mind is always busy trying to fit conceptions into your mind to fit your direct experience in every moment.
It is like using words to find words to chase words to express words within a closed system that cannot described anything that stands outside of the system of words.
When a person lives in a conceptual world they are always chasing concepts to define concepts in a never ending spiral. People just assume our thoughts are like a video in continuous motion where in reality each thought is but a Instant now more like individual slides. Just as we are fooled when we watch a movie into thinking the things in a movie actually move when they do not.
Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home.
But when the mind comes home it sees what is actually there not our conceptions of what is there.
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| Oct 14 @ 10:16 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning
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16knots
Posts: 3,627
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Buddhism - Dzogchern Ponlop
Compassion without limit - Buddhism
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| Oct 17 @ 1:59 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning |
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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I have been lax in my posting.
October 12
As Buddha said: “What you are is what you have been, what you will be is what you do now.” Padmasambhava went further: “If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.”
October 13
When the teachings “click” for you somewhere deep in your heart and mind, then you really have the View. Whatever difficulties you face, you will find you have some kind of serenity, stability, and understanding, and an internal mechanism—you could call it an “inner transformer”—that works for you, to protect you from falling prey to wrong views. In that View, you will have discovered a “wisdom guide” of your own, always on hand to advise you, support you, and remind you of the truth. Confusion will still arise, that’s only normal, but with a crucial difference: No longer will you focus on it in a blinded and obsessive way, but you will look on it with humor, perspective, and compassion.
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| Oct 17 @ 2:01 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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October 14
The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that nothing is real and nothing lasts, is, we come to discover, our greatest friend because it drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances? Is there something in fact we can depend on, that does survive what we call death?
Allowing these questions to occupy us urgently, and reflecting on them, we slowly find ourselves making a profound shift in the way we view everything. We come to uncover in ourselves “something” that we begin to realize lies behind all the changes and deaths of the world.
As this happens, we catch repeated and glowing glimpses of the vast implications behind the truth of impermanence. We come to uncover a depth of peace, joy, and confidence in ourselves that fills us with wonder, and breeds in us gradually a certainty that there is in us “something” that nothing destroys, that nothing alters, and that cannot die.
October 15
Whatever is happening to us now mirrors our past karma. If we know that, and know it truly, whenever suffering and difficulties befall us, we do not view them particularly as failures or catastrophes, or see suffering as a punishment in any way. Nor do we blame ourselves or indulge in self-hatred.
We see the pain we are going through as the completion of the effects, the fruition, of a past karma. Tibetans say that suffering is “a broom that sweeps away all our negative karma.” We can even be grateful that one karma is coming to an end. We know that “good fortune,” a fruit of good karma, may soon pass if we do not use it well, and that “misfortune,” the result of negative karma, may in fact be giving us a marvelous opportunity to evolve.
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| Oct 17 @ 2:02 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning |
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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October 16
Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, . . . we shall harness . . . the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
October 17
The belief in reincarnation shows us that there is some kind of ultimate justice or goodness in the universe. It is that goodness that we are all trying to uncover and to free. Whenever we act positively, we move toward it; whenever we act negatively, we obscure and inhibit it. And whenever we cannot express it in our lives and actions, we feel miserable and frustrated.
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| Oct 18 @ 9:47 AM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning
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yashaenka
Posts: 4,639
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I really enjoyed this you just never know where oh where Wisdom is to be found..
Reincarnation
"What does Reincarnation mean?"
A cowpoke asked his friend.
His pal replied, "It happens when
Yer life has reached its end.
They comb yer hair, and warsh yer neck,
And clean yer fingernails,
And lay you in a padded box
Away from life's travails."
"The box and you goes in a hole,
That's been dug into the ground.
Reincarnation starts in when
Yore planted 'neath a mound.
Them clods melt down, just like yer box,
And you who is inside.
And then yore just beginnin' on
Yer transformation ride."
"In a while, the grass'll grow
Upon yer rendered mound.
Till some day on yer moldered grave
A lonely flower is found.
And say a hoss should wander by
And graze upon this flower
That once wuz you, but now's become
Yer vegetative bower."
"The posy that the hoss done ate
Up, with his other feed,
Makes bone, and fat, and muscle
Essential to the steed,
But some is left that he can't use
And so it passes through,
And finally lays upon the ground
This thing, that once wuz you."
"Then say, by chance, I wanders by
And sees this upon the ground,
And I ponders, and I wonders at,
This object that I found.
I thinks of reincarnation,
Of life and death, and such,
And come away concludin': 'Slim,
You ain't changed, all that much.'"
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| Oct 18 @ 7:37 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning |
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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Thanks Yash.
October 18
The way to discover the freedom of the wisdom of egolessness, the masters advise us, is through the process of listening and hearing, contemplation and reflection, and meditation. They advise us to begin by listening repeatedly to the spiritual teachings. As we listen, they will keep on and on reminding us of our hidden wisdom nature.
Gradually, as we listen to the teachings, certain passages and insights in them will strike a strange chord in us, memories of our true nature will start to trickle back to us, and a deep feeling of something homely and uncannily familiar will slowly awaken.
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| Oct 20 @ 12:35 AM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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October 19
Remember: A method is only a means, not the meditation itself. It is through practicing the method skillfully that you reach the perfection of that pure state of total presence, which is the real meditation.
There is a revealing Tibetan saying: “Gompa ma yin, kompa yin,” which means literally: “ Meditation is not; getting used to is.”
It means that meditation is nothing other than getting used to the practice of meditation. As it is said: “Meditation is not striving, but naturally becoming assimilated into it.” As you continue to practice the method, then meditation slowly arises. Meditation is not something that you can “do”; it is something that has to happen spontaneously, only when you have perfected the practice.
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| Oct 20 @ 10:20 PM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning |
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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October 20
If we were to put our minds to one powerful wisdom method and work with it directly, there is a real possibility we would become enlightened.
Our minds, however, are riddled with confusion and doubt. I sometimes think that doubt is an even greater block to human evolution than is desire or attachment. Our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence. We have become so falsely “sophisticated” and neurotic that we take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt that is nothing more than ego’s desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdom is deified as the goal and fruit of true knowledge.
This form of mean-spirited doubt is the shabby emperor of samsara, served by a flock of “experts” who teach us not the open-souled and generous doubt that Buddha assured us was necessary for testing and proving the worth of the teachings, but a destructive form of doubt that leaves us nothing to believe in, nothing to hope for, and nothing to live by.
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| Oct 21 @ 5:09 AM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning
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Blondino
Posts: 4,269
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Do not believe anything
because it is said by an authority,
or if it is said to come from angels,
or from Gods,
or from an inspired source.
Believe it only if you have explored it
in your own heart
and mind and body
and found it to be true.
Work out your own path,
through diligence.
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| Oct 21 @ 5:47 AM |
Buddhism - A New Beginning |
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BandTMom
Posts: 28,448
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That's my favorite Buddhist saying of all, Blondino.
Thanks!
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