Foundations of Buddhism - An interpretation

Buddha's 'Four Noble Truths' [take one]: 1/ Shit happens: fact. 2/ Something caused that shit to happen: you did, your mind's clinging and craving. 3/ You can get out of the shit: just let go. 4/ There's a well proven 'let-go' path: It has 8 modes:

Buddha's 'Four Noble Truths' [take two]: 1/ There will be disturbances in The Force. 2/ Something caused that disturbance: you did, with your enchantment with The Dark Side. 3/ Balance can be restored to The Force: just let the light in. 4/ There's a well proven path: 8 modes, it has:

Buddha's 'Four Noble Truths' [take three]: 1/ There will be stuckness: That's reality. 2/ Something caused that stuckness: we did, with our mental constructions and absence of mindfulness. 3/ We're not really stuck: we can just let go and we'll be free. 4/ There's a well proven path to freedom: It has 8 modes:

Buddha's 'Four Noble Truths' [take four]: 1/ We exist in a Matrix. 2/ The Matrix is only a construction but the mind finds it agreeable. 3/ However, the reality of the here and now is where the heart thrives. 4/ There is a Red pill that wakes us up to a rich and liberated life and flushes the toxins out. However, many prefer to remain under the hallucinogenic influence of the Blue pill because it appears as 'normal'.

Buddha's 'Four Noble Truths' [take five]: 1/ Life will seem unsatisfactory. 2/ The feeling of unsatisfaction appears in the gap between our model ideal and our reality. 3/ Seeing the reality of things and understanding the nature of this model will set us free. 4/ There's a well proven path to freedom: It has 8 modes:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Buddha's Eightfold Path. Mode 1: 'Right View' means to develop an authentic way of understanding the world without illusion or clinging or craving: the wisdom to understand that no worldy thing or notion can ever be permanent or perfect, not even our notion of 'self'; and the wisdom to understand the inescapable linkage of our actions and worlds reactions, that we create our own reality.

Buddha's Eightfold Path. Mode 2: 'Right Intention' means to aspire and resolve towards wholesome thought, drive and motivation: the wisdom to act without clinging or craving; the wisdom to act with loving kindness and without harm to any sentient life.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Buddha's Eightfold Path. Mode 3: 'Right Speech' means to conduct yourself skillfully in all communication: use language which is inclusive, thoughtful, protective and true. Use words which are constructive and meaningful. Speak only if it improves silence.

Buddha's Eightfold Path. Mode 4: 'Right Action' - means to conduct yourself skillfully as you express yourself through the body: Act only in wholesome ways, guard against corruption of the self and others. Act in ways which maintain a balanced state of mind and harmony in relationships.

Buddha's Eightfold Path. Mode 5: 'Right Livelihood' - means to conduct your working life in a way that builds a wholesome social environment: Contribute skillfully and profit only from activity that is equitable, peaceful, honest and harmless to self and others. Operate in society as you would wish it to be.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Buddha's Eightfold Path. Mode 6: 'Right Effort' - means to maintain the practice over time: Our life is made up of little activities, little thoughts, little distractions, little joys, little habits, little ways. It takes effort to be continually aware, to remain fully present, to see clearly and pay absolute attention. Stay focussed. No external thing can liberate, but this internal effort will set you free.

Buddha's Eightfold Path. Mode 7: 'Right Mindfulness' - means to know and purify your mind so that we can experience truth directly: Our mind is a tool that allows us to interface with, and operate in, the physical world. As our sensations, emotions and thoughts arise, mental constructs attach to them: Our perception is filtered through the mind and is transformed by it. Be alert to this, sharpen the consciousness within you and all about you. With a continuous, clear, direct perception of the world we can experience its true nature. Observe intensely, be attentive, be interested, be fully in the here and now, and allow the insights to come unbounded. Only this moment is life.

Buddha's Eightfold Path. Mode 8: 'Right Concentration' - means to absorb experience and understanding into ourselves such that it results in personal transformation: It's the distillation of our insights and learnings, as they are aligned and integrated in to the heart, and then how this liberates us; it's the substantiation of our practice by submitting it to the challenge of living in the real world. Live true to the best way that you know. You become what you believe in.

ANZAC Day Contemplation

It's been a year now that I've been practising. I hadn't noticed the incremental changes until I'd looked back along the path I'd just come along. "Oh, yeah... I can see small changes in me" However, I've become very interested in how the experience of the everyday can substantiate my practise. I take in a lot of the teachings through reading and in the sangha, and in particular, through the 'audiodharma' of downloadable audio from various talks. I was curious how all these learnings get absorbed in and how this results in any sort of self tranformation. Of course it's a continuous and incremental progress but there are also leaps that occur I think.
This started out as a short note. :-)

This last Sunday was ANZAC Day, really a whole weekend where Australia recognises our particularly sorrowful engagement in world war two. I've noticed my relationship to this anniversary has changed significantly. All my previous years, I've had a very detached awareness of it, purposely unattached, averse even, while this year I felt very close to it, allowing myself, trusting myself to enter into it; not through direct involvement but rather through the contemplation of it, sitting with it, and sending out the heart to be intimate with it. I'm reviewing that contemplation now in terms of some key Buddhist concepts, and if you care to read on, I'll relate them here below.

Empathy/Compassion: I felt strongly the suffering of these men on the battlefields, the fear they must have felt, the lonliness, the disillusionment, the barbarity that was expected of them, to kill like robots and run headlong into machine gun fire knowing that their odds were maybe one in four of surviving the next five minutes and how they lost their will to live amid the fear, sickness and inhumanity. I felt them missing their folk at home, how they were missed, how they called on their God for salvation.

Boundlessness: I realised the absence of border and boundary, feeling this sadness for all of the men in the trenches and the families they were connected to, a few miles away in Turkey or thousands of miles away in New Zealand. I felt how the human spirit was both compressed and inflated, how it was muted and yet enhanced. The reality of brotherhood contrasted with the artifice of nationhood. I note how during the armistice, the soldiers from each side were shaking hands and joking, exchanging gifts and food, only to return a few hours later to the killing. During the advancing waves, amid horredous casualty, a Turkish general appeared above the diggers' trench saying "Stop, stop, stop, for god's sake please stop, you know we must shoot". Of course, No one wanted to kill anyone. I note how a huge number of lives were lost in the securing of very small bits of what was effectively desolate, useless territory.

Impermanence: I understood sharply the transience of the human body, how it can animated one moment, then static the next, and on it's way back to the earth in the following days. How the body is yet another systems that requires continual sustainance in many ways. How the bushland and hills were constructed into a network of rabbit warrens for people, with kitchens and hospitals, and how quickly the floods and fires restored them back to just earth. Likewise the machines and artifacts of war are now mostly just earth again. Also noted how that one site, that was so critical to the campaign, was so irrelevent and unregarded outside of the temporal bounds of that campaign, how all the structures that brought about that campaign were just a momentary vortex of ideology.

Self/Non-self: Why did men run into near certain death? I was able to approach an understanding of how soldiers were driven forward by these ideas of 'protecting the nation', how they had faith in governance, that the generals knew what they were doing, that food would be provided, that the wounded would be healed etc. I noted how they identified with being a Soldier, being a Digger, being an Australian, being a bloke, being part of some collective or several. I noted how they felt they belonged to all those things and how they driven to contain more of that, how they driven to possess not just land or position but identity and notions. I noted the transience in the minds of men, how their notions were transformed, how their deep engagement in the world of actuality brought them 'down to earth' or closer to the true nature of things. How notions were stripped down or distilled under the pressure of trauma. Also noted that the discourses that give consent to war are still present in the media today, noted the words they use to propagate the narratives.

Systems: Had some comprehension of how war is a 'system', that it's made up of connected entities, each composed of smaller entities and so on. Noted how the various inputs into that system each affect the system as a whole, and go on affecting through time and space, that each person plays a role and are both responsible and not responsible at the same time, how everthing's connected in a dynamic way. How one part of the system affects the balance of the whole. Everthing's connected. Suffering will express itself.

Concluding, I felt this emotion rising up. I felt it sitting heavy in the body. I felt my mind unbalanced by it. I felt the sadness and the anger sitting there. However, I had a certain flavour of resiliance that allowed me to not get swept up in it. It's not detachment, rather it's intimacy, it's clarity. It was very challenging though. It's taken me a few days to find my centre again but I feel that it been very educational and I think it allowed me to 'concentrate' or absorb/integrate the learnings. I was able to see this thing clearly for the first time in my life and I've found it to be a liberating experience. Reversing the camera, I've also experienced a real clarity in understanding the Buddha's teachings.

Stating the Bleeding Obvious

Stating the bleeding obvious #1: What comes out a car's tailpipe is extremely toxic to humans, plants and pretty much any living thing.

Stating the bleeding obvious #2: In the not too distant future, the world economy will turn from being a mass 'consumer' economy to a mass 'producer' economy. 'Value' will shift away from the superficial world of 'stuff' and towards a world of knowledge, skill, creativity and awareness.

Stating the bleeding obvious #3: In the not too distant future, human collectives will be less about geography and resources and more about shared ideas and common values; less competitive and more cooperative.

Stating the bleeding obvious #4: 'Peak Oil' is estimated to occur 2010 [Oh shit!] The models are pretty accurate now... They also show that the second half of the oil production 'bell curve' will be sucked up at a very alarming rate, some five times faster than the first.

Stating the bleeding obvious #5: In the not too distant future, power structures built by the church, the state, the corporation and the media will all be deconstructed as the awakening reaches a critical mass. People will demand quality of life, freedom, balance of give and take, accountability and a return to human centered values.

Stating the bleeding obvious #6: It's not the planet that's in danger, WE'RE in danger! The earth will happily continue on without us, but we really really REALLY need the earth.

Stating the bleeding obvious #7: War will come to an end along with ignorance. As awareness and understanding grow, the divisive voices which propagate hate and violence will lose their credibilty. Those voices will be seen for what they really are; notions without substance, lacking truth, and driven to selfish ends. Consent, though unconscious, will simply evaporate. Violence will no longer be accepted as a solution to anything.

Stating the bleeding obvious #8: Consuming more than we produce can only by sustained with credit. Credit is defined as borrowing resources from the future to use now, but at future value. If the credit gap is increasing instead of decreasing, you have a credit crisis; it's a positive feedback loop that won't terminate. When the world does this, it's a global credit crisis. It results from a line of thought that believes that you can get money for nothing.

Stating the bleeding obvious #9: Systems that exist in reality, are wholistic entities. If you affect one part of the system, all other parts of the system will be affected by some degree. Nothing in reality exists in isolation.

Stating the bleeding obvious #10: Things happen will to us, this is a fact. The critical factor is not the events but how you respond to those events. Every choice we make, once made, will either make us stronger, wiser, more connected or the opposite.