A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
RIGHT VIEW Understanding the Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering
What is the cessation of suffering? It is the remainderless fading away and ceasing, the giving up, relinquishing, letting go, and rejecting of craving. (MN 9)
When one knows and sees the five aggregates as they actually are, then one is not attached to the five aggregates. When one abides unattached, one is not infatuated, and one’s craving is abandoned. One’s bodily and mental troubles are abandoned, and one experiences bodily and mental well being. (MN 149)
Reflection
The five aggregates are the medium in which human experience unfolds, like the water in which fish swim or the air in which birds fly. At every moment all five aspects of experience co-arise: material form, feeling tones, perceptions, volitional and emotional formations, and consciousness. The skill to learn is how to be in this world without attachment, without infatuation, and with craving and troubles abandoned.
Daily Practice
When you know and see these aggregates as they actually are—that is, as impermanent and interdependently conditioned processes with no essential core—it is natural to no longer feel attached to them and thereby driven by them. Try deconstructing your troubles by recognizing the extent to which they all eventually boil down to experiential components of the aggregates and as such are inherently empty.
Tomorrow: Cultivating Appreciative Joy One week from today: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering
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Preserving yourself and knowing your boundaries is not the same thing as exclusively seeking your own happiness. It’s about the healing process of learning to skillfully discern what will and will not serve all beings, yourself included.
Pilar Jennings, “Boundaries Make Good Bodhisattvas”
"What grace turns out to be is all the forces that exist in the universe that are free agents, that are available to support the process of your going back into the source. All the gurus, all the beings on astral planes, all of the elements, all of the forces in the universe."
