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 sounds as they actually are, then one is not
attached to sounds. 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
Craving is the
cause of suffering, and if we crave a hundred things we will experience a
hundred episodes of suffering. We are used to this constant thirst to
possess things we like and to avoid what we don’t like. But we do not
have to follow the dictates of our desires. It is possible to notice the
yearning for something and then simply let go of it. This capacity
points the way to freedom from compulsion.
Daily Practice
Using sound as
the focus of practice, see if you can begin to notice the minor ways you
favor or oppose the sounds you meet in your experience. Step back from
being annoyed by a particular sound; step back from the allure another
may induce; step back from constantly welcoming what sounds good and
resisting what sounds bad. This stepping back is replacing desire with
equanimity and can be practiced in small ways.
Tomorrow: Cultivating Appreciative Joy One week from today: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering
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RIGHT MINDFULNESS Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling
A person goes to the forest or to the root of a tree or to an empty place and sits down. Having crossed the legs, one sets the body erect. One establishes the presence of mindfulness. (MN 10) One is aware: "Ardent, fully aware, mindful, I am content." (SN 47.10)
When feeling a painful feeling, one is aware: "Feeling a painful feeling . .. . one is just aware, just mindful: 'There is feeling.'" And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)
Reflection
The second ground on which mindfulness is established is the realm of feeling tones. This includes both physical and mental feeling tones, and this week the unpleasant or painful feeling tones are singled out. Physical pain is self-evident, but mental pain is often subtler, as is the transition point between an unpleasant feeling tone and an unhealthy emotion.
Daily Practice
See if you can break the reflexive bond between feeling pain and immediately resenting it or hating it or wishing it would go away. Try instead to examine with interest and curiosity the texture of the pain: for instance, is it sharp or dull, throbbing or constant? Pain is an inevitable aspect of human experience, and all but the most intense pain is bearable. There is more to learn from facing pain than from attempting to run from it. So let’s look at it and see what we can learn.
RIGHT CONCENTRATION Approaching and Abiding in the Second Phase of Absorption (2nd Jhāna)
With the stilling of applied and sustained thought, one enters upon and abides in the second phase of absorption, which brings inner clarity and singleness of mind, without applied thought and sustained thought, with joy and the pleasure born of concentration. (MN 4)
Reflection
The mind is capable, through training, of becoming more concentrated than is usual in ordinary daily experience. The Buddha describes this as a natural process, unfolding as the body and mind become gradually happier and more tranquil while the mind is focusing on a single object. In the second phase of this process, discursive thinking gradually fades away as the feeling of pleasure and well-being grows stronger and deepens.
Daily Practice
As you sit quietly and focus on your breathing, the thoughts and memories and plans that so habitually inhabit the mind begin to settle, and the mind becomes calmer. At a certain point thoughts may cease altogether. Awareness of sensory experience remains strong, but it is no longer mediated by words, images, or concepts. The need to re-engage the mind with an object and hold it there is no longer needed, so these functions drop away.
Tomorrow: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering One week from today: Establishing Mindfulness of Mind and Abiding in the Third Jhāna
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Infinite, all-pervasive energy underlies everything—is everything. We may think we do our own thing, we may even exercise our “own” will, but our life and all things are fleeting, ever-changing expressions of this energy.
"Knowing you know, or seeking, or any role at all, is just another hype. It’s just another hype. It’s another mind trip. And you will keep tripping until you’re done tripping. And I don’t mean it chemically, I mean it in the life sense of creating models and living them out."