It is only with the heart that one can see rightly;
what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Category: Spirituality
Uma Thurman: "Reality is an Illusion"
“Reality is an illusion – that’s the principle of ancient Buddhist thought,” Uma continues. “And the basic idea of being reborn is that you erase the memory. Everybody is interconnected, and you’re working out your karma with people – so you get erased, but all work left undone has to be completed.”
Vasana
Dear friends, the energy that pushes us to do what we do not want to do, to say what we do not want to say, is called habit energy, the negative habit energy in us. Vasana is the word in Sanskrit. It is very important that we recognize that energy in us. This energy has been transmitted to us by many generations of ancestors, and we continue to cultivate it. It is very powerful. We are intelligent enough to know that if we do this, if we say that, we will cause damage in our relationship. Yet when the time comes, when we find ourselves in that situation, we say it or we do it, even though we know it will be destructive. Why? Because it’s stronger than we are, we say. It is pushing us all the time. That is why the practice aims at liberating ourselves from that kind of habit energy.
The Four Noble Truths
Shortly after his Awakening, the Buddha delivered his first sermon, in which he laid out the essential framework upon which all his later teachings were based. This framework consists of the Four Noble Truths, four fundamental principles of nature (Dhamma) that emerged from the Buddha’s radically honest and penetrating assessment of the human condition. He taught these truths not as metaphysical theories or as articles of faith, but as categories by which we should frame our direct experience in a way that conduces to Awakening:
(1) Dukkha: suffering, unsatisfactoriness, discontent, stress;
(2) The cause of dukkha: the cause of this dissatisfaction is craving (tanha) for sensuality, for states of becoming, and states of no becoming;
(3) The cessation of dukkha: the relinquishment of that craving;
(4) The path of practice leading to the cessation of dukkha: the Noble Eightfold Path of right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
Because of our ignorance (avijja) of these Noble Truths, because of our inexperience in framing the world in their terms, we remain bound to samsara, the wearisome cycle of birth, aging, illness, death, and rebirth. Craving propels this process onward, from one moment to the next and over the course of countless lifetimes, in accordance with kamma (Skt. karma), the universal law of cause and effect. According to this immutable law, every action that one performs in the present moment — whether by body, speech, or mind itself — eventually bears fruit according to its skillfulness: act in unskillful and harmful ways and unhappiness is bound to follow; act skillfully and happiness will ultimately ensue. As long as one remains ignorant of this principle, one is doomed to an aimless existence: happy one moment, in despair the next; enjoying one lifetime in heaven, the next in hell.
The Buddha discovered that gaining release from samsara requires assigning to each of the Noble Truths a specific task: the first Noble Truth is to be comprehended; the second, abandoned; the third, realized; the fourth, developed. The full realization of the third Noble Truth paves the way for Awakening: the end of ignorance, craving, suffering, and kamma itself; the direct penetration to the transcendent freedom and supreme happiness that stands as the final goal of all the Buddha’s teachings; the Unconditioned, the Deathless, Unbinding — Nibbana (Skt. Nirvana).
Old mystic beliefs simmer on Merapi
Straits Times
By Salim Osman
Indonesia Correspondent
MERAPI (CENTRAL JAVA) – ALMOST two weeks after the eruption of Merapi, several thousands among the more than 20,000 villagers who had been evacuated to safe shelters at the bottom of the 3,000m mountain are returning to their homes on its slopes to tend their livestock and crops.
This is despite warnings that the danger posed by the volcano has not passed.
It continues to spit lava, gas and clouds of ash.
They join other villagers who had refused to be evacuated when the authorities stepped up the alert to its highest level two Saturdays ago, before the eruption the day after.
The villagers’ action in the central Java province may seem like the fatalism of rural people everywhere, but it speaks of a deeper, buried layer of Hindu traditions among the people for whom the Islamic faith, though dominant, still remains a recent veneer.
The man who embodies these ancient traditions, which amount to Javanese mysticism, is 79-year-old Mbah Marijan, an elder in the Kinahrejo hamlet, just 4km from the crater.
Continue reading “Old mystic beliefs simmer on Merapi”