Buddhism has given me both the happiest moments and happiest times of my life!
ENLIGHTENMENT
The buddhists from Sri Lanka(?) termed the following a superficial experience of the impermanence of things, so it is just a stepping stone on the road toward full enlightenment. But as such it clearly brings satisfaction with life, a stabile mind and a big amount of natural healthy kind of happiness that is worth mentioning for those who look for happiness in their lives. I might also mention that I have gotten lots of zen buddhist influence from Japan and that affects my views, especially the belief that every being has a buddha nature which a equate with the healthy natural ground for the functioning of living beings - see my main theory about that.
I just wonder if the answer from Sri Lanka meant that my thought of being partly awakened was just a thought and so impermanent in itself. So with my European eyes I think that maybe they didn't answer fully right: One ought to term enlightenment what is enlightenment and not keep to false modesty, since if I am pushed to the place of a student, to learn from those from whom I have nothing to learn, the valuable insight that I have gets pushed down in the social environment: it is just the view of someone without any formal recognition of any level of understanding. The others aren't the only ones suffering from this: I have no way to react freely according to my nature since such beautiful buddhist reactions do not exist in our Finnish European cultural inheritage which is so very thinking oriented. So very unwise... Also formal position is needed, especially if one is a woman, since without it nothing spreads or even flowers! Why do I write this angrily about this? I am sad: such a great beauty and continuous enjoyment lost because people are so damned stuck to customs etc., to traditional hierargies... From around here there is no help coming: just the Christian church here.
A couple of years ago I had healthy ways of living and a meditative state of mind which gave me a peace of mind and continuous enjoyment without suffering. Reading about buddhism � I am a buddhist - I notice that that�s how enlightement is described. But there was nothing unsusual in my experience: it was just living in the level of the experience while having a natural non-grasping attention. It was something which was easy for others to grasp too: it spread in my social environment like good moods tend to spread. I got it from practising sports, sitting and trying to meditate doesn�t give me any meditative feeling but wandering in nature does give. Could it be that just natural healthy ways of living are what we reach for when we wish for the buddhist enlightenment?
WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT
Getting a grasp of the flow of life. Living in a way that is natural for humans. Living each moment to the fullest, like one who really understands that however long or short one�s life is, it is the present in which it has to be lived, (otherwise each moment is lost forever and the life will not be any longer � instead it will be shorter since non healthy ways of living cause at least slightly less endurance, so living each moment to the fullest makes one reactive, makes one adobt the ways that are best suited to each situation and so makes one endure better in addition to giving a more rewarding life).
If enlightenment is this, it means living with the senses, using humans� natural capacity to the fullest, finding natural healthy ways of living according to feelings and one�s true heart felt understanding. It does not mean giving away one�s wishes (except the nonmoral wishes - see these internet pages of mine for my view on moral: it is a very positive view). Instead it means living each moment fully regardless of whether one�s wishes are met or not. There is just a change of opinion in that: each moment being full of natural stimuli with which one can be happy but never perfect when watched from some ready made theory perspective with goals in it: the life in the living is something different from thoughts � fuller, eys, but more ordinary, less mystical than theory. So it is the ordinary, the things that we valued as children in our lives, that we have to be content with: running and enjoying the senses, having a good friend or a friendly social encounter, understanding something deeply with feelings and with meaningfulness to life,� This is what freedom, naturality and not forcing things mean! See these internet pages of mine about my picture of humans as memebers of the natural world, which I term Gaia. What buddhism is not, the emptiness of form: it is not theory or a remembered book like artificial form. But it IS what our heart tells to be important in life and in the world at large. Follow your beautiful feelings and you will find the right natural healthy moral way to live which will give you happiness and a peace of mind.
Love is the road toward enlightenment. Build upon what really works for you and for others: also the social things matter a lot. Be a curing center for your social environment in a happy way. Love is a mark that you are on the right tracks: love binds things to their right places in life. Love is clearly different from greed which is a thinking based thing and not a feeling, especially a compassionate feeling. Feeling love you are happy and can share you mood with others socially, so that the whole environment gets somewhat cured toward healthy emotionality. Love makes you feel more in balance and that's what gives you a peace of mind.
When buddhists say that life is suffering, they mean having competitive theory-based goals. Those are the cause of suffering. Getting rid of them ceases the suffering, at least most of it. Especially this applies to competition with others but also competing with oneself: any measuring of things with a theoretical measure stick and the binding of one's feelings to that result. This applies also to the opinions of others: react to the life in the living and not to theory based estimates about worth. This does not mean refusing to guice one's life according to one's best understanding but only tying the intellectual observations to the level of living the lives. Be wary of the usual error of refusing to live fully if thigs are not right when watched from some theory perspective. That error has to do with the times early in our lives when we did not know how to react to suffering, how to change our balance to rest on other things and how to make thinsg better in practise. Now that we know about guiding and curing our lives, we do not need to refuse to live. But ofcourse this living should not mean supporting any unwanted things by your strenght, instead it should mean living fully morally right, in a way that brings the world effectively toward good, toward a better life for all fairly.
Read my texts about pain and fear for the ceasing of the rest of the suffering? Read my texts about thinking for proper buddhist ways of holistic thinking.
I am a Finnish speaking Finn, so I think like my culture that all healthy persons feel compassion toward all living beings and act accordingly in practise.
I think that humans have lots of misconceptions about thinking and that thinking is such an important part of our lives that those errors may be one of the reasons why we are not enlightened. Please read my texts about the natural ways to think holistically and correct the unnaturalities away from your thinking and your picture of the world. Remember that it is the holistic point of view which is natural in thinking and in understanding social life in its natural healthy form which is the ground for other kinds of social life too. But the thoughts (thought errors) of others you have to think through, they are different from the natural dynamics of healthy humans which should bring the happiness that you search for in your social life.
Thinking gives us a picture of the world which is a map according to which we act in our lives, in the world. If we just would get the map of thinking right, we would all be enlightened, since everything would be at its right emphasis on our lives, each part of our life at its right role. The fact that the famous Buddha was a prince menas that he was a well educated man and so unusually good at getting the map of thinking right. Nowadays people are more educated, as far as I know, so many more of us could be fully enlightened if just our ways of living were healthy enough.
There is also a skill that may have to do with the peace of mind that I gained, with the stability and feeling of safety as if protected by something, by my skill in living. It is an analogy of the body and ways of moving to the mind and to philosophy of life. I learned from practising aikido a good balance and a way to fall down so that I did not hurt myself but continued right away in full health. The same trick done intellectually when falling down or about to lose balance for example by catching bad habits allows one to keep one's mental independence and a stabile mind: acting according to the situation but without hurting oneself in a lasting way when confronting some big problem in life. This may be just the trick of changing one's balance, one's base from where one is about to fall or be captivated to where one is stabile, free and independent. But if one wants to be independent, one has to do that with good moral. Otherwise others are forced to attack in order to protect themselves and the society. With good moral one can decide freely about oneself and others and the others will just enjoy it and agree that such are good wise courses of action in life.
The mind is connected to the body. Humans are adabted to a life in nature where the attention and ways of moving are connected to what is around oneself, what there is to react to, to guard against or to serve as a shelter. So the body and the attention are connected. That is clearly seen in the eyes and ears of animals: when they move their bodies move too, especially if something attaches attention, then the possibilitis of movement are typically partly tied to that thing: to flee or to move forward. Similarly own own attention and our body connect: if we tense some part of the body rigid and unreactive, the corresponding part of our attention gets fixed, unreactive and unmeditative, it is like dozing eyes open for that part of our attention. This makes our capacity much smaller and makes us enjoy life much less. One can notice the effect of going to sauna or of practising sports, of the warm relaxing weather in the summer time and the consequent happy summer atmosphere. Also if one is sensitive to one's own moods, one can notice the different social influences from different persons: tense enjoy life less and the lively relaxed ones (the young ones) more. See the point of having no edges to thoughts and shutting nothing completely away from the awareness in my text about meditation. Such shuttinbg away creates muscle tensions and vice versa. Such is unmeditative and contrary to the goal of awakening.
I have also gotten lots of taoist influence from reading the book Tao-te-ching. Two points in that affect my views on buddhism: the one that one cannot reach the reality with words, words are insufficient to describe the reality, and that one should not force things but instead follow naturality in everything. These things are connected to reaching natural non-forcing and non-grasping attention and consequently a meditative state of attention and ways of action. The traditionasl buddhist meditation practise emphasises the observation of one's natural not-forced breathing. Maybe if one would try that way very thoroughly in one's life, one would reach a natural non-forcing way to live and meditate in everything that one does. But for me meditative feeling comes from practisibg sports: in the reactive freely flowing motion there is no time for artificial ways and so I reach meditation by reaching for naturality and non-forcing ways. Such sports require also a wide awareness which is needed for meditation to enlargen to one's whole life. Such an attention brings to me a clear mind and free emotional life with joy and joyous compassionate social ways. Really enjoying something means to me being drown in the flow of life and not just watching from aside, so the balanced mind of meditation is good to haver in order to be able to act rationally at all. Please read my text Emotional and objective in my bunch of texts about thinking.
Often one reads that those who become enlightened have practised many years but that their enlightenement may have been arubt. During those years they must have learned lots of things which help them, so even though I have made many remarks here, it may be that for upkeeping the realisation there needs to be lots of philosophy of life, lot of skill of regaining one's balance and one's realisation after some harmful social influence, like is typical to get from completely unenlightened minds. I would ho+pe for others too to share many kinds of wisdom and not just the most ashtonishing points.
I have also the skill of recovering extremely quickly, in a few seconds, from touch experiencies: I concentrate on the level of the experience and avoid measuring my situation by the former scale. Then I just change my balance to rest on the things that I still have and change my picture of the world - very quickly, in a few seconds all through the emotional level too - to fit the new situation in a way that I learned from reading the books of Carlos Castaneda, a Peruvian anthropologist, about indian witchcraft. That makes me adabted very quickly, as well as is possible for me, but leaves my life much thinner after the catastrophes. I need to recover fully, to rebuild my life before I am in full health again.
These ways of mine may seem like alienation from the social context, but my experience is that the more I am under the rule of others, the more they will do things which hurt me. But if I am independent, I can choose my type of social relationship - of the type "live and let others live" - and get a much closer and truly rewarding social relationship to others. Being free, I can give and receive in a good way. If I am captivated in some way, I cannot dodge and so I end up in conflicts with others - especially with the malicious ones. (Maliciousness isn't typical in the traditional Finnsih speaking Finnish culture, but with the masses of foreign influence nowadays it too has become common, so even though most Finns feel compassion toward others, they do not always act according to it - so strongly is the threath from USA felt in social life. The role of USA is so strong that when the "partial enlightenment" spread in my environment, I often felt that others thought that it too should have been especially commanded by the USA before it would have been allowed. Maybe that's why it turned to people going to bed with others who liked their mood instead of creating a lasting effect or a movement. The TV series and songs from the USA are seen as a social compulsion and ruin totally the local moral because the actors and singers seem to lack moral totally. But in any case, for me myself at least the enjoyment that I got from my healthy way to live was bigger than anything that I have gotten from sex, so I was quite disappointed at the end result. One might say that I am not skilled enough in sex and be correct but still I doubt the judgement behind what others did. We had something of worth and now we have no longer. Not that losing my mood would have been caused by them going to bed, it was just the fate, I suspect, or the wish of God... If it was the opinions of the foreigners causing this, may it have been the name of the town: Helsinki, which they didn't like?)
I think that the buddhas have to act according to their feelings, completely. Otherwise they would neglect an important part of their understanding. They would cut their fingers when cutting something by knife, they would not seek for a better enlightenment and their health would get rotten if they didn't care about such things. So flowing toward a better life must be typical for the buddhas. That must mean that to them too things feel different, some more pleasant than others and some less pleasant, something to avoid. Having wise reactions according to each situation is different from having no reactions at all. The importance of following feelings, of finding out which are the good ways to do things, reminds me of the importance of the breathing: by taking a deep relaxed breath we get a better touch with who we are and what we feel about life. Our breathing reflects the situations of life tin which we find ourselves. So being conscious of one's breathing in the daily life, teaches us wisdom of life, the wisdom of feelings. To say this clearly: when we feel squeezed, our breathing becones strained and when we feel at ease, enjoy something from the bottom of our heart, we take a deep relaxed breath. This way noticing how we breathe may make it easy for us to notice the situations in life which either need immediate correcting or are an excellent ground to build upon. Maybe we would notice that also otherwise but our concentration into the healthy ways of living would maybe not be as constant and we might lie to ourselves if we didn't have that good measure stick of deep breathing.
The usual propaganda about not going with one's wantings, refers to not going with greed and not with social tangles. And then it once again gives the advice that one should not have competitive theory-based goals - no such wantings - instead onew should value things themselves and the level of the experience, life itself when not measured my any measure stick. In addition to that there is the need to distance oneself from the social tangles so that one can reach fairness and compassion in everything and get the social relationships to work as well as possible. But otherwise the advice is like that of school teachers and of schools it is rightfully said here in Finland that they do not teach for the school but for life. So the emotions and philosophy of life stay important.
It is said that true buddhists give to others: having an abundant happiness they as social beings want to teach some of that skill to others - even all of it if it just works out in practise. Then there is the helping of the ones in need which is a result of either compassion or the society agreement like way of thinking - or whatever. And one should not attach oneself to the social competition about status etc. Having life as a value makes one give more easily. It is also so that being social beings we need to drag our environment toward a positive direction, we need to share the good things that we have, otherwise we get some social part all wrong.
The joy of life that we got was a very moral phenomenom. I used in my gesture language markings to communicate: well for oneself, like this, while well for all, like our traditional culture demands, so everything is taken into account in this simple view. Even the demands of work life were taken into account, like it should have been possible for others to notice too, in practise, even though that is a complicated matter: see these internet pages of mine about this. This perspective is just a holistic view of the world, of live and let others live. So it was not a question of everybody running free and doing evil things or not working. Instead it was at the same time free and non-destructive, very constructive for happy life in the world at large, a movement for excellent moral in harmony with the demands of the modern working life and the personal quest of happiness of each individual or society. And since it was so easy to learn, it could have spread, maybe even all over teh world in some sense, to some exttend, like what maybe caused wondering in my social environment about the role of USA.
One stumbling block for me was that because it all was so effortless and natural, a part of my environment thought it to be unconsicous, so I was admired behind my back instead of getting a role as a wise person.
I am not good at sitting meditation but I have now later tried it quite many times and tried to think about what is its idea, to feel what would be the correct way to sit and meditate. One exercise that I have figured out is that one should pay attention to one's whole being when one breathes and seek to breathe completely! naturally an as deep breath as possible. That means looking for situations and perspectives in whcih one can go relaxedly and freely with feelings, is deeply liberated and has a good deep emotional contact with life. Such would be the correct way to live, indicated by the breathing. That means living fully, as fully as ever possible.
Typically when people in Finland meditate they try to keep their body in a rigid posture, so their breathing is quite shallow and somewhat mechanical, not including the whole body and mind & emotions. So they reach a state in which they have an even clarity and the world looks somewhat shiny but the body part is outside the phenomenom. I feel it to be a shallow way to live. Instead one should aim at living fully, should drown in the flow of life and meditate about everything that one meets in life, including one's body, emotions, mind, sensed things, observations in thinking etc. The difference here is that one should not shut away anything when one meditates, concentration brought by fascination is a different thing. Drown in the experience.
I do not believe that nasty things can be enjoyed. To me enjoying something means changing the way that one does things, the way that one uses attention and guides one's actions naturally in a non-forcing way, according to feelings. The rigid muscle tension connected to a wrong kind of state of mind isn't enjoyable - how could there otherwise be suffering in the world, except because of illnesses. There must be some habits that are unhealthy. Replacing them by healthier habits is what mildens or removes the suffering. Knowing a wise reaction to some situation is different from the situation not being harmful in itself - read my text about pain: curing pain leaves the weakness!
The meditation posture should be a natural expression of one's state of mind. I like especially the position where the legs form a triangle: it is socially open to others, while the hands that rest on the lap keep one's own balance. Together and alone at the same time in a good way, social and sovereign. The way of sitting upon one's legs is more like a concentration posture, more fitted to the Japanese kind of social context of action together with a group. As a meditaion posture it causes one to shut things away from ome's attention which is contrary to the aim of meditation which should be, according to my experience, a widening of one's awareness with no edges to one's attention. The hands in the lap caress one's feelings as felt in the space in front of the stomach area. They also protect one's inner life from harmful outer influences and seek to keep one's whole emotional self intact, a fractureless harmonious well functioning whole which is both strong and sensitive, sovereign in a positive moral way. These things one can learn by observing the natural expressions of emotions and states of mind in the natural! gesture language.
In meditation and in readhing for the enlightenment it is the same as in everything else: an outer form alone doesn't solve things but can instead squeeze oneself and others to a too small space causing aggression and maliciousness. Instead one must build on real sincere ground, on naturality and on real existing feelings, in ordert to get any result at all, other than maliciousness. Inner situation causes the outer form if one is sincere but an outer form does not build the inner state of affairs but can be used to give space to the inner life if used very skillfully, honestly right. An observation of how things really are is the starting point. Freedom means freedom for the inner life. And enlightenment is a question of complete freedom in harmony with all the others, with their true nature, and in harmony with the nature of the world. Such means seeing to the nature of humans. By observing oneself and one's social environment one can understand the others too. It is a part of humans' nature to be pack animals and the working of a human pack is based on the pack members being able to observe things correctly so ernjoying life presupposes sincerity to a large extend since that's our true nature. We want to influence things toward good for ourselves and for the ones that we love, and the best effect comes via sincerity: we express our real feelings and others understand that all human point of view so agreeing with the worthiness of our goals, working together with us to fullfill those goals, that what is most worthy and emotionally touching in them. Seeing the alikeness in our lives, makes others to see it too. What makes sense to us, makes sense to others too, if it is grounded both emotionally and intellectually. Understanding something well makes it so simple, an everyday life thing, that it is easy for others to grasp too. And since our natures are alike, others will copy your good choises of life.
You may think that I was not enlightened and I might agree with you. But I had the impression that some others thought that was somewhat enlightened, so I write these pages to invite others to travel this far at least - WITH good or even better moral! You may want to read the page Social effect about why I feel oblidged to write about enlightenment too, even though it is maybe the page that I least would have wantted to write, so vague impressions are these after all. Partly at the same reason and partly because my moral oblidges me I have written all my other internet pages too, hoping that other good people would also understand at least this much about these things.
There is a picture of a buddha with the left hand in the lap protects oneself keeping so personal balance and the right hand touching the ground keeping in touch with the flow of life, with the world. I consider that an important lesson: one should always follow one's own instructions of usage - feelings, naturality, balance, freedom, healthy holistic rationality etc - when living in the world. Otherwise one cannot avoid the damage that circumstances happen to cause oneself. Being free from the power of circumstances one can just enjoy the life. Not losing one's balance means not falling to bad habits and wrong kind of attitudes, to non-wise ways.
Sometimes I think that a major lesson of many men in a cold climate is to not to tense muscles rigidly artificially, because such tension creates unpleasant feeling and an unability to feel feelings and atmospheres and to make social perceptions. It also fixes one's attention making its focus small so that one's whole capacity, including intelligence gets much much smaller. Meditation should make the body and mind free but one can aim at the same result also via a straight road, just by observing what one does in this sense and why and how one can change to better ways of living, for example by remembering to go to sauna every week so that one's muscles relax and untangle themselves and the mind gets freed to some extend. Remember to be thorough in your learning, and to apply what you have learned to everything, sometines also to your social contacts. So you will get a much much bigger positive effect - as far as you do not lie to yourself or to others.
If one wants to live life at the level of experience and not in thoughts and imagination anly, one should have as few misconceptions about what it means to experience as possible. Like, one should not forget that humans are physical beings. (Sexuality is another matter.) What we do or experience, we do or experience via the body. The body is what we are, the expression of ourselves, our building material, our essence and not just a tool. So do not tense your body to a rigid meditation posture: so you tense your mind too on those parts that connect to the rigid parts of your body. Consequently you do not get as enlightened by meditating as you could otherwise get with your meditation skills: the wider your concept of the mind that meditates, the wider the meditative part too - and it should include our whole being, our whole life. Instead feel at ease and stop because you feel calm and peaceful, like when on a walk in a forest you stop to admire the scene: the immovability rises from inside of you, caused by the situation.
I do not know anything else about this subject, except that to me at least sports are important.
Have a happy new year!
I might add that my understanding of what enlightenment is is connected to my picture of humans and my picture of the world at large which both I have described on these internet pages. See especially the link Interconnectedness. In short it goes the following way in this context: humans are happy when they live a healthy natural kind of life in a healthy natural environment which includes having an excellent moral. The pieces of that natural life as a part of the natural world are what our functioning is based on, are what welove and what makes us happy. A natural non-grasping attention is a part of that healthy way to live and so is compassion toward all living beings with one's actons based on that fairly so that the end result will be as good as possible. If there is some part in our lives replaced by some artificiality, we cannot enjoy it, except to the extend that it is still like the natural stimulus, the natural part of our lives. We can endure through the artificialities if there are not too many of them, but if there are many of them, we become out of order and suffer, cannot enjoy life. So enlightenment presupposes a natural enough life. Some part of that naturality is in our own ways of functioning but some part also outside ourselves, like the positive effect of admiring pure nature to the state of mind shows. It is natural for us to be enlightened but nowadays we are far away from a that big amount of naturality in our ways of living, so enlightenment has become a skill of functioning well in the artificial environment, one of the artificialities being the effect of schooling - see my texts about thinking. In that we have to build upon the healthy and natural, in a holistic way since that's our natural way to conceive things, a natural way whcih makes us solve some of the problems on the way, like my text All that matters seeks to show. So even the life of an enlightened person would be build upon the naturality still left in our lives.
To be enlightened and to live in the world means to see people with the eyes of compassion, wanting them to get enlightened too. That is a skill that one can teach. One part of that are the compassionate social relations, the free natural and healthy social relationships. So one must look at the other person seeing where the other one supports good ways and where conflicts, ignoring then the conflicts as a possible ground for cooperation and coexistence and building on the compassionate free relationships, teaching that way the good ways to live to others. So one needs to protect oneself in order to be able to communicate that evil doesn't lead to anything but good does. In the gesture language of the formerly discussed buddhas this is the combination of a barrier (= the back side of the hand in front of the body, to protect and to keep balance) and an open graciously giving hand or arm - it is easy to use both of these gestures at the ame time in the same hand: it is a gesture in between the mentioned ends of the spectrum. Typically good things are shown higher in the space than conflicts, so it is possible to turn the back of the hand toward the conflicts and the inside toward the good things, so indicating what one supports and what one resists - teaching so others if they want to listen or are naturally social. This isn't a trick but a clumsy way of saying a natural thing.
The mind isn't an as complicated thing as one might think, as long as one remembers that it comes together with the senses, feelings and the body, and not just the thinking and memory alone. Speech and language skills are like the skills in handywork: they are something done by the mind and not the mind itself, like we can do things with our body. Thinking means observing how things are, as such it is closely related to the sense of sight. Holistic thinking is the natural form of thinking and makes one feel less confused.
The usual basic social advice of the Finnish speaking Finnish culture: "Live and let others live!", while understood to support just true justice and not equality of the good with the evil, is an essential part of my understanding about enlightened social relationships. It is an easy piece of understanding: I live and others live too, let's stay at this level of understanding and let things be so too. It is very free, natural and compassionate. It is very elementary but all that is needed in order to get the whole work well. Free and effortless, very constructive for happy life, like enlightenment should be - as an instantaneous realisation of the right way to live it has to do with naturality, with not forcing things, and with a holistic view of things since that is the natural way to understand the world, this in a way which gives correct conduct at once: something simple, holistic and essential. Things looking simple as a whole may have to do with the intellectual and sensory capacity having been widened by meditation though. Still, the natural way for humans to function, the enlightened mind, should be understandable to all, like this piece of social advice is.
Our thinking is confused. That's one reasong why our lives are a mess. Also the thinking of others is typically confused, so our social lives are a mess too. With compassion and no maliciousness, together with a holistic view of the world, we could all live happily. Freedom isn't uncatchable, it is just unforceable, otherwise it gets destroyed, it is understandable and even controllable if one does not try to force things but just follows the flow of life. Do not have theoretical plans in your mind about how things should be. Instead let the world be like it wants to be. This is the taoist wisdom and connected to the buddhist understanding: like this you give room to naturality, reaching meditation in daily life. Life is in the living, it isn't in our thoughts, grasp each moment of your life to the fullest, advices Tao-te-ching.
My buddhist/taoist perspective: to give up my old theory perspective and to build a new one based on my experiences, based on the sensed world in all its complexity. The atmosphere of this is that of giving up (the old theory) and of flowing with the sensed experiences. So it is like a religious experience, like a prayer which widens one's capacity lightly, easily and enjoyably by giving up bad habits and placing trust in the higher or in the world and in the human nature. Flowing with life.
If it is just enlightenment that you are interested in, I feel that it may be easiest to grasp via the Japanese Zen Buddhist teachings, via the short zen buddhist poems and short stories about someone having gotten enlightened suddenly. Referring to life at the level of natural experience.
"Buddha-babble blocks the way." i.e. all theory is mistaken, is at the wrong level, is pointing to the reality instead of being the reality itself, you must trust life at the level of experience.
There are two kinds of emotions: ones born out of sensations, out of the experienced reality, and ones born out of thoughts. The sensed things are a sure source of information for us and feelings based on them are often positive and trustworthy. But thoughts can often be mistaken, so emotions based on thoughts are often mistaken and hard to bear. Of course we need also thoughts and serious-minded attitude toward thoughts with emotions too understanding about the important matters of life. But the stupid competitive thoughts we should forget and instead concentrate on life in the living and on emotions raised by life at the level of experience.
I tried to explain what buddhism is to a rational atheist relative of mine who didn't know anything about it:
One should live life at the level of experience - that gives happiness - and not in memorised thoughts.
One should not measure things in points or analogiously by some theoretical measure scale of good and poor performance, and bind one's feelings to that result - such is the cause of human suffering, believe the buddhists (if I have understood right!). Instead one should bind one's feelings to the level of experience, to what life feels like in practise.
About reducing also physical pain this way: by paying attention to how one moves one can reduce the strain in the hurt part and so lessen the pain.
One should live fully in practise and not just make theretical plans about the future: maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe after a ten years... Since if ten years pass, it can happen that we lose our health and cannot put our plans into practise. Then we feel betrayed by life as if we were supposed to life for forever. But if we live fully and expess ourselves fully -especially in social relationships and other things which we feel very important - at the present, we can feel satisfied with how we have used our chances, our precious moments upon the Earth.
Like we Finns, buddhists too think that one should feel compassion toweard all living beings and live one's life truly conscientously according to those feelings.
I have practised the Japanese art of defending oneself without hurting anyone, aikido, and learned from it bowing while sitting on my knees. Such a bow puts one's preconceptions down and lets the higher ideals and aware perceptions of the reality into power in one's being. It is good to do every now and then: bow to things which you truly respect and which truly deserve great respect in the world, bow to moral and emotional truths at the same time as to the world at large or maybe to a god that you respect. Give up your old theory perspective and accept the sensory and emotional experience as a source of information.
Flow toward the things that you like and away from the things which hurt you. At the same time be aware of them both. Do not put edges to your perceptions, do not shut away even other things, accept the world in all iots sensory and emotional richness. When you have a thought while meditating and you achieve to just to observe it, do not restrain from reacting naturally to it: do not react as if it were the only thing in the world or in your mind but instead by letting that reaction to be a part of the flow of life in you: just be AWARE of EVERYTHING at the same time, of even things that do not seem of much importance. That is not intellectual awareness but sensory awareness, the kind of noticing how things are instead of putting them to some box in your ready made theory perspective about the world and about maditation. Do not put yourself to any box, just enjoy the complexity of sensed life without needing to react any more than what is natural to you or any less than what is natural to you when you watch things from a sensed and even compassionate point of view instead of from the point of view of feelings which are based on competitive selfish greedy thoughts.
About trying to increase compassion. The easiest way to do this is to love yourself in a way which respects the rule "Live and let others live." When you are happily enjoying life you naturally feel warm toward others. That warmth is a good natural base for compassion. Besides, by following the above rule you set a good example for other to follow, so they will be likely to treat you friendly and compassionately too, since they too will feel warm feelings toward "all" the others.
Sorry to say this, but I think that the cause of suffering is too much wrong kind of schooling. One has to do away with the harmful effect of written language while still keeping the wisdom and understanding bought by schooling. That means that one's thoughts have to be transformed from memorised rules to one's own observations about the world. This is the aim in the Finnish speaking Finnish culture which tends to make people extrely rational in a holistic way and compassionate.
The buddhist teachings say that one should restrain from lying. How to do that in practise in a constructive way, without being harmfully outspoken and without making of oneself a target for others to attack to? Start by talking about things which all humans share: there is nothing dangerous in them and they touch everybody. Follow in your talk the rule "Live and let others live." since it is the most constructive one and most moral one that you can use, with it you can even critisise others because that too will be seen to affect things toward good if you just explain yourself clearly enough. By using this perspective more you will learn it better and your environment will learn it too bringing happiness and harmony to your society, with an increased amount of compassion.
If you could really understand what thinking is a question of, maybe you could become enlightened. Since thinking means noticing how things are. In your mind you build a picture of the reality which should be as much as possible like the reality so that it as a map will guide you correctly in the world. But the right way to use the map of thinking is with your own eyes open so that you can see the whole landscape instead of just the things on the map. That way you can correct the map of your thoughts which is just a tool and nothing to replace the reality with. Life is in the living, thinking is in noticing things and life too is in enjoying the senses - which are your means of making correct observationbs about the world. Also, when you bacome better at thinking, you begin to notice how you yourself affect what you observe: at some moment you may be sensitive to sounds i.e. you are listening, at another moment you may be so preoccupied by thinking that you can hardly notice what happens around you. In order to make the best possible observations about your environment you must be in right mode for it and do things in right ways to succeed as well as possible. That means that you must pay attention to yourself in order to cevelop in thinking and noticing things. In the end rationality equals sensitivity. A completely enlightened person should easily learn to be very rational: by making slight observations about oneself and about the world and about thinking one could correct the thought errors away and follow rright practises. But it may be that a conscious non-neglecting practise in thinking is an easiewr road to that - unless you manage to be like the taoisrt master who does everything without doing anything, also in questions of thinking. That trick has to do with naturality: the most natural ways are the most effective one since they follow the principles of functioning of humans, human societies and of the natural world. And naturality in ways of action and in ways of using the attention is what buddhism is about too. No wonder that meditation makes one's capacity manyfold!
To be aware = to awaken to the reality with all your senses and soul
Suffering is born out of INTELLECTUAL attachement to which we bind our feelings. Instead we sould bind our feelings to what life feels at the level of living it, at the level of the senses with a wide awareness and in our soul, and live each moment to the fullest.
How and why does enlightenment bring excellent moral? Enlightenment means natural sensitive light attention everywhere, it means a non-forcing way of doing things, kind of flowing with the natural flow of life, with the soul of things. So enlightenment is not possible if one wants to shut away parts of things like is typical for evil ones to shut away the feelings of others and the good of others, the needs of harmonious social life, the needs of the future of us all etc. So evil ones try to flow with selfishness and that produces just tangles and unhealthy attachement instead of the attachement to naturality which brings freedom and is the base of enlightened life. Free light attention flows with the lives of others too, finding the easiest most harmonious routes in social life WHEN WATCHED FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE WHOLE WORLD WITH ALL THE FUTURE TOO TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT. That means justice and not a non-harming attitude toward those who use such softness as a helping aid in hurting others. So a holistic view may be essential in order to get the buddhist advices to work.
The buddhist enlightened one is one who has found the one and only right healthy and natural way to live. So the enlightened one is not out of order but instead fully functioning in all respects. Such means an enermous capacity in everything that one is enlightened in. The enlightened one is at the same time free and completely in control, stabile and moving, effortless and achieving, aware and relaxed, very emotional and very rational, sensitive and strong,...
Intellectually a non-neglacting attitude is constructive for enlightenment. That is one side of the required wide awareness.
One thing which we have discussed at the buddhist center of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Helsinki, the capital of Finland and a neighbouring town, is that what should be one's attitude to tough experiencies in life. I think that one's life is based on the good sides, so that's what one should build upon and go through the tough things only as much as one has strenght each moment. Meditation can help and give extra strenght and a good way to live. If the tough thing is already past and its memory does not leave you alone, try to rebuild your picture of the world based on your experiencies, so that both the good and bad sides are represented: from the good things you can get strenght and the bad things you can from now on guard against - the world wasn't like what you imagined it to be like, that's one reason why you were hurt. If someone close to you died, you an think of the impermanence of things: as a child your parents were not always with you, somethimes they were doing something else that de,manded their attention, sometimes they were in a shop, sometimes they were at wqork, sometimes travelling far away, even each time that you were with them was slightly different. When your parents were not present you built upon other things that you had, like friends, other adults, nice things that one can do alone etc. So life is never twice exactly the same. There isn't a box like hole in your life demanding to be filled just by your mother - she has a place in your life, yesw. but thoings are more complex than that. Just shift your weight to rest on the things that you still have in each kind of things. And if someone is uglier than you rthpought possible, refuse to be social with them and barry their bad deeds like you would barry if they were wild animals doing those things during the night. Surviving through something really tough like losing something essential: live at the level of experience with a wide meditative awareness, that can give you some contect to your life, some joy of life, make you stronger, lessen the pain and lessen the danger of more damage since it makes you more reactive. Avoid measuring your situation on the former scales on which you now do very poorly. Instead build new scales based on the level of experience as it now is and on your present observations about how your life is like and what are your possibilities in life. Guide your life according to the new theory perspective and not the old one. Remember that even though you lost a lot (Maybe one could use this method even if one had lost a limb, but I do not know anyone having tried, anyway, one could learn new ways of moving and new strategies of life this way.), your experience maybe taught you something (the above) which makes you nearer enlightenment... Just live your liufe with all your understanding and especially at the level of experience: admire the beuty of nature, of fvlowers, pictures, of people, music, sport, poetry - whatever you happen to have, beauty lifts the mid to a less depressed, more fractureless state and can cause continuous enjoyment even if things are not otherwise well. Religion typically affects so too. Let your new theory scale and living the life at the level of experience become habits. Now youy know that theory isn't as trustworthy as you believed before.
Do not guide your observations by your theory perspective. "This exists and that not." Instead let your awareness cover all kinds of things and take the time to do each thing that your perception ability demands to have. Do not shut your mind's eyes to the reality. Do not make edges to your attention, let it instead cover a wider and wider space. Just sensing lightly can be meditation, so you can widen the meditation to cover your whole life.
1) No measuring of one's life in point scales 2) A wide awareness, not closing anything away, especially not the level of experience 3) Flowing with life, having a gliding glance instead of conceiving the world as if consisting of word like blocks, flowing from one experience to another: oh how beautiful here the blue colour, and that form of a plant, those people over there, the wind blowing and the sun shining... And going on like this forever, even thinking in this way: like this feels this phenomenom which is like this, its environment and its importance in the world feel like this and are like this etc., the attention shifting glidingly from one thing to another neighbouring one via fact associations (including structural analogs, i.e. atmosphere and emotional associations - see my texts about the rationality of feelings and about objective thinking with feelings and atmospheres.) in one's holistic view of the world which is formed of life at the level of experience so that it is meaningful and pleasant to experience at the same time as being very objective since it is not imagination and since its connection to the reality is surely right.
Read my text emotional and objective in order to understand how one can be objective at the same time as being completely emotional and/or sensitive to atmospheres and sensations which have nothing to do with one's thinking.
Enlightenment in Finland in Europe is a different thing from enlightenment in Asia because the cultural inheritage is different. There is no counter force like in Asia where the sticking to non-violence creates an opposite unenlightened end of the spectrum which seeks power via the use of force. Intead with my emphasis and with the emnphasis of the local culture of justice and responsibility over the whole world without unrealism cure the need for opposing forces away and enlibghtenment becomes everybody's movement for a better life, better world and success in all areas of life. We find from ourselves what enlightenment is like. There is no separation between it and our culture. Even Christianity is not separate: the moments of buddhist wisdom of life have often been my moments of religious awe in the Christian sense, so one could see buddhism as a road which leads toward christianity too ibn addition to bveing a road toward a grerater happiness.
The following letter of mine connects so clearly to the Buddhist enlightenment that I add it here.
"I have watched a video of the Swedish Royal Ballet dancing Swan Lake. I enjoy watching it but at the same time I wonder: what is that feeling of stiffness, weakness of spirit that I often have noticed as a part of the atmosphere of ballet when watching it in TV or otherwise, even in the movements of those whose hobby ballet is. Having read many times the Taoist classic Tao-Te-Ching which tells about masterful skill, I notice that the problem may be the one described in that book: One forms oneself a predetermined idea of what the dance movements, beauty and love are like and so in fact stays in contact only with one�s memory and the level of thoughts instead of with the lively ground for these goal like things, the ground which makes them forever new and enthralling and dazzling in the eyes of others. This ground is the true naturality of all intentions: free life completely according to the emotions and to the wishes of each moment, of each part of a second, it is life at the level of the senses, at the level where you flow (instead of being a fixed thought structure �this one is in love�) lingering for a moment in one things, aiming for something else the next moment, where you do not form yourself fixed rules of behaviour �I am now in a situation demanding behaviour like this.� But where the action rises from the needs of the situation in a completely natural way, where you use your whole capacity to the fullest without being enclosed inside some borders defining the situation � where your love for dance and for the things that in your eyes connect to it, is what makes you perform the movements at all � while your mind wanders freely to whatever yourt herart wishes and that love for those things and the love for life born from that enjoyment of those things is expressed also in your dance. Well, this is very far of what I ever could myself do � I have never danced ballet, not as a child � but this is one thing what masterful skill is about. So maybe it is your task to try, to see the idea between my lines and to try it into your lives� "
About the metta exercise: if you first take care of yourself, take care that you haver things we�� or are happy, you naturally feel warmth toward others. Let that warmth born from your own healthy ways of living, your own freedom and emotionality, be the base for your loving kindness. It is just by loving yourself that you get the strenght needed for loving others.
About my ability to overcome shortcomings in life: when you notice that some arrangement of things is not good: makes you feel bad and leads to nothing, abandon that way of reacting to life and seek the pure ground for your possibilities in life just now and in the future, placing your weight in that which really can give you strenght and which does give you strenght. Enjoying the happiness of healthy ways of living, you have the ground for overcoming the difficult thing too. Remember that it is good to feel sorrow in any case so that you do ot needlessly lose any important things from your life.
Here is a writing excercise of mine which might make you understand what it was all about. The point has to do with the Taoist wisdom of not acting according to some predecided perspective, and with the Buddhist idea of no form versus form. Here is my text:
Absence makes the heart grow fonder (We were given this non-Finnish header and the task of illustrating it somehow in our text excercise.)
I used to practise aikido which is a Japanese martial art
concentrating solely on defence without hurting anyone. I liked its
philosophy especially. But I was a slow learner. The rigid forms of
movement and the always evasive style of reaction were in
contradiction with my character. I wanted something straightforward
which one could do in a way that arises straight from one's heart and
which one could fully concentrate into. So I started karate and sought
a philosophically inclined karate club. Of one club, Wadokan, the
oldest one in Finland, I was told that they parctised seriously. I
visited the first lesson of their beginners' course and was
immediately in love with karate. The lesson was led by a woman with a
sturdy friendly sporty style: the chairwoman of the Finnish Karate
Association. I came to admire and respect her very much. She was so
heart felt in what she did, in a practical social way. I came to love
her lessons, loving the whole karate course with its various teachers.
I grasped eagerly each advice that I was given and mimicked each
karate movement of the teachers. I learned enermously much and enjoyed
life maybe more than any time before in my life. The challenge meeting
a beginner was so enermous that I was able to use my full capacity in
the training. My completely non-aggressive character found the freedom
of the straightforward karate movement liberating, shedding light to
my whole life. And from me the light spread to the environment making
my social contacts glad too. That too was new to me. Never before had
I had such a flourishing social life. Now years later I still remember
those times as if they had been full of sunshine. I long for them. The
stagnated forms of all already known things in my life threaten to
strangle me, taking away the joy of life, the pure happiness of living
with full speed according to one's heart's wishes.
When I was a beginner on a karate course, I didn't know what karate
was. So in a way karate was absent to me. There was only my heart's
voice to listen to.
Some remarks on meditation
Metta: metta rises from meditation. Metta is not a question of contemplating compassion. It is a question of tuning to the state of mind and way of living which produce a compassionate state of mind.
Meditation is a question of resting in yourself! Let yourself be what you are, follow your heart's voice and conttemplate on how to make more room for your own feelings where you need it. That brings a warm friendly attitude toward others: they are the ones letting you to live according to your feelings, they give you this wonderful chance to experience life in all its beauty and warmth. Use a holistic picture of the world in which you do not take sides but rememeber to care for yourself especially: if you are nothing to yourself, you cannot serve as an example to others about how to live, you cannot give them happiness by your own example. But if you find the right happy way to live for yourself without hurting others - by remembering to follow the rule "Live and let others live."! - you can just by passing by, just by existing, solve many of the problems of others. Carry responsibility about the world at large: it is our pleasure to live in an as good world as possible - caring for that should not be a burden for anyone. And it isn't as long as you rememeber that one should not sacrifice the good ones or the good in life but the bad ones and the suffering i life instead.
Maybe this summarises what it is/was about:
A paradise movement
I love Life, happiness and things positive for happy life
- like most of the others, like You too.
That means that I support from my heart
the arrangements in the world which support good life,
moral in this sense of the word.
This is all that is needed for a better world.
(Speaking out this view is also a good way to win new friends.
It works well also wordlessly, on gesture language.)
What is meditation like? Meditation measn awareness, so it feels like teh things that you are aware of. It is at the same time more spiritual and more down to earth than I thought possible, lighter and fuller than how I have otherwise experienced life. Meditation is not a trick. Meditaion means being aware in the middle of life: that's why it brings a fuller experience of life and a more sensitive touch with things which makes it possible to avoid accidents and just flow with life. Being at least partly at the level of sensations it is more down to earth than ordinary life which is so easily coloured by thoughts, and being wide in awareness it makes it possible to balance life and so gain a spiritually sensitive state of mind at the same time: a holistic view of the situations at the level of perceptions of sensations and of atmospheres. As such meditation brings a deeper satisfaction with life, being fullfilling in many seemingly opposite ways at once.
How to reach this: think that meditation means being aware of your life at the level of experience: the senses, sensations, social feelings, bodily sensations, feelings, atmospheres, the way that thoughts affect your physical body and make your action at least momentarily fixed, the way that thoughts relate to the reality, to your perception sof the world which should be what they refer to and not some unchanging separate real of thoughts, your true motivation and true goals in life, your heart's wishes... This is a way to live to the fullest and to guide your life with your whole capacity toward what is good for you: reach for the positive (positive also for others i.e. moral) and avoid the negative things. This does not6 mean guiding your life by the level of the thoughts, instead it means flowing with the emotions!
Oh, maybe I should write about the impermanence of things in case that that really is my strong side.
Typically we live under the illusion that the world is constant and try to find the constant features of our esperience. This error is created by the importance of memorised thoughts to us. It makes our experience shallow since there is so very little which really stays unchanged. What life can give to ur is at the level of actually living the life, so you should drown in the experience, into its ever varying conplexity, concentrating on each little thing that our senses meet instead of justy recognising the unchanging features of the phenomena. To me this is important for the joy of life. It gives me much of the content to my life � not just the senses but social things and compassion too at the level of experience plus the feelings and atmospheres that I experience.
My boyfriend caught a cold. He has an orange autumn jacket and didn't agree to change it to a green winter coat until he really caught a flu from the cold. I guess that we should by him a new orange winter coat. So the question is: how does buddhism help to a flu and to other illnesses? If you think about something, you get stressed, tensing your muscles, getting ready to some kind of action, regardless of the illness that says that you need rest. But if you on the other hand relax, let thoughts go and enjoy the warm feeling given by a thick blanket, the relaxedness of your muscles, the feeling of just resting, then you listen to what your body, its instinctual wisdom says about what you need at this very moment: what gives refreshment, enjoyment and time to let your body and mind cure themselves. Consequently you get the rest that you need, just in ways that suit your body the best and which let your mind rest too, and so you will get healthy easier and quicker - just by listening to yourself and not your thoughts only.
In thinking you should always refer to the reality at the level of experience, so that you do not stay at the level of your unchanging thoughts but refer to the reality in all its variety. For examle the word "timid" looks unchanging, like one entity but when you relate it to your own experience it becomes so wide and varied concept that you have to divide it to several subdomains: a little bit timid in this specific way for these specific reasons, or more timid in another or the same way for other reasons, etc. So a word gets replaced by an experienced landscape, the level of thoughts by the level of life in the living. This is a move toward greater objectivity and greater happiness. It makes you get rid of the unsatisfying and unrealistical level of thoughts and get a grasp of what the life in the living can offer. Typically it is just fixed thoughts which make us suffer, make us irritated at life and at others, make small children cry. Life in the living does not have those drawbacks, it makes us enjoy. Even physical pain can be lessened by having a holistic awareness of one's whole being and of life at large: such makes it possible for us to avoid needless strain and the suffering caused by it. When we have done all that we can to avoid such strain, we can relax: there is no need to feel any pain, so there will not be any pain.
If we can have both strawberries and ice cream, that is better than having just ice cream. Similarly, the wider we can experience the reality, the more we can enjoy it. Thus awareness brings happiness unimaginable: by a bigger capacity you can reach abigger enjoyment.
If you notice things, you can take thme into account. Just flow away from the negative things and toward those things which cause you positive feelings. So easy is the road toward enlightenment. A little by little you will learn the art of happiness if you just are aware of things, being able to take them into account in the above way. Do what suits you the best, what brings you happiness. This helps you to be true to the voice of your own heart instead of following some doctrine too literally. This helps you to use your full capacity in the Buddhist road instead of just some flattened shadow of what you could find by yourself, by following your true heart. For example, for me the sitting meditation isn't the right thing to do: I always enjoy meditative feelings in the middle of the daily life much more, greatly more: that is my own road at least for the time being. I sometimes try to sit though, in order to learn: do everything just the way that FEELS right for you!
I wrote a letter about Buddhism (Sorry, it is in Finnish language):
Buddhalaisuudesta (artikkelisarja uskonnollisista yhteis�ist�)
Hei,
Ollessani eilen Helsingin buddhalaisessa keskuksessa oli siell� Hesarin toimittaja tekem�ss� juttua. Mieleeni tuli n�in j�lkik�teen, ett� minulla on er�s n�k�kulma, jonka toivoisin teid�n ottavan artikkelissanne huomioon:
Buddhalaisuus on sukua objektiiviselle ajattelulle
Buddhalaisuus on onnen tavoittelua tiedostamisen avulla: kun huomaamme, millainen el�m�mme on ja millaisia itse olemme, voimme tuon hava�ntomme pohjalta korjata el�m��mme parempaan p�in. Havaitsevuus on siis buddhalaisuuden perusta ja ihan sama asia kuin objektiivisen ajattelun vaatima havainnonteko. Buddhalaisuutta voineekin luonnehtia it�maiseksi psykologiaksi eik� niink��n uskonnoksi. Sekaannus lienee l�ht�isin siit�, ettei l�nsimainen ihminen heti ymm�rt�nyt miten istuminen ja rentoutuminen voi antaa tilaa objektiivisuudelle p��st�m�ll� irti j�hmettyneiden ennakkoasenteiden konemaistavasta vaikutuksesta ja antamalla tilaa aidolle havaitsevuudelle aivan kuten luonnossa liikkuminen rentouttaa ja avaa aistit. Lis�ksi buddhalaisuus suosittaa korkeaa moraalia keinona tulla yhteis�n kanssa toimeen, mik� on uskonnollisen kaunis piirre. Objektiivisuudessaan buddhalaisuus kuitenkin ohittaa jopa l�nsimaisen psykologian, joka helposti mallittaa todellisuutta etuk�teiskuvitelmien puitteissa sen sijaan, ett� tyytyisi pakottamattomaan l�sn�oloon itse el�m�ss�, siis h�iritsem�tt�m��n objektiiviseen havaintoon kuten buddhalaisuus opettaa tekem��n. Siin� miss� l�nsimainen psykologia k�sittelee ihmisen mielt�, ihmist� sosiaalisena, yhteis�llisen�, tuntevana, ajattelevana, havaitsevana ja toimivana olentona, buddhalaisuus tarjoaa mallin onnistuneesta tekemisest� (zen), yhteis�ss� el�misest� (metta) sek� mielest� (buddhaluonto, buddhalainen viisaus) ja el�m�n onnesta (samadhi). Buddhalaisuus siis p��see siihen, mihin l�nsimainen psykologia vain pyrkii, onhan kyseess� vieraan kulttuuripiirin monituhatvuotinen ihmisviisaus!
T�ss� siis buddhalaisuus ateistisen kielenk�yt�n l�pi. Kokeilkaa itse, jollette usko. Ihan jo p��ttelem�ll� voisi havaita, ett� buddhalaisuudessa on paljon j�rke�.
Kristinuskon n�k�kulmasta buddhalaisuus lienee avoimin silmin katsottuna el�m�� siten kuin Jumala tahtoo meid�n el�v�n, el�m�� sellaisina kuin miksi Jumala on meid�t luonut. My�s siksi buddhalaisuus olisi arvokas lis� kulttuuriimme.
Levitess��n buddhalaisuus voisi parantaa suomalaisten sosiaaliset taidotkin: tarjota paikkansapit�v��, itse todeksi havaittua, moraalisesti rakentavaa ymm�rryst� ihmisen� olemisesta ja yhteis�n toiminnasta.
Yst. terveisin Hannele Tervola, Espoo
Suffering is typically caused by intellectual fixations toward a certain state of things in life. Fixation that emotions cause us to different states in life is different, it ought not cause any suffering: feelings are a natural part of our lives, we have natural reactions to them, their task is to help in living and gaining happiness, not to disturb us in any way. Please see my pages at www.paradisewins.net/feelings.html for the appropriate reactions to feelings. The nasic thing that feelings do is to give things correct emphasies according to their roles in our lives and in the lives of others.
Buddhism allows lots of room fot true objectivity. The social ways suggested by its meditation posture resemble those of the Finnish speking Finnish culture. The legs and the hands in the lap make a border, a barrier against the outer world, inside of which one can stay balanced as if one were alone. On the other hand, the openness of the posture suggests that one is in friendly terms with the rest of the social world - as long as it stays outside the border. Individual understanding together with a nonpersonal holistic view of the world give room to objectivity. This is contrary to the customs of those cultures which (like the Swedish) keep people all the time inside some cultural context, so determining what things should be like. Such does not give enough room to the freedom of individuals. Theuy ougt tp be cured. One way to do so is to sit and so learn what is the natural way to live, both by oneself and in the world at large, and so arrange the ewolrd according to one's heart's understanding - also rationally so and not only on the condition that one is already enlightened. Freedom ought to be positive for one's possibilties of enlightenment since things that force oneself to unhealthy ways of living are a burden which makes enlightenment more difficult.
Yesterday in the Buddhist center there was talk of three kinds of samadhi: pictureless samadhi, directionless samadhi and the samadhi of emptiness. Knowing nothing much of the subject, I tried rephracing them in my own language: the first would be living ast the level of the sensatons, the second would be reaching for balance in one's way of life and the third one would be the richness of life.
If I would be allowed to give one advice on meditation to the Westerners or at least to the Finish speaking Finns, I would say that "You are allowed to exist and you are allowed to act". That would have a liberating effect which would open one's awareness.
Oriental philosophy and objectivity
What do we get stuck on when we reach for good objectivity, for a good picture of what the world is like? It is obviously the inability to form such a picture: the inability to correctly observe what the world is like. So just observations are cruxial. This is essential for anyone intelligent to notice. Still much of science and schooling at large is done without regard for the observations of the individual: everything observed is observed by someone, even if measure equipments are in use. So the abilities of each one as an observer are of extreme importance. One should know one's own faults as well as one's strong points. One should know that one can concentrate one's attention so that one notices a narrow range of phenomena well but missed everything else, and one should also know that one can train one's arttention to observe more and better: such training is the core of the ages old orintal wisdom: of taoism and buddhism. Both of them are typically classified as religions but a more communicative, a more understanding approach would notice their strong connection with objectivity, their usefulness from the purely wordly point of view. In essence they are nearer to good quality psychology than to religion. We would have a lot to learn from them if we really are interested in true objectivity in everything.
Reddish colours together with green lead to good quality objectivity
Blue has been the traditional colour of thiking, so people turn to the
atmosphere of blue when they seek to increase their ability to
objectivity. But that is all wrong: the blue colour is cold and
distances the person from the level of actual percetions. Blue is the
rest colour of an emotional thinker, that is why it is commonly
connected with objectivity, I guess. In any case, thinking consists of
perceptions of what the world is like. So the base of thinking is in
correct observations made by the senses, that is the ground and the
building material of all our thinking. From those perceptions we know
what the world is like, and we can unifie them to a picture of the
whole world by our ability to observe – based on our experience of
life – what are the common features that stay unchanged from situation
to situation. For example all people need food and they guide their
actions with the help of their own understanding, even though often
social and emotional things matter a lot.
So what is the colour of accurate sure perceptions about the world?
For a holistic view of the world which you need to form in your mind
(here live I, there is the street, there the food shop that I visit
daily, there the river and the houses where my friends live with huge
trees growing in the garden,… A picture of the whole world in this
way, of all that you know: placing things to a map of the world, where
you can zoom in and out, you get easily and naturally the best
possible holistic view of the world!), the colour of observing that
holistic view in your mind is the colour for observing a landscape
with lively eyes: GREEN!
For making accurate observations in your daily life in order to add
them to your picture of the world, to understand those sides of life
better, you need vivid eyes, alive in the middle of the action. That
is the colour of energetic movement with all the senses open to
receive life: ORANGE. This must be one of the major aims of the
ancient Buddhist in choosing the orange colour to symbolise Buddhism:
if you keep your eyes open, you will learn at least something about
the things that you meet in your life. And so you will be able to
guide your life better: to live a happier life!
For understanding what the things in your life mean to life, to your
own life and to others as well as to the world at large: how they
affect your living environment which determines your chances in life,
you need feelings: feelings about your own life, compassion toward
others and feelings about the living environment and the ways of
living (= feelings about the nature, moral and ideals at least).
Feelings reflect the importance of things to life. This is easy to
understand with extremes, like if someone dies, that leaves a dark
atmosphere, and if a new baby is born, that brings a very positive
reddish atmosphere. Similarly with other things in life feelings
indicate whether something is positive or negative. In this one needs
to be analytical: there are several sides to each thing, both positive
and negative, so we typically feel in many different ways about each
thing in life. The goal in observing feelings is to follow the
positive feelings and to get rid of the causes of negative feelings:
rid of needless destruction at the same time as cultivating healthy
happy natural and moral (moral means health of the society and that is
good for yourself because health is the strongest and happiest option)
way s of living. So the goal is to aim at the reddish direction. By
loving the RED colour in its unsymbolical form we give room to
feelings. That helps us to safeguard the health of ourselves, of our
social relationships (helathy = most beneficial, says the theory about
evolution's competition) and of our living environment. Noticing
feelings when thinking makes us observe the signifigance of things to
life. That is why the red colour makes you strong.
THE ADVANCEMENT OF BUDDHISM AND THE WAY TO GIVE AND RECEIVE GIFTS EVEN WHEN IT INCLUDES MONEY
If Buddhism means reaching for the right way to live, one should adobt it on all areas of life, also in working life and in the major currents, forces of the world, like the reaching for a high anough income is. So I think that one should bring bUddhism to working life in a way that would make its usefulness as a tool visible also to those who have very different values to begin with. For that I consider my work efficiency perspective almost ideal: it unifies BUddhist meditation with the european convincing search for the healthy way to live and with our love for the nature, which too brings a kind of meditative state of mind. The nonforcingness of meditative attention fits well together with following feelings fully and being sensitive to atmospheres and sensations, forming so a sure ground for objectivity and bringing excellent motivation - just what the modern work and school life needs! So I made an internet page about this at workingbuddha.page.tl
I really wonder if one should sell Buddhism to those who are not otherwise interested in it in the least. Since thus BUddhism would spread and affect things toward better while gaining respect in new areas of life. Zen Buddhism with its emphasis on masterful skill offers an example of what Buddhism could offer to the working life. But if it does not cost anything, it is seen as a religion: as something which disturbs business instead of benefitting it, like you would see the benefit because others too have bought Buddhist advice. By this I do not mean that BUddhism itself should cost anything, I mean just that companies ought to pay for Buddhist education packages that have especially been planned for their needs, which increase the beneficiality of their work via more Buddhism... That would be a way to gain more respect for Buddhism. To the ordinary individuals, to organisations etc. Buddhism should not cost anything.
How to arrange this in practise? One should take individuals who are not bound by Buddhist tradition, who can make a mixture of Buddhism and of some other things that would suit the companies especially well. The other things ought to be morally right too: like the advancing of good moral, healthy ways of living, healthy emotionality and the love for the nature! Then just find out what is the market price for such good advice. It surely is very different (much much higher price (= market price for such an useful insight into the human nature and into the working ability, and for a skilled teacher in such) but also more unconventional ways) in the Western world where there is almost no Buddhism, than what it would be where Buddhism is well known (low price (to pay the costs of the teacher etc.) and ways according to tradition?). The income should of course be used morally right: for the living of the teachers etc and the surplus to support Buddhism, for example in the poor countries or where it is most needed. For example one might try unifying the bUddhist awareness with the observation ability taht is supposed to be taught in schools, i.e. with the quest for objective thinking that is world wide, and which could support the spreading of Buddhism in some simple form, like "observe what your life is like, so that you can guide it better" and "live your life at the level of the experience, so as to not lose touch with who you really are, and in order to enjoy life the most".
To live freely according to one's own nature, to let others live freely according to their own nature, social life in harmony...
How to create good will to others around yourself
The Metta exercise teaches to you how the good will of humans arises from freedom to live according to the voice of one's own heart. Living happily you are naturally more tolerant and even good willing toward others.
Similarly if you in social contacts refer to the natural everyday states of mind and ways of living from which in your experience the Buddhist happiness and freedom arise, other who are social with you will take them as temporary guidelines for themselves, be happier for a moment and so also good willing in their social contacts. In other words: live in a wise natural happy way and communicate that to others via everyday concepts common to all: here I am aware like one doing gardening work, here I didn't grasp unwisely the nasty side of what others did but instead laughed at it like one who prefers happy life to the stupid nasty malicious games of social position or whatever, here I follow my feelings, enjoying sensations (the sunlight, sound of water splashing, nice colours,...) and healthy natural friendly every day sosiality according to the "rule" "Live! and let others Live!", valuing my personal integrity in the sense of following my feelings but enjoying also helping others to do the same.
THis video is in fact about the Tao but you can apply it also to the Buddhist enlightenment.
Think at the end of breathing out relaxedly, not when inhaling or holding your breath.
Meditating eyes open int the nature is much more efficient than meditating inside.
Relax for meditation, both your body and mind. The breathing should be completely relaxed and natural, unforced and effortless.
Relaxation ought not be like slumber, death like, instead it ought to be lively, completely effortless, light and ready to move according to emotions and sensations. From this natural relaxation arises a natural posture which is alive, effotless, completely uinforced, not striven for but naturally arising from your alive relaxation.
Together with completely relaxing yoru facial muscles (and the rest of your body) relax your state of mind, let go of conscious striving for, of reactions to your situation in life and seek for balance and harmony, even when that means rising above your situation of life, kind of neglecting it for the time being.
In concentrating on your breath, do not shut away the rest of the immediate physical environment. (And as you get more skilled in keeping in meditation, not any of your environment.) Do not put edges to your attention, even though you may emphasise the things that you are concentrating in.
Breathing is a natural stimulus which makes you relax and get a grasp of the right way to live. Just let go of everything else - without shutting it away! - and in a short while you will get increased capacity for handling the other thinsg too, but this time more meditatively, more enjoyably.
What is meant by naturality in Taoism and Zen Buddhism?
Naturality means that you do not decide things beforehand, forcing them to be of a certain kind.
But instead feel, sense the flow of life, how it naturally goes.
You do not interfere with that flow with thoughts.
But of course you can guide the flow to its natural aims via roads that you see and feel to work well.
Still it is natural flow according to emotions and instincts, and
natural reactions born from sensations, feelings etc.
And not anything robot like.
Life in its liveliest form! Completely unforced...
(Don't forget to use a holistic view of everything - it solves the problems that you might meet.)
A thought about the meditation posture:
You ought to have your personal feelings and "selfishness" innermost, outside that secured area a barrier against the evil deeds of others and social feelings, including compassion and hate, outside the barrier (formed by your hands) and outmost a world wide moral, kind of the context of your actions.
Today we discussed in the bUddhist center about hate. Others mentioned as a rigid rule that hate is not good and ought to be avoided fully. I could not help but mention thta in my own life my own aggression has been a positive force which has given me more room to live in, put things straight so that I have been able to enjoy personal integrity and harmony with the others, and learned meditation... But this of course demands that one is moral when one is aggressive - completely moral with a holistic view to the world! And one must always attack just the real cause of the anger and not something else, an easier target, like many people mistakenly do. And one must not cling to anger. One must just react according to the situation, in a way that refreshes the air, making it good to breathe. Defending the good things in life and in the wolrd! I asked how else defend them but got no answer...
Anger is different from agitation felt because of the circumstances of one's life: that ought to be guided toward constructive action to cure those bad sides of life away. Typically we feel negative feelings mostly because of the biggest factors in our life: the work, closest human relationships, the (upper class?) culture's bad sides,... Those are typically the most difficult ones to cure, but still: one ought to guide one's forces toward taking some more emotional distance from them and to curing them in peaceful, happy and moral means.
In the metta exercise relax your stomach so that you gain room for your feelings. From having room for living according to yoru feelings you get warm feelings also toward the others who let you live nicely that way.
Robot likedness and Buddhism are opposites.
Yesterday at the Buddhist center there was talk about the things to avoid: hate, greed and ignorancy. I suggested replacing ignorance with negligiency, an uncaring attitude. Because often ignorancy gives birth to beiung aware which is a good thing. And on the other hand saying that ignorancy is not for good leads one to robot like following the things that one manages to find out. The triplet hate, greed and uncaring attitude strikes the eye as being similar: destructive in its negligience, block like and stupid in thinking and too much target oriented. It is an opposite to already the good sides of the everyday awareness with its open-mindedness, common sense, good will and enjoyment of life. The next step to the same direction ought to be like succesfull meditation in motion: like the enjoyment of a summer day in the nature with warm free and sincerely friendly social relations.
From yesterday's Dharma discussion at the Buddhist ceter in Helsinki:
The more I come to think of it, it seems that Buddhism is a counter reaction to the negative effects of school: all are forced to go to school for years and years and we learn there via reading school books so that our whole thinking gets affected by the looks of written text. But written text is just a means of remembering and communicating to wide masses, it aren't planned for its effect in thinking and in the ways of living. Still, it affects those things enermously - negatively! - and Buddhism is a counter reaction to that: back to the undisturbed perceptions of the individual, to our natural ways of living, to the real base for all our abilities including objectivity!
Yesterday's subject was three hindrages: one's picture of the self, cynical doubt and sticking to religious beliefs and rituals - if one manages to overcome these obstacles, one is said to have entered the flow. I would say that if one manages to overcome one's schooled ways of thinking and reach real naturality of observations of life from moment to moment, the real base for one's objectivity, then one is in touch with one's true nature instead of only with words and fixed concepts, and can perceive things as they are at each fraction of a second, live like a human being is intended to live and be happy.
If you breathe in, you get ready for action according to feelings: your sphere of attention rises like as if you saw more light. When you breathe out, you relax, let go of action, as if it would be getting darker in the evening. Where in inhaling your attention is in yourself, in outhaling it is in your whole environment. Thinking while inhaling in a build environment makes you stupid and block like in your thinking, while thinking while inhaling in a nature environment makes you inspirated and fascinated by the action. Thinking at the end of outhaling, makes you wise in a holistic way: you observe without difficulty all the things in your environment.
Agitation that you do not like is usually born out of the artificialities in the world: poor artificial ways of thinking, build environment, mindless customs etc. Just see how the functioning of the world is build upon pieces of the healthy natural world - like what is the real constructive intention behind each action, what is the correct place for that kind of action in the whole world & society - and you will see how the different sides of life fit together in harmony - see my other pages for examples of this? This might be the same as seeing the Buddha nature in everyone, but quite abstractly...
How one should practise? Finding something of value you notice it from the pleasing atmosphere: THIS I would like to add to my whole life! Just cultivate those things, kind of paint your whole life with those pleasant colours. You do not need to dedicate yourself artificially - if you do so artificially, you have noticed something ugly too that you want to avoid. The best and most natural route to your goals is to pick trhe bnice things and drop the ugly things away. This works well if you are honest and sincere toward YOURSELF and pay attention to how things connect so that you do not lie that you can take one nice wall of a house and live comfortably without the other walls' support. In other words: USE A HOLISTIC VIEW OF EVERYTHING (see /thinking.html) WITH THE CONNECTIONS OF INTERTWINED THINGS MARKED UP IN IT CLEARLY! So just dive into the good moral pleasant religiously beautiful things that you manage to find. That purifies your life so that the next time you will find something even better! Find the soul in the things that you do and generalise the soul to your whole life, finding so new insuight to everything that you do...
Sometimes there is in the radio a song where the phrace "LIFE as a mantra" gets repeated. I talked about the song to other Buddhists on a Buddhist weekend work camp at Loppi in Finland. At the same time I started pondering what, besides LIFE, would be a good mantra for each of the others present:
LION for a man who stuck to too much rationality because it gave him social position - LION ought to give him the same or better via a strongly experiencig way
WATER for a man who seemed to intellectualize everything that he met, WATER would refer to what qualities are experienced. He went to the lakeshore and stood there admiring the beautiful sunshine on the mirrowlike water surface. At meditation he looked like a still pool of water - surely convincing looks! I do not know how much it helped him though...
AIR for a woman thinking very concretically about everything, AIR could describe what meditative awareness in its sensitivity and lightness is like
BERRY FOREST for an engineer thinking in schooled ways to describe the practical enjoyable wide awareness
FIRE for one who seemed to already have some emotional insight of one's own
GOLD for me: for one with some insight but unability to keep valuable things in high esteem at the expence of the not so good things in life
EXPERIENCE for one who had a good strong connection to the experinced reality but a tendency to intellectualize
BEAUTY EXPERIENCE for one who tended to end up agitated because of too much grasping: BEAUTY is a guide to well working solutions and the touching experience that it brings makes the better answers a guide to follow in one's life
I figured also some additional ones for people not present:
THE STATE OF MIND BOUGHT BY PRAYER AND A LIFE ACCORDINGLY for those with a strong belief in God
THE ESSENCE OF SNOW (OF GOOD) for a very evil person
COLOURS for a very intellectually oriented curious person with some touch with the experienced way of looking at things but a hate for the nonrational
SUNNY DAY for an elderly couple with a formal style and not much interest in Buddhism
ATMOSHPERE TONES AND ATMOSPHERES OF LANDSCAPES for two very different men whose experience seems to enrichen from paying much more attention to atmospheres - like is good for all of us.
All the people who got a mantra from me looked somewhat isnpired, so I think that this is a good way to communicate, kind of giving others a puzzle consisting of signs that point to the right direction, toward happiness, fortune or the like. I was told that mother Amman gives people religious sentences as mantras. I do not feel up to that level: I had an atheistical upbringing, so I do not have any insight to other people's religous feelings and assuming that big role seems too high for me. These "mantras" that I gave to a very varied group of people are just things pointing to some part in their lives where they seem to already do things right from the Buddhist point of view: just a step or two further in the Buddhist path... I urged the people to experiment, to find things on their own, comparting their own mantra to that of others in order to gain more insight.
In the Buddhist camp I noticed severalt imes that I was not paying enough attention to what I was doing, not even as much as ordinarily. Especially thsi happened when we ate together. I guess that all the people were turned inwards because of the sitting meditation and that affected the social influence that we were getting. So one ought to figure out some way to come back to the real life after meditation: maybe a group of zen buddhist nature (etc.?) pictures on a wall?
There was a lovely traditional red wooden house next to the Buddhist retreat center in Loppi. I would love to live in such but how does the retreat center next door affect life?!
In the meditation posture relaxedness seems to be more important that having the correct posture since if you force your body it gets tense and that affects your state of mind disastrously. Ideally the relaxed well poised posture in meditation should be an expression of a meditative state of mind. the posture and the state of mind should be in harmony! So just relax very deeply indeed in a sincerely and naturally alive way, both body and mind! That's it!
There is something wrong with the need to practise things: In school we learn that if we memorize things and practise enough, we can then act them out of our memory like robots. But being a robot is the opposite of being aware and enjoying life, opposite of buddhism... So one ought to learn to do things by being aware and well motivated. You say cynically: "Let's try: I will make you unpractised one as robot like as I can, and myself I will try to keep my eyes open in addition to having practised a lot." Well, thart is not the point: the point is in being aware and free, playfully unconventional in one's action in contrast to being a memory-based robot. Since typically we practise simple tasks so much that we can do themn without paying any attention to them: we have become robots. An alive human being could do the same job better, with spirit! And enjoy life much much more!
Metta ought to be healthy everyday friendliness.
Under the Buddhist influence your life opens like a flower. A piece after piece falls into its right place in your own life, in your social relationships, in your ways of doing and in your relationship to the world at large, and so the whole starts to function better and better, giving you joy of living, the happiness of well.being, the light joy of harmonical social life, the inner contentment of a satisfying relationship to the qworld at large. Buddhism is equal to following the voice of your soul, your inner instructuons of usage: everywhere in accordance with your nature and the nature of the world. You see deeper into yourself and deeper into the nature of things, ever deeper and happier, more satisfied and effortlessly graceful in the beauty of living a naturalk kind of life having a natural relationship to the world at large, and full of wisdom born of a wider capacity bought by meditation and an insight tinto the human nature bought by a true contact with yourself. You have hit the right chord, your nature, your soul!
Maybe if you would take the following as your only advice to follow thoroughly, that could help you a lot along the way toward enlightenment and also masterful skill. In it it's important to remember that causes and consequencies do exist: you need a holistic view of the world, you cannot resort to a spot like view, you have to solve everything by this method. It demands that you use fully all the glimpses of understanding and all the everyday truths that you have. But: Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! (It is fully ok to celebrate Christmas even if you do not beleive in God, Santa Claus is just a tale for all and it is nice to celebrate on any excuse.)
I had the following social style.
"I like this, so I will do this.
Doing so, I will love life!
So will all the others who copy from me.
Together we live in harmony, building a better world.
That is in contrast with any other options, those are not worth choosing.
So I will dedicate my whole life to this good cause.
And so will the others. This is the essence of our culture."
The Finnish speaking culture of Finland in Europe that is...
There is a difference between sight dominated wordly awareness (not meditation) and intensively sensations oriented wide light non-forcing awareness which flows freely with feelings, the latter of which is a description of meditation and the former is not.
Kaisa Hannele Tervola, Espoo, Finland, European Union
Links
Social effect WHY I WRITE
Mildening pain
Handling fear
Continuous enjoyment in social life READ THIS
My conscience is what I live by
Learning via moods READ THIS
Masterful skill
Life is all that matters
Paradise wins! (My main page)
Fullfilling dreams
Meditation
Seek to follow your feelings
Feelings can be seen as rational
Competition
Thinking
Get more things done this way
Emotional and objective READ THIS
The picture of the world of the books of Carlos Castaneda
Living morally
The body is a part of our mind, a part of how we exist
The interconnectedness of human functioning
Feeling compassion with the whole body
Getting rid of maliciousness
CONTINUED: Some more links about enlightenment