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topdog82
Death Spirit



Registered: 07/16/10
Posts: 7,992
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Re: Metta (kindness meditation) [Re: topdog82] 1
#26694451 - 05/25/20 08:25 AM (3 years, 8 months ago) |
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It’s made me more caring to those in my life. It’s made me less irritable. Less judge mental. More peaceful, and more happy. Weirdly when you aren’t so emotionally charged by someone who is causing you an issue, you are less intimadated by them. So you can stand up for yourself more easily
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The Blind Ass
Bodhi



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Posts: 26,657
Loc: The Primordial Mind
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Re: Metta (kindness meditation) [Re: topdog82]
#26694461 - 05/25/20 08:30 AM (3 years, 8 months ago) |
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-------------------- Give me Liberty caps -or- give me Death caps
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VajraWarrior
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Re: Metta (kindness meditation) [Re: topdog82]
#26694534 - 05/25/20 09:15 AM (3 years, 8 months ago) |
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Quote:
topdog82 said: It’s made me more caring to those in my life. It’s made me less irritable. Less judge mental. More peaceful, and more happy. Weirdly when you aren’t so emotionally charged by someone who is causing you an issue, you are less intimadated by them. So you can stand up for yourself more easily
Don’t people who practice that tend to be doormats? Buddhism doesn’t strike me as the religion to go out and fix things, but at least they don’t start trouble.
-------------------- Soooo nothing's real and everything is real? Exactly. UGH! Then what was the point of any of this? -O.K KO
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Tantrika
Miss Ann Thrope




Registered: 03/26/12
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Loc: Lashed to the pyre
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Quote:
VajraWarrior said:
Quote:
topdog82 said: It’s made me more caring to those in my life. It’s made me less irritable. Less judge mental. More peaceful, and more happy. Weirdly when you aren’t so emotionally charged by someone who is causing you an issue, you are less intimadated by them. So you can stand up for yourself more easily
Don’t people who practice that tend to be doormats? Buddhism doesn’t strike me as the religion to go out and fix things, but at least they don’t start trouble.
Buddhism was about starting trouble from the outset ;D
One of the "problems" of Buddhism as a religio-philisophic tradition is that parts of its formative philisophy are a response to other traditions
tho it was not what we would consider "Hinduism" by todays standards per se (but will refer to it as such for convenience in this post) Vedic Hinduism controlled the society the Buddha was born into he was a prince by birth, because his parents were rulers, because their parents were rulers and so forth -- caste system ordering
he ended up walking away from all of that and starting a tradition outside of ordered Vedic society the "original Buddhism" was not about engaging with society, specifically because society was seen as the ordering principal that needed to be broken away from
Vedic society made a couple of presumptions that the Brahman (an Ultimate God) was Real; and that the Atman (the personal soul) was Real everything else was represented as an illusory world that the Atman travelled through in the Hindu lens -- Karma is something we generate in this lifetime that controls what we are reborn as in the next life time in a causal way that also meant that only people born into the Priest caste could achieve Freedom/Enlightenment and that women could not achieve enlightenment so there is a sort of embedded view here as well that transitioning from male to female is subjecting oneself to extremely negative karma that may even cause one to (gasp!) be born as female in their next life
Buddhism threw basically all that out the window Brahman wasn't worth discussing, nor what happens after death the Atman was not real because it was actually impermanent anyone from any caste could attain enlightenment if they left the Hindu system even women were considered capable of attaining enlightenment if they adhered to the the 8-Fold path Karma influenced events in future lives, but did not control future lives and, indeed, since the Atman was not real the Buddhist idea of "reincarnation" is different from how Hinduism portrays it in Buddhism, reincarnation is described as a candle lighting a candle lighting a candle they share a flame because each one used its own flame to light the next but the flame is both the same as the first flame and different from the first flame and persists for its own duration even when all subsequent or pre-existing flames have been extinquished so, in a sense, "you" as an Atman/Soul never come back -- but "you" as a personality complex will arise in the world again, because a future being adopts all your personality traits left behind unless you are like the Buddha and achieve Nirvana, then people may try to mimic you but clearly there will not be another Buddha until the teachings are completely forgotten
this may also be a good opportunity to point out another unusual bit of translation "Compassion" comes up a lot in Buddhism and, in teachings that originate in English language they do tend to mean what compassion is suspected to mean but Compassion has also been utilized in a number of translations as a substitute for "skillful means" which is known as Upaya in Buddhism it is still compassion, in that it is an energy and enactment of action that is concerned with alleviating suffering for others and bring them in line with the Buddha's teachings
but, well, the common example in Zen of how skillful means actually plays out a monk asked his teacher "what is enlightenment" so the teacher slammed the gate on him, breaking the monks leg
that's it -- you are expected in Zen to glean the lesson from that, not from further information about the situation
the more mundane Therevada example is a father comes home and finds his house is burning he realizes his children are still inside so in order to get them out he yells "Children! Come Quick! I have brought you the most wonderful gifts!" the children rush out and find nothing but if he had told them the truth of the burning house they were in, they may have panicked and not escaped the skillful means; the compassion is the lie
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VajraWarrior
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Re: Metta (kindness meditation) [Re: Tantrika]
#26694571 - 05/25/20 09:45 AM (3 years, 8 months ago) |
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That Zen stuff sounds like abuse to me, reminds me of the lengths people will go to so they can rationalize such stuff as wisdom.
But that doesn’t sound like the usually starting trouble more like just saying NO to the existing system. I meant like the crusades with Christianity or the witch trials.
-------------------- Soooo nothing's real and everything is real? Exactly. UGH! Then what was the point of any of this? -O.K KO
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Tantrika
Miss Ann Thrope




Registered: 03/26/12
Posts: 17,138
Loc: Lashed to the pyre
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Quote:
VajraWarrior said: That Zen stuff sounds like abuse to me, reminds me of the lengths people will go to so they can rationalize such stuff as wisdom. ...
Agree, there is a lot that shows up that is likely abuse and this will come back up in response to your second portion of your post
sometimes it is proportional tho
early in this thread, suggested that OP read the biography of Milarepa one of the really rough portions to read is after he has murdered his extended family and stuff he goes to the Buddhist teacher Marpa, who as part of his teachings tells Milarepa to build him a tower each time the tower is almost complete, Marpa has Milarepa tear down the tower, put the stones back where he got them then eventually he demands a new tower the ordeal leaves Milarepa's back covered in cysts and scabs and infection from the unneccesary physical labour (he is forbaded from help or from using machine assistance)
but the lesson isn't that he needs to build a nice tower for Marpa the lesson is that once you make a change, you can't actually take things back to the way they were and how that reflects on his various murders that people cannot be brought back to life and the lesson resonates with Milarepa much more strongly, because of the physical suffering he was put through in learning it
Quote:
VajraWarrior said: But that doesn’t sound like the usually starting trouble more like just saying NO to the existing system. I meant like the crusades with Christianity or the witch trials.
Well yeah, that is because Buddhism has typically been an "underdog" belief system it has not had positions of power/control where suddenly the interest becomes erasing competing beliefs to make that control more complete
Buddhists were the witches through history, crucified, burned, beheaded the Vietnamese monk who lit himself on fire to bring the global eye to recognize how his religion was being treated Buddhism has a lot of martyrdom -- have to sit for a bit or maybe see if my notes from class have it, but there was a full book on the issue my Zen Buddhism teacher suggested we read
but there are instances in the modern world where Buddhism is the dominant religion and is associated with violence to Muslim minorities -- tho there is a surreal sentiment that the violence is pre-emptive against inevitable Muslim violence https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22356306
it is really important to understand with Buddhism possibly more than any other tradition that the philisophical traditions that we read and engage with through thought can hold a world of difference from the living religious traditions that have been perpetuated to this day the Buddha wanted to be viewed as just a man who woke up; and who recognized Arhats as being as enlightened as him, just simply not "the Buddha" as he was, because he started the tradition that enlightened them but around the world people offer incense and gifts to Buddhist deities in wishes for things like a happy marriage, a good child birth, a new job
religious Buddhists pray for help with their problems
also there is a lingering line of thought that interests me to discuss but am too lazy to right now but the Dalai Lama has cut off "official" recognition of traditional Buddhist lines of worship that are still active because he was worried that Westerners would see it and misinterpret the violent deities so basically just throwing a bunch of "lesser" religious Buddhists under the bus like a shady religious leader
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Tantrika
Miss Ann Thrope




Registered: 03/26/12
Posts: 17,138
Loc: Lashed to the pyre
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Re: Metta (kindness meditation) [Re: Tantrika]
#26694623 - 05/25/20 10:10 AM (3 years, 8 months ago) |
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Also, knew your ban was prolly inevitable and that was part of my reason for bringing discussion from PM in to this thread but feel free to continue this on Thanatos if my presumption as to who the puppet was of is correct


*edit* nvm, seems like the puppet was from that account being banned as well
Hope you find peace on your journey, whatever the case
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