You are simply configured differently in the two situations. This kind of outlook can cultivate compassion for yourself when you behave badly or screw up. The idea of a constantly changing self is echoed in modern psychology. Sometimes you represent yourself by your career.
All of these ideas apply not only to your own self, but also to the selves of others. When you reify someone else, you mistake the person who is with you in the present moment as enduring in time, with no change. This mindset is seen as a barrier to compassion that enhances suffering in the world.
Instead, Buddhism suggests that you try to see other people as they actually are, even your nutty ex. In the process, you reduce their suffering and yours. A t first glance, Buddhism seems at odds with the scientific evidence that people are social animals. We know that strong attachments to other people are vital for your health; without them, you wither and die sooner. Buddhism, on the other hand, suggests that relationships involving strong attachments can be problematic, precisely because those attachments make it difficult to see ourselves and others clearly.
But ironically, Buddhist thought also offers some compelling suggestions for building and maintaining healthy bonds that are echoed in the emerging science of relationships.
In Buddhist terms, your friend is suffering because he reified his partner in the service of reifying himself. Two people meet, they get to know each other, and they experience strong feelings for each other based on that knowledge. Those beliefs, which neuroscientists call predictions , are like a filter through which you learn about and experience the other person in terms of your own needs.
Such filters set you up to reify your fictional self and your partner. Buddhist philosophy offers another route. Go ahead and have strong feelings, but drop the story about your partner that is, resist the predictions accompanying those feelings. Instead, treat the feelings as a signal to learn who your partner is right now, in the moment. Relationship science suggests that romantic relationships are healthier when you and your partner see each other in an unrealistically positive light.
This phenomenon, called positive illusions, involves exaggerating or even imagining positive qualities in your partner. Couples who idealise one another feel more satisfied in their relationship. From a Buddhist perspective, however, these types of illusions usually emerge from the need to cling to your reified sense of self. In the long run, they can lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment.
Instead, try accentuating the positive without the illusions. People are more satisfied with their marriages when their spouses see virtues in them that they do not see themselves. For example, suppose your spouse is inattentive to details, and shoves items into the refrigerator without considering what might get knocked over.
Or instead, you could frame this behaviour in a more charitable light: that your spouse has a lot on his or her mind, or is getting older. Like the tulip, your partner is ever-changing. If you decline to fight, the conflict fizzles and provides an opportunity to flourish.
What if your partner utters snide remarks intended to cause you pain, or even takes a swing at your head? A Buddhist perspective would never be to stand there being mindful. But afterward, Buddhism offers a perspective on what to do next. Partners who let loose with abusive behaviour are trying to achieve some goal, often to make themselves feel better, bolster self-esteem and reify the self.
If you understand the root of their aggression, it is easier to foster compassion and empathy for them. But it gives you space to consider ways to prevent others from harming you further, and from harming themselves. Instead of firing back or ignoring the Tweet, Silverman responded with compassion.
She started a conversation with him, he apologised, and Silverman helped him look for a back specialist. A battle requires two opponents, so if you decline to fight, then the conflict fizzles and provides an opportunity to flourish.
Wisdom also means knowing when to quit the relationship. The ultimate is not something separated from the phenomena. If you touch the ultimate, you touch also the phenomena. And if you touch deeply the phenomena, you touch also the ultimate.
It is like a wave. You can see the beginning and the end of a wave. Coming up, it goes down. The wave can be smaller or bigger, or higher or lower. But a wave is at the same time the water. A wave can live her life as a wave, of course, but it is possible for a wave to live the life of a wave and the life of water at the same time.
If she can bend down and touch the water in her, she loses all her fear. So there are two dimensions in the wave. The historical dimension is coming up and going down. But in the ultimate dimension of water, there is no up, no down, no being, no nonbeing. The two dimensions are together and when you touch one dimension deeply enough, you touch the other dimension. Everything is skillful means in order to help you touch the ultimate. Some people I have spoken to seem to interpret the concept of interbeing as a statement that all things are one.
One is a notion, and many is also a notion. The notion of two different things, or just one, are also notions. Sameness and otherness are notions. Nirvana is the removal of all notions, including the notions of sameness and otherness. So interbeing does not mean that everything is one or that everything is different.
It will help you to remove both, so you are not holding a view. You said that the Buddha was a human being. But the Mahayana says that there are countless buddhas and bodhisattvas at many levels of existence who are sending their compassion to us. How are we rationalist Westerners to understand these beings? In Buddhism, the Buddha is considered as a teacher, a human being, and not a god.
It is very important to tell people that. He is a teacher, and that is good enough for me! I think we have to tell people in the West about that. And because the Buddha was a human being, that is why countless buddhas become possible. As a human being, you should be born and you should die. That is the historical dimension. Then you have to touch the Buddha deeply in order to touch his or her ultimate dimension.
You can also look deeply at an ordinary human being—not a buddha, just a non-buddha like myself or yourself. If you look deeply at yourself, you see that you have this historical dimension—you have birth and death. But if you look at yourself more deeply, you see that your true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. So in you I see a buddha; in everyone I see buddha in the ultimate dimension. It is exactly because the Buddha is a human being that countless buddhas are possible.
We have to remember that inside of the historical dimension there is the ultimate dimension. We are not really subjected to birth and death. It is like a cloud. A cloud can never die; a cloud only becomes rain or snow or ice, but a cloud can never be nothing.
That is the true nature of the cloud. No birth and no death. A buddha shares the same nature of no birth and no death, and you share the same nature of no birth and no death. We know that on Earth there are human beings who possess great wisdom and great compassion.
They are buddhas. You touch the buddha in yourself; you touch the buddha in people around you. The buddhaland is here. If you know how to practice mindful walking, then you enjoy walking in the pure land of Buddha in the here and the now.
In our tradition, you should walk in such a way that each step helps you to touch the buddhaland. The buddhaland is available to you in the here and now. The question is whether you are available to the pure land. Are you caught by your jealousy, your fear, your anger? Then the pure land is not available. With mindfulness and concentration you have the capacity to touch the celestial realm of the buddhas and the bodhisattvas in the here and the now.
That is not theory at all. That is what we live each day. What we practice each day. Many of us are capable of this. You are free, and then the kingdom is there for you. If you are not free, well, the kingdom does not exist, even in the future.
So the same teaching and practice can be shared between many traditions. I think there are many people who now look at this new century and see, again, the seeds of tragedy, both at the human level and the natural level. Where do you feel the world is headed now? I think the twentieth century was characterized by individualism, and more than one hundred million people perished because of wars. Too much violence, too much destruction of life and environment. If we want the twenty-first century to be different, if we want healing and transformation, the realization is crucial that we are all one organism, that the well-being of others, the safety of others, is our own safety, our own security.
That kind of realization is very crucial. Modern biology has realized that the human being is really a community of billions of cells. No cell is a leader; every cell is collaborating with every other cell in order to produce the kind of energy that helps the organism to be protected and to grow. Thich Nhat Hanh. Subscribe to Newsletter. Ways To Give. Your Gifts at Work. Practice of Generosity. Mindfulness in Daily Life. Mindfulness Teachings. Mindfulness Trainings.
Mindfulness Verses. Mindfulness Songs. Mindfulness in Community. Mindfulness Apps. How to Meditate. How to Relax. Mindfulness Bell Magazine. Parallax Press. Book Club. This time, stop after each phrase and take a deep breath in and out. Boorstein also speaks of "the four categories of persons--dearly beloved people, good friends, neutral people, and enemies--that we use to identify the people we know.
Anyone that you've put out of your heart? Boorstein goes on to elaborate about lovingkindness that one way to practice it is to tell good stories about people. Even with people who have great difficulties, or about whom you could find a bad story to tell, look for something good you can say about them, and if an occasion presents itself, do so.
She goes on to talk about "writing new endings for old stories"--especially stories that are filled with conflict and antagonism. Without erasing, we can sometimes mend a story by writing more at the end of it. In a remark that in a sense sums up the Paramitas , Saddhatissa writes, "If the root is generosity, compassion, or insight," says Saddhatissa, "the resultant act constitutes wholesome kamma and will produce correspondingly beneficial effects.
If the root is greed, hatred or delusion, unwholesome kammic acts result, leading to undesirable effects. These are vows taken by Buddhist monks and nuns, framed in such a way that they can apply to anyone. The Dalai Lama uses the terms "analytical meditation" and "stabilizing meditation" for two types of meditation. I use the terms "contemplative meditation" and "concentrative meditation.
In analytical meditation you try to understand a topic through reasoning. For example you might analyze one of the causes of suffering, or one of the items on the Eightfold Path, or one of the Paramitas. Or you might contemplate some habit of your own that causes you difficulty, being careful not to fall into your conditioned usual patterns of thought about it.
In stabilizing meditation you try to achieve calm, clear abiding by fixing your mind on a single focus of attention. This might be something physical like a candle or your beathing, or a mental object such as a visualization or word yantra or mantra in yogic terminology. You can also " meditate in the manner of wishing. For example, you might wish to be filled with the compasiosn and wisdom of a Buddha. Such meditation is related to prayer. In imaginative meditation you envision that you have certain qualities that you want to develop.
You might, for example, imagine Buddha or the Dalai Lama or some other spiritual teacher sitting before you, and envision yourself acting in ways that mirror that person's qualities. Or you might imagine that spiritual teacher as existing inside you, in the region of your heart, so that you embody his or her qualities. A morning practice. Examine your motivation as often as you can. Even before getting out of bed in the morning, establish a nonviolent, nonabusive outlook for your day.
At night examine what you did during the day. Reflect on how you are caught in a pervasive process of conditioning. You can do the same thing in regard to others. Difficulties can wake us up. All of our difficulties, in a Buddhist perspective--our suffering, our attachments, our impermanence, and so on--can serve to wake us up.
Any time we feel like something is not right in our lives, we can direct our attention to noticing what we are doing to create that "not rightness. Hard times help you let go of pretenses. However, when you face rally desperate situations, there is no time to pretend: you have to deal with reality.
Hard times build determination and inner strength. Dalai Lama , p. Facing great difficulty. Just a drop of something sweet cannot change a taste that is powerfully bitter. We must persist in the face of failure. When you experience a difficult period, do your best to avoid behavior that will add to your burden later on. Keep this in mind: By greeting trouble with optimism and hope, you are undermining worse troubles down the line.
Under no circumstances should you lose hope. Hopelessness is a real cause of failure. So in order to practice compassion, you should have an enemy. Enlightenment liberation can only be attained by working diligently at it. The above is a purely conceptual summary of some of the principal ideas in Buddha's teachings. It leaves out all the stories told about his life, how he came to these realizations, the community of followers that developed, and that which gives the concepts historical life.
I like Betty Kelen's Gautama Buddha in Life and Legend Avon, as a wonderfully readable rendition of both the myths and apparently true stories about Buddha's life.
The stories include: Siddhartha Gautama's first meeting with Yasodhara, and her contribution to the emancipation of Indian women. The young Siddhartha Gautama going out from the palace to the pleasure garden and seeing an aged man, a sick man, a dead man, and a monk.
Adventures with ascetic teachers and the realization of the Middle Way Buddha's enlightenment under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya The law of karma, suffering, samsara, and Nirvana The founding and organizing of an order of monks Yasodhara and Rahula join the order The conceited Brahmin Malunkyaputra and the arrow Helping with the resolution of worldly problems and conflicts The woman whose son died and the mustard seed. Suffering some translations use "unhappiness" exists.
It is built into the very structure of our existence. Suffering has a cause. Its cause is self-centered craving, and desire for that which will not beobtained. Out of this comes grabbing, clinging, or rejecting. Much of this is bound to fail because wefail to deeply realize the truth of impermanence, so that we grasp at the constant, changing flux of life asif it were something stable and fixed.
These causes are part of a series of interconnected links of cause andeffect which create a vicious circle from which there appears to be no escape. We meet new situations stillencumbered with the viewed and attitudes of the past, which create still more ties which bind us to the wheelof suffering. We can learn to stop doing that.
There is a path that leads to the cessation of suffering and unhappiness, called the Eightfold Path. Nirvana is a state in which we no longer create avoidable suffering and unhappiness for ourselves and others. It parallels Jesus' concept of the "Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. What Nirvana is not: It does not require inovlvement with the conceptual construct of a God or deity-figure. This can help us move away from "money mind" to the ability to maintain a clear and steady focus of our attention and awareness The challenge and the paydirt in the eightfold path, of course is in the nitty-gritty grasp of the it and how to put each of the eight principles into practice.
By misunderstanding them, we can go astray.
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