When Buddhism has
spread to a new culture, it has interacted with the indigenous traditions of
that society, and the result of their encounter has been something better
suited to that culture.
In developing
nonattachment, one can come to experience serenity and loving-kindness now.
Realize here and now
that there is no "you" that was ever born or can pass away.
Wise people don't
waste their time trying to fix an unreal reality. To awaken is to realize the really Real,
which is something other than its appearances.
Meditation by itself
is sometimes insufficient to resolve deep-rooted psychological problems and
relationship difficulties.
We need such
fictions because our minds do not function in a vacuum but are activated by
their constructs.
Pursuing our own
well-being cannot be sharply distinguished from promoting the well-being of
others.
Rather then
devaluing this world by trying to end rebirth into it, or attempting to make
the best of our lives within it as it is (or as it seems to be), there is a
third possibility: we can "wake up" by realizing something usually
unnoticed about the nature of this world, right here and now, and integrate
that realization into our daily lives.
Another word for
Buddhist enlightenment is liberation: freedom from the delusion of self, and
from the conditioned tendencies that largely compose it.
The solution to our
festering sense of lack is deconstructing and reconstructing the sense of self,
so it doesn't feel so separate.
The self is composed
of mostly habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, reacting.
Wisdom lived is
love.
It is not merely
that we are a way that the universe can become self-aware. We are not only creatures that know we are
creatures: we are creatures that create and know that we create. If the cosmos is the creative process, we are
its epicenters.
We are free to
derive the meaning of our lives from delusions about who we are -- from
dysfunctional stories about what the world is and how we fit into it -- or we
can derive that meaning from insight into our nonduality with the world. In either case, there are consequences.
Thich Nhat Hanh has
recently suggested that the next buddha may appear as a sangha --- as a
community rather than as an avatar who will come to save us from ourselves.
Greed, aggression
and delusion are the main sources of evil.
