|
Related Discussions
Richard | 2 | 3 |
Peter
Vineeto | 2 |
______________
Related Links
Spiritual
Teachers
Vipassana
Zen
Zen at War
|
|
Please note that the text below was written by the feeling-being ‘Peter’ while ‘he’ lived in a
pragmatic (methodological), still-in-control/same-way-of-being Virtual Freedom before becoming actually free.
|
Buddhism
Buddhism: The religious and
philosophical system founded by the Buddha Gautama, teaching that all human sorrows arise from desire and can be eradicated by
following the disciplines of his eight-fold path. ‘Buddha’ (Sanskrit: enlightened, from budh-’: awake, know, perceive) is
the title of the successive teachers, past and future, of Buddhism, especially of its founder, the Indian religious teacher
Gautama. Oxford Dictionary
Peter: Contrary to popular belief, Buddhists are not actively
pursuing peace-on-earth per se. The Buddhist’s Ultimate Reality is called ‘The Parinirvana’ (Complete Nirvana) or the
freedom of spirit brought about by release from the body. According to the Buddhist analysis of the human situation, delusions of
egocentricity and their resultant desires bind humans to a continuous round of rebirths and its consequent suffering (dukkha). It
is release from these bonds that constitutes Nirvana, or the experience of Enlightenment. Now, ‘Nirvana’ – in Buddhist
religious thought and spiritual philosophy – is but the initial goal of the meditation disciplines and practice in that it
signifies the transcendent state of freedom achieved by the extinction of desire and of individual consciousness.
That this is only the inaugural objective is very clear to the
discerning eye because – while liberation from rebirth does not imply immediate death and thus release into the Ultimate Reality
– the physical death of a perfected person (an Arhat or a Buddha) does. Thus while the immediate aim of the Buddhist path is
release from the round of phenomenal existence with its inherent suffering by attaining Nirvana (the enlightened
state in which the fires of greed, hatred, and ignorance have been quenched), Nirvana is not to be confused with total
annihilation because, after attaining Nirvana, the enlightened individual will continue to live, burning off any remaining karma
until the state of Final Nirvana (Parinirvana) is attained at the moment of physical death.
It may be noted that, during the early centuries of Buddhist history,
not only were there the three major pilgrimage centres – the place of Mr. Buddha’s birth at Lumbini, the place of his
Enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, the Deer Park in Varanasi where he preached his first sermon – but particularly the village of
Kusinara, (or Kushinagara) located in the eastern district of Deoria, which is the place of his Parinirvana. Quite obviously, this
is a very ‘self’-seeking approach to life on earth … something that all
metaphysical peoples are guilty of. The quest to secure one’s Immortality in some spurious After-Life is unambiguously selfish
... peace -on-earth is readily sacrificed for the supposed continuation of the imagined spirit after physical death.
|
So much for their
humanitarian ideals of peace, goodness, altruism, philanthropy and humaneness. All Religious and Spiritual and Mystical Quests
amount to nothing more than a self-centred urge to perpetuate oneself for ever and a day. All metaphysicists fall foul of this
existential dilemma. They pay lip-service to the notion of self-sacrifice – weeping crocodile tears at noble martyrdom –
whilst selfishly pursuing the Timeless State of Being … the ‘Deathless State’. The root cause of all the ills of humankind
can be sheeted home to this single, basic fact: the overriding importance of the survival of ‘self’ by whatever name.
Richard: The actualist method is a far cry from the Buddhist carefully cultivated ‘mindfulness’ ... the practice of
‘mindfulness’ is a further withdrawal from this actual world than what ‘normal’ people currently experience in the
illusionary ‘reality’ of their ‘real world’. All Buddhists (just like Mr. Buddha) do not want to be here – now – as
this flesh and blood form, walking and talking and eating and drinking and urinating and defecating and being the universes’
experience of its own infinitude as a reflective and sensate human being. They put immense effort into bringing ‘samsara’ (the
endless round of birth and death and rebirth) to an end ... if they liked being here now they would welcome rebirth and delight in
being able to be here now again and again as a human being. They just don’t wanna be here (not only not be here now but never,
ever again) ... is it not so blatantly obvious (that Mr. Buddha just did not like being here) that you wonder why you never saw
his anti-life stance before? How on earth can someone who hates being here so much ever be interested in bringing about
peace-on-earth?
In this
respect he was just like all the Gurus and God-Men down through the ages ... the whole lot of them were/are anti-life to the core.
 Library Index
Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless
Peter’s Text ©The Actual
Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
Disclaimer and Use Restrictions
|
