NOTES FROM THE PATH

“Seek out your own salvation with diligence,” the Buddha said. “Try it, see for yourself.”

The Buddha said, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of salvation than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere.” When we are suffering, we are as much in need of our compassion as is any other being, and we are equally deserving of it.

In the end, only the individual can attain his own salvation. The Buddhas can merely teach that there is a Way. It is the individual’s responsibility to follow it. “Abide with oneself as an island, with oneself as a refuge. Seek no external refuge.”

Of whatever teachings you can assure yourself that they conduce to dispassion and not to passions, to detachment and not to bondage, to decrease of worldly gains and not to their increase, to frugality and not to covetousness, to content and not to discontent, to solitude and not to company, to energy and not to sluggishness, to delight in good and not to delight in evil, of such teachings you may with certainty affirm that this is the Norm, this is the discipline, this is the Master’s message.

Salvation begins with Right View, which mean the way one looks at life, one’s perspective. Without Right View, one is confused, resulting in frustration, depression, and anxiety. The goal of Buddhism is quieting the conflicted mind. The following is Right View.

THERE IS NO PAST. “Bring out the past here and show it to me,” the Buddha said. All there is is memory. Memory, though, is selective, hence unreliable. Historians, for example, balk at this because the past is everything to them. They don’t want to hear about the shortcomings of language, for instance, how peoples’ recollection of themselves, others and events can be faulty, how the interpretation of facts can be suspect, and indeed how the very accuracy of basic facts can be in doubt. Whole lives and major events are guided by this often shaky information, the blind leading the blind.

THERE IS NO FUTURE. “Bring out the future here and show it to me,” the Buddha said. All there is is anticipation, planning, expectation, which like the past is unreliable. This is to say, how can one know what his circumstances, much less he himself, will be like at a given point in the future, will be like even one hour from now. He may be dead by then. Only the present exists, one breath, one heart beat at a time. At that, remembering the past and planning for the future are done now, in the present moment. “All we have is now,” Marcus Aurelius reminds us, as does Eckhart Tolle who speaks of now as “Isness,” what actually "is.” Alan Watts says, “There’s no place to be but here and now. There’s no way to be anywhere else.” Watts adds, “Interestingly, time is moving, yet there is only now.”

EXISTENCE IS IMPERMANENT. When the prince asked his jeweler to make him something that would carry him through times of triumph as well as times of defeat, the jeweler made him a ring inscribed with the words, “It will pass.” Impermanence, “annica,” is the First Dharma Seal. Existence is in a state of constant flux. Every day is different. Every moment is different. All is transient, hence unreliable, hence the cause of all suffering. We seek fulfillment in life but we never really feel fulfilled because what we seek fulfillment in is time bound, transient. When we try to grasp it, it just runs through our hands. We are not happy with what we achieve, own, and know because too quickly we are tired of them, are bored with them. Time kills them.

THERE IS NO SELF. Present consciousness, anticipation, and memory create the illusion of a self. Krishnamurti said, “Could it be that you identify yourself with a merely abstract ego based on nothing but memories?” There is this physical body, this happening, sure enough, but it is all there is.

Hormones contribute to the illusion of the self. The lie of hormones. It is not, for instance, until testosterone recedes in men in their fifties that they see the extent to which they have viewed the world through a veil all these years.

There is as well the lie of mental states. We are conditioned to view the world and ourselves in a certain light, which is false often times. This includes the lie of symbolic thinking (e.g. thinking about thinking and the problems that thinking creates), and the lie of language (e.g. words about words and problems that words create). We don’t know what we are looking at half the time and then we go on to communicate it using symbols that are approximations at best of what we mean. Alfred Korzybski notes, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t,” with Alan Watts adding, “nothing is really describable.” Meanwhile, we identify ourselves with our thoughts. We think we are our thoughts.

Also there is the lie of feeling states. We are conditioned emotionally to react to the world and ourselves in certain ways, which are false, too, sometimes. When one is lonely, he misses his family and friends. Loneliness, though, like all other feelings, comes, as Krishnamurti explains, from thoughts, and thoughts are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. Yet we identify ourselves with our feelings. We feel we are our feelings. We feel we are our moods.

Our lives are just these smoke and mirrors, called “maya” in Buddhism, meaning to be enchanted, spellbound. What we actually are is just consciousness. We are a conscious body. In Hinduism, this consciousness is also called atta, or atman, which is the immanent form of the Brahman. But why so further define it? Why make it like a soul? The Second Dharma Seal states that there is no individual permanent soul that, for example, migrates after death to another body. This is to discourage clinging, i.e. using "soul" as a life preserver, so to speak. All the individual is is a temporary collection of momentary events that are constantly in flux in their causal relationship to each other, with a consciousness that expires when the individual expires.

WHAT IS WORTHWHILE DOING? "Survival is not the issue because you’re not going to survive," Alan Watts says. Liberation, nirvana in Buddhism, moksha in Hinduism, is the goal. Everything other than the Path to it is irrelevant. In this way, as the Dhammapada states, “It is not what others do, or do not do, that is my concern. It is what I do, and do not do. That is my concern.”

MEMENTO MORI: The Dalai Lama’s hobby is fixing clocks, a reminder to him that he, like everyone else, is “on the clock.” Memento mori, remember death.

SUFFERING. Termed “dukkha” in Buddhism, this is the Third Dharma Seal. “Greater than the waters in the four oceans is the flood of tears each being has shed, or the amount of blood he has lost when, as an animal or wrong-doer, he has had his head cut off.” (Zaehner, p285). Life is not all suffering, but largely it is suffering. According to Buddhist psychology, every moment of life when happiness and inner peace are absent is a moment of suffering. When you are rushing, impatient, irritated, frustrated, anxious, angry, fearful, bored, sad, or jealous, when you are filled with desire for something you want that you don’t have, or feel aversion for something you do have that you don’t want, you are suffering. When you are reliving a painful experience from your past or imagining a future one, you are suffering. Nothing on this planet is free of it.

PLEASURE TRAIL. To ease our pain we seek out what pleasures we can find here and there, food, sex, adventure, like chickens on the trail of corn. The trouble is, we adapt to pleasures to where we need more and more of them to get the same effect. Addiction is the result.

WHY ARE YOU UNHAPPY? It is because you are filled with wanting, with desire, to the point that eventually the desire becomes a thirst that cannot be satisfied, even when you achieve what you desire. So how can you be happy? By ceasing to desire. Just as a fire dies down when no fuel is added, so your unhappiness will end when the fuel of desire is removed. We must not strive, grasp, cling, clutch, wanting to do this or to be that, for, again, even when we attain what we want, it is not enough. The more we have the more we want. Attaining what we want is suffering just as much as not attaining it is, with “suffering” defined as chronic frustration.

WEALTH, POWER, AND PRESTIGE: Wealth, power, and prestige are what society teaches us are the desirable things to have in this life. But Krishnamurti said, “Think it through. Do you really want what you think you want?” As the old adage goes, "Beware of what you want, you might get it." Or again, "Hell is getting what you want." The reality of wealth, power, and prestige is that they are transient and therefore will end soon enough in suffering. The aim of Buddhism is to eliminate suffering. The old saying “less is more” is correct. Have nothing and want nothing, and in this way you will take the greatest pleasure in the smallest things and be happy. “He who knows he has enough is rich,” Lao Tzu said.

DO NOT COMPETE. With competition there is a winner and a loser, with the biggest loser being the winner. A hollow victory. This is because the one who wins must equal or better himself the next time out, feeling guilt at the same time for the suffering he has caused the loser. As for the person who has just lost, he feels resentful toward the winner, wishing him ill, looking forward vengefully to when they can compete again, perpetuating the cycle. The aim of Buddhism is to end such suffering. There is a popular picture of Buddhist monks shooting pool, a seeming contradiction to this tenet. The monks, though, are not competing. They are just shooting pool.

WHY AMBITION? Ambition is one’s attempt to fill a void in his life, such as a need for love or respect. Love and respect, however, are transient. Wealth, power, prestige, love, and respect are hollow victories.

AVOID ALL ATTACHMENTS, FETTERS, CHAINS THAT BIND. Do not be attached to personal possessions, to location, to money, to other people, and least of all to yourself. Attaching yourself to things is folly because soon enough you are bored with them, wish you never had them, yet cannot get rid of them. You find you become attached to people but because you don’t like most of them all that much, it jeopardizes your happiness in the end. Have feelings for people, the Buddha said, but don’t make them responsible for your happiness. Meantime, why should you attach yourself to yourself, to your physical self especially, for your physical self is dying, has been dying from the day you were born? And why should you attach yourself to your psychological self when your psychological self is an illusion?

NO DUALITY. This is known as the principle of relativity. There is only the appearance of opposites, when in fact they are one. Opposites are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have light without dark, substance without space, life without death, self without other. They go together. They arise mutually, called the coincidence of opposites.

REALITY. The truth is that we are on a rock hurtling blindly through space, a rock containing, by a fluke, life forms. The biggest fluke is that at least one of these life forms, we humans, is aware of itself. We are aware that we will die one day, for instance. Life on this rock has no purpose beyond perpetuating itself, from what we can see. We are in denial about our life on this rock. We understand it intellectually but cannot fully grasp it. When we look at the stars at night we do not know what truly it is we are looking at, otherwise we would be screaming in terror in the streets. We have at the same time a false sense of security about it, much as we have when we climb into a jet plane, believing that we are as safe in it as we are walking around outside it.

DIRECT EXPERIENCE IS SUPERIOR TO SECONDARY EXPERIENCE. Direct experience is, for example, classical music, physical labor, and color. It is the experience of the five senses. Secondary experience is the symbolic world, thinking and language, life once removed. While secondary experience is useful in ways, it generates a world unto itself and is false, or, more often than not, is only partly true.

DEPENDENT ORIGINATION. This states that what is, is dependent upon something else, the law of cause and effect. If this is, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises; if this is not, that does not come to be; from the stopping of this, that stops. It is like a clock where if one wheel turns, all the wheels turn. Everything changes with one change, or not. The moral implication of this is, what are the consequences of my actions? Will they lead, for instance, to hurt of self, of others, or of both? What will happen if I stop, or do nothing?

JI-JI-MUGE. Similar to dependent origination is ji-ji muge. This refers to the interdependence, the mutual interpenetration of all things and events. It is likened to a spider’s web where every dew drop on it reflects every other dew drop on it. A net of jewels is another way it is described. In short, nothing stands alone.

MINDFULNESS. To be aware of dependent origination and ji-ji muge is called mindfulness. Persons not aware of them are either ignorant “avidya” or ignore-ant, that is, have chosen to pay no attention to them. The result of ignorance is an endless chain of false illusions in which each succeeding illusion is due to its preceding illusion. Ignorance, therefore, is at the heart of all human misery and evil. Humans, in general, are so darkly ignorant about their own nature that all of their actions have the wrong orientation. Not moral transgression then, but mental error is the root of human misery and evil.

AHIMSA. Non-injury to other living beings. “All things breathing, all things existing, all things living, all beings whatever, should not be slain or treated with violence, or insulted or tortured or driven away,” according to the Acaranga Sutra of Jainism, the view of Buddhism and Hinduism as well. Thus, Jain monks, while walking in the forest, carry long staffs that they tap on the ground in front of them to drive off any insects lest the insects get innocently trampled.

NO VIOLENCE. Physical violence goes without saying, but mental violence must also be avoided. Anger and ill will are mental violence.

COMPASSION. We must have compassion toward our neighbors as we hope our neighbors have compassion toward us. We are all in the same boat. Everyone suffers. Indeed, every living thing on this planet suffers, the common denominator. We must, therefore, have compassion for all living things, even for the bacteria that may one day kill us, for they live here too. Compassion is the cornerstone of Buddhism because it not only benefits the recipient, but it aids the one bestowing it as well. An alternative to the word compassion, since it implies superiority on the part of the one bestowing it, is sympathy. We can sympathize with our neighbors because we all suffer, and if we have not yet lived all that much life, or have not yet lived a particular aspect of life, we can empathize with others.

FORGIVENESS. Forgiving someone of something is the greatest gift a person can give another. This includes not trying to change someone who does not want to change or who cannot change.

NO REHEARSAL, NO REPLAY. Our thinking is dominated by our rehearsing what we will say to someone in the future, or our replaying what we have already said to someone in the past. But there is no future, there is no past. Only the present exists. With this in mind, we must treat each heartbeat, each breath, each meal, each laugh, as if it were our last, because all too soon it will be.

ZEN'S VIEW. The four propositions are: something is; something isn’t; something both is and isn’t; something neither is nor isn’t. Zen asks what is beyond the four propositions?

BAD LUCK. If there is good luck, there is also bad luck. Baby birds in a nest get killed when the tree trimmers come through. The birds were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We will all be in the wrong place at the wrong time one day.

DYING. As soon as you realize that you are alive, you know that you will be dead one day. Every person in the world will die eventually, just as every speck of living anything will die. The Buddhist response to this is to live a simple life, to in essence be nothing, especially to be no ego. If you are nothing, you have nothing to lose, they say. “When Death came, there was no one there,” Alan Watts put it. Some say that Buddhists have a death wish, by the way. It’s not that they don’t want to live any longer, but that they don’t need to. As for dying too soon, the older one gets, they argue, the more he has to worry about. The longer one lives, the more years he has to live with anxiety. The longer one lives, the longer he has to suffer with degenerative diseases. It's not complicated.

OBJECTS. Buddhists conceive of an object, a rock for instance, as an event and not as a thing or substance.

THE WORLD. Buddhists accept the world as they find it, as it is. Above all, they do
not place blame. They believe that the individual determines what happens to him. The
individual, not something “out there,” is responsible for his fate. The external world only reacts to what the individual does.

SUCHNESS. Also termed thusness or tathata, it means reality as it is, without superimposing any ideas upon it.

GOD. The issue of God is avoided in Buddhism because it is not the point. The point
is liberation, in real terms, today.

ICONOGRAPHY. Even Zen Buddhists can be found with elaborate temples and
bowing to statues of the Buddha, but this is merely what Buddhism comes in, the
packaging.

THE MIDDLE WAY. The Middle Way is what is common between opposites. The
Middle Way, in practice, is so the cure is not worse than the ailment.

CONTAGION. We do what other people are doing around us, called “contagion” in psychology. The result is conformity, even when it is bad for us, like war.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE. Rather than dwell on how one’s life would have been better had he done this or done that, one should think of the ways in which it might very well have gotten worse.

BURDENS. Talent, celebrity, intelligence, duty, and victory cease to be burdens when
they are no longer encouraged. Why are they burdens? Because they produce hubris, hence suffering.

LONE RHINO ON THE PLAIN. Pratyeka-buddha. Seek out your own salvation with
diligence.

SAMADHI. A remarkable place in the brain. Samadhi is not self-hypnosis. It is mental absorption to the point of ecstasy. Samadhi can occur spontaneously during deep meditation or be the result of such “technical means” as repeating a mantra at length. Frustration over not attaining it at will, though, can make it a fetter.

TAO. The Tao that can be named is not the Tao. He who says he knows the Tao does not. It cannot be said what the Tao is, only what it is like. The Tao is like gravity.

WU WEI. Wu wei in Taoism means non-interference. We should flow with our lives, not get in the way of them. Alan Watts says, “You are going along with the Tao whether you want to or not. You can swim against it but you’ll still be moved along by it. If you swim against it, all you’ll do is wear yourself out. But if you swim with it, the whole strength of it is yours. Yet the difficulty for us is determining which way it is going.”

WHAT YOU ARE, FINALLY. Your will has nothing to do with it. You are happening of yourself. There is nothing for you to figure out.

OUT OF NOTHING COMES SOMETHING. This is where mysticism begins. The Buddha called this Wisdom. It comes from the emptying or purging of the ego-identity. Right View is how this is done. One becomes like a newborn child. One is now on the surface, no longer buried under layers of self, thinking and memory. Now there is only feeling, feeling not of the emotional kind, but of the intuitive kind. Just feel it. Don’t interpret it. Don’t expect anything from it. There is nothing to be done about it. It is here that one feels that he is all of existence. Tat tvam asi, that art thou. What follows is mystical union, but not of self with other, but of self with self, in the way that the Atman is Brahman. And with this comes a fundamental shift in consciousness.

RIGHT DIRECTION. You are facing in the right direction. All you have to do is keep walking.

FLOWER. A plant at the end of its life suddenly sprouts a flower. The plant is more surprised than anyone else. It is now what it was meant to be, it sees, the only thing it could ever be.

REALIZATION. Consciousness sees that it is a broader consciousness, not that it is a part of a broader consciousness but that it IS a broader consciousness.

ANALOGY. It is like sitting with your hands resting on your thighs. Your hands feel your thighs at the same time that your thighs feel your hands.

TRUSTING IT. Can it be trusted? It is not a question.

GOD "ISMS"

THEISM is the belief that at least one deity exists. In a more specific sense, it refers to a doctrine concerning the nature of a monotheistic God and God's relationship to the universe. Here it conceives of God as personal, present and active in the governance and organization of the world and the universe.

The claim of no knowledge, no faith, and a complete rejection of theism is known as agnosticism, atheism, and antitheism, respectively.

MONOTHEISM (from Greek μόνος) is the belief that only one deity exists. Some modern day monotheistic religions include Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism.

POLYTHEISM is the belief that there is more than one deity. In practice, polytheism is not just the belief that there are multiple gods; it usually includes belief in the existence of a specific pantheon of distinct deities.

Within polytheism there are hard and soft varieties:

Hard polytheism views the gods as being distinct and separate beings. An example of this would be the Egyptian and Greek Religions, along with certain schools of Hinduism.

Soft polytheism views the gods as being subsumed into a greater whole. Some forms of Hinduism such as Smartism and Advaita Vedanta serve as examples of soft polytheism. They accept all the major Hindu deities as forms of the one Brahman.

Polytheism is also divided according to how the individual deities are regarded. Accordingly:

Henotheism: The viewpoint/belief that there may be more than one deity, but worship of only one of them.

Kathenotheism: The viewpoint/belief that there is more than one deity, but only one deity is worshipped at a time or ever, and another may be worthy of worship at another time or place. If they are worshipped one at a time, then each is supreme in turn.

Monolatrism: The belief that there may be more than one deity, but that only one is worthy of being worshipped. Most of the modern monotheistic religions may have begun as monolatric ones.

PANTHEISM is the belief that the physical universe is equivalent to a god or gods, and that there is no division between a Creator and the substance of its creation. Examples include many forms of Saivism.

PANENTHEISM: Like Pantheism, panentheism is the belief that the physical universe is joined to a god or gods. However, it also believes that a god or gods are greater than the material universe. Examples include most forms of Vaishnavism.

DEISM is the belief that at least one deity exists and created the world, but that the creator(s) does/do not alter the original plan for the universe. Deism typically rejects supernatural events (such as prophecies, miracles, and divine revelations) prominent in organized religion. Instead, Deism holds that religious beliefs must be founded on human reason and observed features of the natural world, and that these sources reveal the existence of a supreme being as creator. Other forms of deism are:

Pandeism is the belief that a god preceded the universe and created it, but is now equivalent with it.

Panendeism holds that the universe is a part, but not the whole, of deity.

Polydeism is the belief that multiple gods exist, but do not intervene with the universe.

AUTOTHEISM is the viewpoint that, whether divinity is external as well or not, it is inherently within 'oneself' and that one's duty is to become perfect, divine.

Autotheism can also refer to the belief that one's self is a deity (often the only one), within the context of subjectivism. This is a fairly extreme version of subjectivism, however.

EUTHEISM is the viewpoint/belief that a deity(ies) is wholly benevolent.

DYSTHEISM allows for there being evil in the divine realm.

MALTHEISM is the belief that a deity exists, but that god is wholly malicious and abusive.

FLUKE

The big bang, so-called, was a fluke, just a phenomenon. The universe that resulted, with all its galaxies, stars, and planets, is also a fluke, just a phenomenon. Life forms in this universe are a fluke, just a phenomenon. That we humans are self-aware, self-conscious is a fluke, just a phenomenon.

Some say that human self-awareness, self-consciousness is a god, gods, or God seeing itself through our eyes, but this is unlikely.

Still, there is something else going on here. We all know it. It is like being in a dark room and sensing that you are not there alone, that something else is there with you. You don't know what it is exactly, even though you give it all kinds of names and otherwise try to conceive it, define it, describe it, but at the end of the day, you are, well, only there with it. If you are lucky enough you will make contact with it, or it with you, usually at a time when you least expect it and when you are not even trying. This contact seems to be what it and we are for. Whether THAT is a fluke is another question.

BEING DONE WITH IT: A SHORT STORY

All kinds of things, most all of which were irrelevant to who he really was, or would turn out to be, were heaped upon him since birth, all kinds of expectations, a certain education, a certain physical appearance, a certain set of manners, a certain kind of extracurricular activity, a certain kind of friends, and from these all the subsets of expectations spiraling out like the frons of a fern. And these one by one he did eventually because he found that he could not get rid of them without doing them. He had to do them to undo them. Doing them purged them from him. Even the blog he had been writing year after year, a stream of consciousness on eastern spirituality, was an undoing by doing, a purgation, a being done with it, a purification.

So now here he was all these years later and he had done everything, been everywhere, met everyone. All that was left for him was to be done with it once and for all, to make the declaration, "I'm done with it."

Unfortunately, in the scheme of things where opposites arise mutually, where you cannot have one of something without the other of something, "being done with it" meant starting it again, being at the beginning again, not at the same beginning, but at a beginning nonetheless. Samsara was the word for it in India, reincarnation. Which was why his declaration never did come. Which was how he was now done with it.

MAYA

The term "maya" in Vedanta generally means world illusion. But what does this mean more precisely? The root of the word is "matr," from which we get the modern words "measure," "meter," and "matrix." Maya is the world as measured, which is how the human brain sees it, in bits, as if a grid were placed over it. The world, however, is not bits, but is an entirety, so vast that the mind cannot grasp it in it's true state.

For example, this universe contains trillions and trillions of galaxies, within which are millions and billions of solar systems filled with innumerable planets. In one such solar system there is a planet called Earth. Upon that planet Earth, inhabited with close to seven billion humans, there are hundreds of countries. In one such country, America, there is a state called California, within which there is a city called Los Angeles. In this city, which has many hundreds of thousands of people, there is a street called Figueroa. On that street, there is living a man named John (or insert your own city, street name etc. here) whose mind, like all other minds, cannot grasp the true state of it all. He can understand it intellectually but cannot know it fully. This is maya.

Maya also means magic and play and in this way is the creative illusion, the illusory appearance, that the Divine (Brahman, godhead) generates. But it is not illusion in the sense of unreality but of cosmic play or cosmic sport. In Vedanta the world is a drama in which the Divine plays all the parts, and it is through us that it sees what it is doing. As part of the illusion, however, part of the game, it believes that the roles it is playing are real, until eventually it awakens from it and the world ends--until the Divine begins it again.

The ever-changing mirage-like aspect of life, where a piece of rope lying by the roadside will appear in twilight to be a snake, or a distant post a man, is also maya. Maya is described as that illusion of reality which is not Reality itself, even though it is embodied in that Reality.

Many everyday experiences are also maya. Something as usual as driving a car 65 miles an hour down a freeway and believing one is safe, to say nothing of flying 35,000 feet in the air in a jet plane going 500 miles an hour, and also feeling safe, is maya.

The Hindu model of the universe as a drama, an illusion, is contrasted with the model of Western religions that sees the universe as an artifact, something that is made, like a potter makes a pot. Here, for instance, God created a human out of clay, blowing the breath of life into its nostrils. The Chinese model found in Taoism, on the other hand, is an organic one. The universe is seen as an organism, with every part affecting every other part.

The inspiration for the Hindu model might well be the way in which we humans feel at times like we are playing roles. We have a public self, that is the self that meets and interacts with the world, and then we have a private, personal self. But there are lots of selves that we create throughout our lives depending on the circumstance, all of which we feel sooner or later to be an illusion. As it happens, our feeling this, our seeing it, is none other than the Divine itself waking from its play, albeit ever so briefly, before going back and playing at it some more.