Quote: from the Father of Relativity

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.

Albert Einstein

The Five Skandhas (Heart Sutra continued)

Understanding the mind is paramount to understanding Buddhism

In many Buddhist writings, you will read about the “Five Skandhas”. This is very simple, and is again, Sanskrit for the constituents of the mind.

They are split into two, those being “form” Skandhas, and “mind” Skandhas.

The Five Skandhas, also called Formations are:

form

apperception, sensibility or feelings

perception

volition (will, impulse)

consciousness

1. Form is composed of matter made up of four elements: earth, water, fire, wind. Form is conceptual, and should not be grasped at, or held important.

2. Apperception or sensibility is derived from the sense organs:

1. eye enables sight

2. ear enables sound

3. nose enables odour

4. tongue enables taste

5. body enables touch

6. mind enables the experiences of the five organs above, but also of its own function called “knowing”

This set of pairs, i.e. organ + function, is known as the Twelve (12) Bases of Consciousness.

3. Perception is a product of the six externals above: sight, sound, etc. It is the individual's processing of the 12 bases to 'feel' the environment

4. Volition is the reaction of the will to the objects and may produce aversion, attraction, etc. In other words, the feeling as basis for emotion.

5. Consciousness grasps the qualities of the six objects. It creates a third member of the sets in 2 above. These are designated Visual consciousness, auditory consciousness, and so on, ending with mental consciousness. These are called the Eighteen Elements [dhatu].

These five aggregates or formations, the skandas, are not ultimate and eternal in nature but are conditioned. They arise from causes and circumstances. Like all phenomena, they come and go; endure and change and disappear.

Since we are composed of these, we are impermanent. There is no part of us that is eternal. We cannot logically say, "That is mine; I am that; that is my Self" This is what Buddhist call “the endless wheel of life and death”

The quite amazing upshot is that “existence, as we see it, is illusionary and conceptual”

Called the "Five Aggregates" because in turn they too are not solid indivisible whole entities and are made up of even smaller parts. The break-down [can go] on and on, until there is not even a single particle which one can call a Self. They only come together as an "aggregate" due to causes and conditions. Since it does not have an unchanging self and is impermanent (i.e., when the causes and conditions are gone, so is it ;) it is EMPTY.

This is the subject of the Heart Sutra!

The Heart Sutra

The best book I have read on Buddhism is a collective work from Mahayana Buddhist Sutras translated into English . The particular book is about The Heart Sutra, or Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra

What does that mean? Well it is in the Buddhist language Sanskrit.

Prajna means Wisdom

Paramita means Perfection, namely the 10 qualities leading to Buddhahood: (1) perfection in giving (2) morality (3) renunciation (4) wisdom (5) energy (6) patience (7) truthfulness (8) resolution (9) loving-kindness. (10) Equanimity

Hridaya means Heart

Sutra means a Buddhist scriptural text purporting to present a narrative of a teaching given on a particular occasion by the Buddha.
This specific wording for Sutra is due to the wanting of Buddhists to get away from Doctrine or Dogma, and keep it as a kind of “take it or leave it” text. It’s not a lecture or preaching.
The Heart Sutra discusses the concept of all object (form) are inventions of the mind, and are actually empty. The mind invents names for every last item on the earth.
All existing is produced from causes and conditions and the self is a false self, without any selfhood.

I will disscuss this more in the next posts

The life play

When we watch a play, or a film, we get rather involved. The villain comes on; we berate him. The heroine comes on; we cheer!
We may even get so involved that we get butterflies in our stomach (adrenalin rush). But it’s a play; it isn’t real.
So what are we seeing here? We see people in a real life setting, doing things that we do everyday. In fact what is the difference with real life? Well, there is no difference. Like a picture of the Grand Canyon is no different to eye actually seeing it. It’s a collection of light waves which invoke a set of emotions and memory, sewn together with some insight, and consciousness.
When the play is finished, we go home, having been not effected (albeit temporarily) by the events.
Taoism and Buddhism tries to treat life like an event too. An event of nature; not one that we are sat watching as if removed, but one that we are integrated into. In 'The way of Zen' by Alan Watts, he said "As the tree produces Apples, then we can say that a tree “apples”.
"As the earth produces people, then we can say that the earth “peoples”
We should get involved with life, but not grasp at it, and not keep memories and thoughts as real, just like watching a Play.

Consciousness

The late, great philosopher, Alan Watts, talked about floodlight and spotlight consciousness. If you think of a spotlight, it focuses on one thing, but a floodlight lights up everything. The same is for vision and hearing too.

We can see things passing in peripheral vision, and focus on small text with clarity. We can hear a voice in a crowded room too, focusing on one thing, but still hearing everything else. During a deep conversation, you would hear your name shouted out in a split second reaction.
Well watts talked of consciousness in the same way. The spotlight is the ego. Focused on memory, past and future. On good and bad. On happy and sad. All the dualistic things that lead to suffering. The floodlight is the way we walk, and eat, and process information without seemingly knowing it.
Sometimes I need to remember something. A famous actors name perhaps and you rack your brains, pulling all kinds of faces. Actually, if you relax, and do absolutely nothing, breathing normally, it just comes to you. This is the floodlight consciousness.
What meditation is trying to do is remove the spotlight, and see the floodlight. It is that simple. Thinking bad things about a neighbour who built a fence inside your boundaries, and letting it go around in circles in your mind is spotlight. Peeling an orange is floodlight. Getting upset because you lost a bet on the horses is spotlight. Swallowing and digesting food is floodlight.

Tis' the Season to be Jolly

I’m still very much into Christmas. Although I lean towards the Buddhist ideology, I have remnants of my Christian upbringing. All my life, I have got my self excited about things. Leaning Chess (to obsession), reading Cosmology books with interest in Relativity and Time. Maybe I cherry picked all nice things that may let me know what I am. Maybe Buddhism is another one of these, but I am not going into this blindly.

I think Christmas has this helping, friendly theme. The Buddhist phrase is “helping all sentient beings”. It’s an exciting time. No stress or work. Sitting with family, relaxing. Maybe what the Buddhist ideal is all about. Not grasping any particular one thing, but just sitting quietly, observing the world from a middle ground, and making no waves.

Anyhow, Christmas was invented by the Church to compete with a Pagan Festival and Roman Saturnalia, hence the reason that you can enjoy it without being a Christian, particularly.

Santa clause in his red gear was invented by Coca Cola, which I still drink….so it seems apt :-)

Equanimity

I keep on reading the word Equanimity, in Zen and Buddhist literature.
Equanimity is described in the dictionary as:
Evenness of mind; that calm temper or firmness of mind which is not easily elated or depressed; patience; calmness; composure; as, to bear misfortunes with equanimity.

And from a Hindu newsletter:
>>Man in his pursuit of higher ambition is constantly juggling between dichotomies - success and failure, attachment and aversion, hope and despair, happiness and misery. Motivated by desire to succeed he tosses himself into the storm of materialistic world. Success makes him happy and it may lead to yet another vaulting desire, which ultimately breeds greed in him. But, conversely, all his efforts may amount to a colossal failure. Then the intense feeling of despair leads to anger. No wonder, the Bhagavad Gita (16.21) names desire, greed and anger, as "the three gates to hell".
In his day-to-day struggle for existence man is led to confront these dualities of life which narrows his perspectives to one of the two limiting states: success or failure, happiness or misery etc., but there could be a situation when the two are balanced. In such a condition, one has neither the feeling of attachment with success and the resulting feeling of hope, joy etc. nor that of aversion to failure and the opposed feeling of despair, misery etc. That is the state of equanimity in activities, speech or thoughts.<<

Sounds very Buddhist actually, talking of Dualism, and Equanimity.
My own view is that you can see detachment and dissociation as Equanimity in your mind. Your view that you are being mindfull and calm is actually that you are neglecting and dissociating the people around you. I have seen this in my self, and will work on it.