Friday, August 08, 2008

Getting off the train

I have 15 minutes before I go out and there's golf on TV but whatever makes me do this made me come here instead of watching it.

I said to Thomas yesterday about the theories behind enlightenment/advaita, and it is playing out (leela) in my life so perfectly as described by the teachers. The rule is if you engage with worldly things they always even out, so best to transcend them and leave them behind when they'll no longer affect you. It's almost like being at a distance now, as I see little barrages of events, either all good or all bad come day by day and see how well they balance each other and why there's no point seeking the good as the bad is part of it and must follow.

So it pushes me a little more away from the samsara and to enlightenment as you never stay up long and however good you feel when you are it goes down as circumstances do. So if you are told there is a second way it has to be a better one. The emotions have their place but if the peace behind them is both constant and better that'll do me now. I've seen how emotions don't care if they're positive or negative, it's energy which is clearly better kept at a distance. They are fun for a holiday but if optional then quite happy to leave behind if it can ever happen. They are not my friend and just weather which won't affect you when indoors within meditation.

Life outside is unreliable in every aspect, none of you can rely on it any more than I can, it'll let every single one of you down sooner or later and it only matters if you care, ie are affected by it emotionally. Buddha spent his later life searching for the answer to this and then founded Buddhism by teaching when he had. It became way too complicated and needed a few newer teachers like Nick Roach to weed out all the ideologies and complex rituals brought in over time by the human rather than the spiritual side of the teachers. You don't stop living if enlightened, you just apparently escape the emotional torture they call karma and like the lotus flower float on the mud but aren't touched by it.

So everything in the 'real world' is just a mixture of this emotional energy, and if watching a film or soap can enjoy the ups and downs without needing to be involved, and enlightenment is a similar step, to be aware of the same things as if watching a film but not to be part of it as both are an illusion, one alludes to the other. Every teacher I've seen and read says the same thing, not from their books or teachers but their own enlightenment and I have to trust them.

1 comment:

Thomas said...

Ah, yes, detachment. Lovely detachment. Ever since reading Conversations, I've been mostly successful at reducing my reactions (especially negative) to things that "happen" to me.

Here's an example:

In the early 00's, I bought a basketball hoop for the front driveway. One afternoon in the summer of '4, I was mowing the front lawn and wanted to get under the basketball hoop. I took two of the four sandbags off the top of the hoop's base and continued mowing. My car was parked in the driveway. I took another bag off not thinking much of it. I had ear plugs on (I always do while mowing). As I mowed, I suddenly heard a loud crash. I had no clue what it could have been. I turned around and saw that the hoop had fell to the ground, landing on the driveway, but not before shattering my front windshield in the process. Oops, my bad. I didn't have too strong a reaction to it. After all, these things happen, no?

It was funny explaining how it happened to the guy at Abra. Too bad no one was videotaping it. I coulda been on "America's Stupidest Home Videos".