Readers' comments and essays,
Section Two
Donald Reynolds: A conversation
with Donald Reynolds
Nina Correa: Nina Correa: Xun
Zi
Mike Butler: Holding Lady Yin's Hand
Bao Pu: At the roots of daoism: the
shaman
Netta: Netta's view of suffering
Jan: goddelijkheid: a process
Ginny:Objects of Love
OhC: Blending the bimodal process:
integrating Zhuangzi's "double view"
OhC: On Duality
Mark Grennell: When we want others to have “correct” beliefs, and fundamentalism
Linda Peltier: Silence, the place of no place
Lian Dao: Marguerite Porete and The Five Skandhas
Wrenna: It asked nothing of me
A conversation with Donald Reynolds
Ken
Sorry about the lack of paragraphs. Makes for difficult reading, I know, but it is the decision of the powers that be, not mine. I had it broken up into seven paragraphs. Suppose that we perceive one kind of energy doing some kind of energy to another kind of energy, and we decide that what we are seeing is two children wrestling in the street. This becomes our apparent reality simply by naming the objects and the event. We see two children playing.
Suppose that we then hear angry voices coming from the two
children, and we decide that when we thought they were playing,
we were mistaken. The two really are fighting. What we saw before
was apparently not real. Where before we could only see them playing,
now we can only see them fighting. Now we cannot see them playing,
no matter how hard we try. We can never see them playing and fighting
at the same time. Whatever reality we have at any one time is
all there is. New perceptions are possible only when we let go
of the old. Suppose that we now find that the two children are
neither playing nor fighting, but instead, are working. They are
very good actors who are being filmed by a camera we didn't see.
We would then see that we had not been seeing Reality at all,
but NOW we are! On and on, always caught by what we BELIEVE to
be Reality rather than seeing Reality itself. Each moment, Reality
is what it IS, and it is changeless within each moment. Around
this changeless Reality our perceptions of that Reality may change,
becoming the new substitution. This is what was happening in our
example.
Don Reynolds
Hi Don
Well said. I am wondering what comes next if anything. Is there
an advantage in attaining the realization that you have outlined?
I assume there is, and am interested in hearing more.
ciao, Raymond
(From Donald Reynolds to me and other readers of the BBC website)
Raymond Sigrist wrote
>>I am wondering what comes next if anything.<<
It's not like most topics where one thing follows another. It is more like unraveling a tangled ball of fishing line with neither of the ends showing.
There is a Real world. It is what "is." What is commonly called "the real world" is the one that has names. That one is not real. That one is created by the intellect each time we have need of it. That one is of the boys fighting, playing, acting.
We cannot drink a glass of water, we can only drink what "glass of water" stands for, and THAT has no name.
Basically what has happened is that when we were small, we learned things because "Daddy says." We ask Daddy, "What is that?" He tells us and we believe that THAT is what it is. Later it becomes, "Teacher says." In adulthood, it's "experts say."
Everything we know, with very few exceptions, is something someone told us. Our instructors learned it the same way, from other instructors. All of this apparent reality is stored in memory and combined with the intellect, and the senses, creates what seems real to us.
We are, as we are now, identified completely with our intellect.
What it knows is what we know. What it does not know, we do not
know.
The intellect can only operate with names. It can only, using
logic and memory, think. It can only think when it has names of
things, facts, happenings, and so forth. It cannot think of Zordixes
for instance, because it has nothing named that in its files.
The way to see the real world is to see the illusion of the world created by naming, and then what is there that has no names - what is left, is the Real world. It is what "is." Unnamed, no meaning, just "there."
>>Is there an advantage in attaining the realization that you have outlined?<<
Yes, definitely. Most assuredly. I hesitate to tell you the benefits specifically, but let me give you this to chew on.
Humans are naturally happy. All animals are naturally happy. Humans, and other animals, are not happy when something is bothering them. It is like the sun is always shining, but it seems not to be when clouds cover it. A human's "clouds" that hides the "sun" (happiness) consist of fear, anger, covetousness, jealousy, enviousness, dissatisfaction, etc.
All of these "clouds" are created by believing something real that is not real. Every one of them. There is never anything to fear, never anything to be angry about, nor covetous about, nor dissatisfied about.
What do you get when you are always happy? Happiness, confidence, satisfaction, the ability to accept anything that happens, and frequent periods of pure bliss. Plus more.
Another advantage is that once you have that realization that the real world is there and that it is obvious, a whole new universe previously not even imagined becomes available for investigation, for artistic appreciation, for knowledge of the unbelievable magic that masquerades as the common.
Another advantage is that if there is anything you don't like about the world you live in, you will be able to change it to your satisfaction.
>> I ... am interested in hearing more. <<
It would be much easier for both of us if you asked specific questions about anything concerning Mind or Existence. I can't know where you are stuck until you ask a question. If I discoursed without knowing what you didn't understand, it would fill a book. That wouldn't be feasible on a message board.
A question. Are you or not, a voracious reader?
Hi Don
I'm not intellectually stuck on anything you said, I agree with it all. I think that as you indicate, contentment is the most compelling motivation for spiritual cultivation.
I asked the questions, because I was curious to see if you were going to offer "enlightenment," or some other conventional religious promise that would appear to be able to take one out of the ordinary world. This ordinary world, as you suggest, has more than enough to keep us happy, if only we see clearly how it is working.
Yes I have read quite a bit, and have focused on the classical daoists, who realized the phenomenon called "zile" -- self-generated contentment -- or in other words, a contentment that is generated from within any given situation, no matter what the situation entails.
To these ancient daoists, winning a lottery or being sentenced to death, would have no added positive or negative effect on the ability to be content. To most folks, this sounds like a ridiculous proposition. But it is not to people like you who have apparently found the trail that leads to this place of sovereign contentment, a state that can be cultivated and secured within the human psyche.
If you permit, I would like to put your two above essays permanently on the net. Your words are an important clue for realizing what Zhuang Zi called the ability "to make a springtime of every event."
ciao,
Raymond
Raymond:
>> I asked the questions, because I was curious to see if you were going to offer "enlightenment," or some other conventional religious promise that would appear to be able to take one out of the ordinary world.<<
I don't know what to say. I am speechless. I have been waging a kind of one man battle against the idea that to be "spiritual" somehow takes one away from the ordinary. And here I find a compatriot!
I once wrote a short book with pen and ink drawings that emphasized
the idea that the common was miraculous and the miraculous was
common, directed toward those "on a spiritual path,"
especially those on an Eastern religious path.
Here's a bit of it; (Damn this feels good!)
"One of the first things that engaged my curiosity about the spiritual path was this talk about Holy men, Wise men, Masters and Saints. Reading, I got the impression that they were in some manner different from the rest of us, but I couldn't imagine how. They were frequently described as "ordinary," but I couldn't believe THAT. This curiosity grew into an intense desire to see one of these creatures. But there weren't any where I lived.
I met a man who was going to Tibet to study in a monastery. I asked him if he had ever seen a holy man, and when he said he had, I asked him what they looked like. He said, "Like ordinary people." Well, I KNEW that. But what KIND of ordinary people?
I once went to a Ram Das lecture -- not to hear what he had to say, since I had already read all of his books, but to see what he LOOKED like. I didn't consider him a holy man, but at least he had seen one, and in any case he was closer to being one than I had ever hoped to be -- at least in this life.
I was surprised to find that he was the guy sitting with some friends in the front row whom I had already dismissed as being Ram Das because he looked and acted so ordinary.
Ram Das himself speaks of Maharajji as looking and acting like nothing more than a silly old man.
Rajneesh once said, "If Jesus is special, YOU are special. If you are ordinary, Jesus is ordinary." Jesus,in speaking on the same subject declared, "As I am, you are." (or words to that effect, I have been told) So if you are as interested as I was in what a holy man looks like, I guess he looks ordinary, like they say. Just like everybody else does.
A Master is simply someone who has mastered some art form. The art form could be bricklaying, painting, cooking, housekeeping, golf, or life. There are masters in all fields of creativity.
I'm not a golfer, so to me Tiger Woods is an ordinary guy that
happens to play pretty good golf. To a devotee of golf, however,
he is a special person commanding awe and respect. The devotee
GIVES him the special aura - he wasn't born with it. So it is
with us and our Masters. They seem special to us only because
they are experts in a field where our own interests lie. Call
them role models if you will.
Masters of anything become Masters because they have spent a lot
of time and energy constructing their art forms. They spend this
time and energy because of a driving interest, and since none
of us can choose our interests, becoming a master seems to depend
upon being in the right place at the right time more than it does
upon anything else.
A Master is an ordinary person lucky enough to have had the means and opportunity to indulge in his favorite pastime with enough years of experience to have perfected his craft somewhat.
A Saint is an ordinary person who has mastered the art of loving.
Wise men are ordinary people who derive their wisdom from "seeing" rather than from believing. They KNOW rather than THINK.
Knowledge - book learning -- comes to us primarily from the various schools we have attended, and from books we have read and understood. Most of what we learn in school is useless to us since we will never use the information except to further our education, or to teach what we have learned. Otherwise, it is just stuff we keep in our memory banks which we take out once in a while to show to someone we wish to impress.
Wisdom comes from combining knowledge with experience related to that knowledge. A person may read hundreds of books about mountain climbing -- be learned and well versed in the field, but if he never climbs, he will lack wisdom in this area.
Like Masters, Wise Men are found in all areas of human endeavor. The wise see the Truth, whether it is a putting stance or the relationship between love and service, because of experience and the fact that they knew what they were experiencing when they had the experience.
>>To these ancient daoists, winning a lottery or being sentenced to death, would have no added positive or negative effect on the ability to be content.<<
I have a saying, "If you can accept everything, you can accept anything. If you can accept anything, you can accept everything."
>>If you permit, I would like to put your two above essays permanently on the net.<<
Yes, of course.
Xun Zi believed that all humans were born evil,
which was in opposition to
most of the philosophies of that time in ancient China. The general
consensus was that if each person returned to their original selves
they
would be innately compassionate. Xun Zi believed that there had
to be laws
and restrictions to make people follow the correct path, or they
would be
doomed to creating catastrophes for themselves and others.
He got his knickers in a twist when he read
the Laozi and Zhuangzi, which
stated that people should ignore the rituals and follow tian
(nature, the
heavens). He thought that tian could take care of
itself, and that the
people shouldn't be concerned with it.
So, Xun Zi believed that if one is humble and
yielding, one leaves the door open
to all the evils that are inherently within people. Hierarchies
of worth had
to be established on this earth to set examples and rules for
the ignorant
masses. He was a strange fellow, wasn't he?
From my morning's readings:
"The greatest cleverness lies in what
is not done and the greatest wisdom
lies in what is not thought about.....Thus, if people abandon
the affairs of
the human being to conjecture on the business of tian,
they will lose sight
of the real circumstances of those things around them."
-Yuan Dao p. 31 (Xunzi 63/17/16f.; cf. Knoblock [1994] vol. 3:16f.)
Xun Zi had a double standard. The masses were
supposed to be humble and
yielding, but the officials and intelligensia had an obligation
to lead the
masses. I think he was horrified at the thought that the leaders
might
become humble and yielding.
Mike Butler: Holding Lady Yin's Hand
In case it isn't obvious, the prose below is an expression
of my learning about and accepting my natural tendency to swing
between yin and yang a little harder than the norm (bipolor disorder).
Thank you all for this enviornment to speak.
---------
When I hold the Lady Yin's
hand, the days crescent into night,
passing by as though sluggish dreams.
Heartening sounds, images of
comfort do little to the questing bound,
they appear at the edge of a vast landscape filled to cluttering.
In peace this journey goes, as I travel these roads often, but to those outside my body, the tussle and toil may seem quite odd, distressing some might say. But really, this journey feels as right and true as any other in the world. I see different realms of reality than some are allowed and I'm restricted from others where many people go. As yin folds into yang, I'm beginning to accept my path.
Bao Pu: At the roots of daoism: the shaman
"The Shenren … rides upon the cloudy vapours, harnessing a flying dragon, and wanders beyond the four seas." Zhuangzi 1
The definition of "shaman" Jordan Paper uses (The Spirits are Drunk: State University of New York Press 1995) is "a social functionary who, with the help of guardian spirits, attains ecstasy to create a rapport with the supernatural world on behalf of his [or her] group members" (Hultkrantz quoted on page 52). It seems however, that all the examples of spirit journeys from the Zhuangzi and Chu Ci show a "shaman" who is not a "social functionary." He is a reclusive individualist. The Daoist adept is almost an "asocial" shaman - more of a mystic than a shaman. In fact, I know of no examples of a social functionary who ascends to the heavens/netherworld in the ancient literature. There were mediums (eg. the "Shi" - impersonator of the dead and the Wu -- exorcist/medium/liturgist) but no actual shamans.
As revealed in the "art of mind" (Xin Shu) chapters of the Guanzi, the shaman/medium/mystic houses a spirit-like energy within the heartmind (in the chest) and becomes like a spirit: achieving a healthy body, superior ability, and omniscience. These mystics identified the essence of Guishen - ghosts and spirits – as something universal. They called it numerous things: energy (Qi), essence (Jing), spirit (Shen), the One (Yi), Nature/Heaven (Tian), or simply Dao. Ghosts and spirits are powerful and efficacious because they are refined, not because they are supernatural, and we as humans can realize and manifest this spiritual quality if we undertake a self-cultivation practice as described in these texts. If successful we will become a sage, and be capable of anything, including ruling the world.
The mediumism of the Shang and early Zhou dynasty’s rituals (as revealed in the the existence of the Impersonator of the Dead Ancestor) was most likely the precursor to this type of self-cultivation. The authors of the Xin Shu texts and the other Daoist texts elaborated on the ritual fasting done by the early mediums, including quieting the heartmind of its distractions and sitting still. In the Zhuangzi many of these mystics experienced disembodiment and they ascended to a celestial domain, (much like the shamanic experience of other cultures). That it was described so similarly to the spirit journey of the shamans, it is probable that shamanism did exist in ancient China.
The early Daoists consisted of these shaman-mystics and scholar-knights (shi) who associated with them: those who were struck by the profundity of their teacher/master’s wisdom and enlightenment. Many of these Shi worked out a cosmology based on the mystical experience and developed a new approach to rulership and governance. Hence, many of the early Daoists were philosophers as well as mystics.
Bao Pu
"Some Buddhists say that desire is the root of suffering. I disagree with that. My own feeling is that it is dissatisfaction that is the real root of suffering. If one is not dissatisfied, then, of course, there is no suffering." Netta
Instead of talking about Gods, I prefer talking about "goddelijkheid" (Dutch) - godliness? That isn't such a fixed thing, it's more a process, a happening.
In fact, that's one of the problem of our thinking.
Our language converts processes into nouns. That can give strange
phenomena, such as "where's my fist when I open my hand?"
It disappears suddenly. Not that we're magicians, but our language
deceives us. A fist is just an action of the hand, when that action
stops, then the fist has gone.
jan
(see also: Ibn 'Arabi)
With my cat Merlin gone, his physical presence that is, and my daughter out on her own, I realize that Love needs an object onto which it can project itself, extend Itself, see itself in a way it cannot see itself without this object. The love I felt for Merlin and my daughter and my X's was all the same I realize. The love was mine all along and was not dependent on the "object" as a cause. The object felt its effect for sure, as did I, but without the object it was pure potential. When our relationships end, is the pain we feel because the object is no longer in our lives to love us? No, I don't think so. I think we cry and grieve because who we were, how we extended our Love stops abruptly and it is not because we are no longer being loved by the object but the opposite: We have no one to extend our Love upon, we are fish out of water.
And so in the end it is ourselves we are objectifying and projecting our Love onto anyway imho, but that is all there is to do here. It is said that God creates and extends his Love by folding back in upon Him/Herself. And so it is I think what we are doing when we place our Love upon an object human or otherwise. The illusion I think is that we think the object is causing this Love within us, but it isn't. It isn't causing it but it is allowing it to express. It is receiving it. The Love is always there, it is ours to place/extend onto whom or whatever we please. And when it "ends" it is because we no longer extend it onto that particular object. It is a choice we make to withdraw. Sometimes a much needed choice of course, and sometimes the choice appears to have no choice but to withdraw, as in the case of death, but the point is that the Love was coming from within us all along and was not dependent on the object at all for its origins just for its expression, its receiving. And that as long as we are creative beings we will seek to express, in fact it is my humble opinion that most illness in this world is caused by the blocking of this expression, that there are no receivers out there for the ill person, that we just fold in for the last time and self combust or something.
I think the object can even be an idea, as in the memory of someone, but our culture won't allow us to Love an idea/memory without giving us some kind diagnosis. I know a woman who lost her husband 8 years ago and still keeps him alive through his work and has never found another relationship. She is as much in love with him today as she was when he was alive. Some think she's "stuck", I think she's healthier than many of us.
Merlin was a lifeline of Love expression for me at a time when the man I was in a relationship with would not, for whatever his reasons were, allow me to Love him completely. He only allowed me to express Love a little bit and it was not enough. Merlin became my much needed object of expression, my much needed receptacle for Love.
"Receive and Transmit" says Peter Gabriel. I am a different person when I am not Loving this way and I am not one to say that I Love the entire world this way. Not yet. That is a goal that I hope to achieve before I die, but I'm not there yet guys. So I had a talk with my mentor the other night and he tells me, well Ginny, I guess you'll just have to find yourself another someone to extend all that Love upon won't you? LOL. For now, however, its the birds and my artwork but I'm open to his idea. Peace.
ginny
Ginny is one of the hosts of Come
Together Community
OhC: Blending the bimodal process: integrating Zhuangzi's "double view"
Perhaps it's the nei xin that
decides which knowledge is noisy and
which is useful? After the noisy is filtered out - neither the
global/intuitive or the dividing/conceptual need dominate or subordinate
- but rather whichever is useful in the moment would naturally
surface,
perhaps, with the other still there, non-separate, in full support.
OhC
The only thing I perceive as "dual" is at base level discernments; everything else (to me) is fluid; sometimes mostly this... sometimes mostly that... or both at the same time... or neither.
At the base level of closest perspective objects (including words) are dual: "X" and "everything that X is not"....this is obviously an orange, everything else is not, etc. Because everything around us appears in cycles, its perhaps easy to overlay "either/or" thinking past base level discernments. An example is "kindness to others OR kindness to self"...implying they are naturally exclusive concepts. With an either/or perspective, its an easy task to divide things up into the good/bad categories [bad/good used in a moral sense rather than a useful/not-useful sense...yes, fine line, I know] Actually - that fine line is what seperates discernment from differentiating.
All discussions can over-feed the either/or rigidity that can sneak into how one perceives and then interacts...diminishing the usefulness of fluidity. I admit, I enjoy taking the "other side" of conversations; a favourite childhood game was "pick a topic, any topic, pick a side, any side, I'll take the other" - quite dualistic (grin). In a recent discussion Zentao rekindled the "nothing holy" discussion about the sacred/empty perspectives; yet anything past the base discernments (being able to define/discuss the ideas of sacred or empty) sets up dualistic thinking.
IMO, the only difference between seeing all things as sacred, and seeing nothing as sacred, is choosing this rather than that. Both perspectives see it as an either/or equation and have chosen one side or the other. From my perspective, in practical application, other than the useful/not-useful equation within discernment [cant drive nails with an orange], there are no equations. Of the four possibilities [everything is holy, nothing is holy, everything is both and everything is neither] - all four exist naturally, at the same time, without conflict. For me, downstream from discernment, this applies across the board - to concepts others may be inclined to put into either/or equations - or into only one of the four possibilities.
Your words, and mine and everyones, are dualistic at the base perspective. Avoiding it would mean whistling only :-) My guess is we are not in disagreement; I apply duality to the operationally seperable (your hammer, my orange, vs everything they are not) and examining it now, perhaps "dual" is a muddy word for this process.
Regardless, its the application of duality onto the fluid dynamic that reinforces the boundary between the black and the white. Even within the *totally* black lies the potential of the white - so are they really seperate things past base discernment? Or just different degrees of black/white within everything - so the boundary does not exist? I don't see boundaries, either.
After base discernments, the concept of duality may be a great teaching tool - or maybe it's not.
All thoughts welcome,
Rene
Mark Grennell--When we want others to have “correct” beliefs, and fundamentalism
Mark wrote the following two posts on “Beliefnet.com”
I admit that sometimes I have argued for my personal beliefs, and I really want(ed) to be correct in them. I've even wanted to convince other people of their correctness! I think (if I am understanding other posters here correctly) that my beliefs are fairly similar to some others here, in that I believe there is quite a bit of mystery to this whole faith business that I will never be able to fully understand or know for certain within this lifetime, and I have tried before to convince others who believed differently of this.
Some of it has been attempts to defend myself from (real or imagined, probably mostly imagined though) attempts on their part to convince me that their beliefs were correct. Other times it has been jealousy that they have this certainty in their lives, at least to outward appearances anyway. Still other times, I was laboring under the mistaken idea that it was somehow my business what they believed and/or that they would somehow benefit from sharing my beliefs.
I think that probably the biggest reason why I have tried to convince people that I'm right, though, is because I have (and to some extent probably still do) derived a bit of egoistic self-satisfaction from the idea that I must be right. Which is pretty ridiculous, when I think about it, since the part of my personal beliefs that I carry the most conviction about and which I have tried most stridently to convince others of is my belief that there are a lot of things that I can't ever know for certain.
Of course, a corollary of my belief that I can't know some things for certain is my belief that I should actively seek a relationship with G-d that includes direct personal experience; I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that just because that seems like the right thing for me it should be what everybody would want and I am somehow doing them some sort of favor by enlightening them to this fact.
So to answer your question more succinctly, the reason why I sometimes feel like I "need to be right" in my interactions with other people is because I am still plagued by self-centeredness which causes me to derive a sense of superiority about my "correctness" and my alleged "open-mindedness," coupled with a selfish belief that for some reason other people would want to believe what I do if only they knew "the truth."
Am I proud of all this? Not really... I hope that I entirely stop behaving like this in my lifetime, but I've not ever known or even heard of anybody who entirely extinguished the natural human drives towards selfish and self-centered actions so I'm not really that optimistic about my ability to do so either.
There is the distinct possibility that *all* of us are wrong and we may never be right or even know who is right... why emphasize this whole right/wrong thing so much?
The way I figure it, fundamentalism primarily affects my relationships with other people... mainly it's that I experience fear when I am talking with people who vociferously hold beliefs other than my own. I fear that maybe they won't/don't like me, or else I fear that maybe I'm wrong, or that they will "force" their beliefs onto me (as if I'm not capable of hearing their ideas while still keeping my own intact?), all of which are completely anathema to my ego!
I don't know... I think the only thing wrong with fundamentalism is the way that I sometimes react to it.
Mark
Linda Peltier-- Silence, the place of no place
What I love most about silence is sitting in the pure and simple Unknowing. Just sitting in that place where I don’t have to figure anything out; where I don’t have to have any answers at all. Just being. Feeling the intimate nature of Life, accepting that I’ll never be able to capture or define It in any way, and the quiet, assured knowing that it can’t be any other way.
From silence we see how so much of life is about awareness. How, when we are paying attention, we can see everything as ever changing, ever new, alive and vibrant! It becomes so clear that nothing stays the same and that nothing exists of itself alone. Everything interconnects, even us. The dance goes endlessly on.
In silence you see how the world of unimaginable possibilities is continually rising and falling from within your own deep, energized heart - Life forever manifesting in the immediate and infinite now.
I find that “place of no place“, where the ground is forever shifting, to be my greatest refuge. For me it is home in the deepest sense of the word.
In silence you also come to realize the impossibility of even attempting to convey what’s uncovered there. As so often has been said, we are given maps to guide us, but ultimately it is, and always will be, a trip we take alone.
Linda
Lian Dao on Marguerite Porete and her burning at the stake by Church authorities in the Middle Ages and how this relates to the Five Skandhas
At some point, Marguerite probably had to decide whether to live life as a saint or die at the stake as a heretic. I should also like to imagine that such is the nature of the transmission at source that most of her attachment to the conditional aggregation had already melted away leaving very little that could have actually suffered in the fires of the reality-worshippers.
What are the Aggregates in Buddhist teaching?
Here follows a very basic understanding of the Skandhas, sometimes also known as the Mara Aggregates, after the Indian demon-god Mara, Lord of Death.
One of the core teachings of the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni lies in what are referred to in Sanskrit as the Skandhas. These are five groups that when viewed together equate to what we generally term as our ego, or perhaps more properly our personality. Skandha translates as aggregate, or more literally as a heap, that is a collection of things that when lumped together give the impression of a substantial body of note but when each thing is removed from the pile,and scrutinized we can see how the component things don't really amount to much.
The Five Skandhas are:
RUPA-SKHANDHA or Form
VEDANA-SKHANDHA or Sensation/Feeling
SAMJNA-SKHANDHA or Perception
SAMSKARA-SKANDHA or Activity/Mental
VIJNANA-SKHANDHA or Individual Consciousness
These are also sometimes divided into NAMA or mental formations (2-5) and RUPA or bodily formations.
Buddhism considers that as each of these formations depend upon a set of conditions to give rise to them, so they can be ultimately said to be without any lasting, enduring, independent value. That is, these five aggregates when taken together give the impression of a personality, that is a sense, or semblance even of self nature. Yet when truly examined and taken out of their own context, each ones relies upon a process of interaction with other similar bodily and mental constructs to actually even to be said to exist.
Because of the fact that each grouping depends one upon the other for significance, then it can be said that each grouping taken individually or as whole is subject to suffering, simply because each one seems to appear from a set of conditions, undergoes a process of gradual decay and then seems to disappear.
Amitofo,
Lian Dao
It asked nothing of me
There is an old saying "The more I learn, the less I know." I began, thinking I knew that there was a god. I was wrong, I simply assumed it due to my upbringing. Then, I decided after studying several religions that they were all bunk and there was probably no god at all. Then, when I started having mystical experiences, I thought I believed in god again. After all, who saved me if not god? But the more sure I become, the less I am sure, and for that matter, the less I am sure that it matters whether or not I believe. Because whatever it was that saved me it asked nothing of me.
For the longest time I could only define it in apophatic terms, even though at that time I didn't know the word. After spending a little time at debate forums, I kept getting accused of defining my god by what it was not, instead of what it was. Yet, how could I possibly know what it is? Who it is? If it is? I really only knew what it was not. It was not jealous, it was not demanding, it was not EVER going to send me to hell. That's a positive, if you ask me.
Just because I gained the ability to see the world "Pregnant with god" doesn't mean that I know what or who god is. It could be an energy, it could be all of our energies. It could be all our energy together invested for thousands of years to create it, or it could be something completely outside ourselves. It doesn't matter to me. I know what god is NOT, and that makes all the difference.
Wrenna