Zwischenwelten: Aug 3, 2016

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

when i was a boy, my father taught me on buddhism, on karma, on the path of silence.
i was in deep thinking and feeling.
it appealed to me to find a possible meaning of my travel through universe,
to be reborn and to travel with more or less weight depending on this life,
the one now, to be reborn on earth or on other planets, somewhere in the universe,
a theory following cause and effect and giving so much space to see continuity and unending possibilities.
i remember how i thought why do small children need to die cruelly,
how can being murdered or slaughtered make any sense? Karma was a welcome image here.
another chain of associations was to see no sense in endless numbers of humans
to be born, each one different, each one new, it looked something like mechanic to me, like a series of robots or new cars-
and i felt our spark and essence and energy coming out of another energy and substance, a living intelligent energy:
what could be the sense of individual travel in near automatic replacement?
i never felt sure about it.

now, coming back to childhood's thinking, i cannot safely see the same in thought.

first in all modesty, maybe this energy and essence out of which we are born and in which we are living and dying doesn't need me to find a sense and meaning at all.

then we cannot remember past lifes with any scientific evidence. and when i see individuality as
existing but non-important in the face of death, no argument for karma counts.

we don't die taking us as a person to another sphere. what happens with what i imagine and feel as essence is another matter. but it is not MY essence, it does not belong to me forever, i see
an emanation of another energy. in chemistry the essence of various probes can be mixed..so in life and maybe after, because when i wish to imagine the time after death i will not be a person but will be taken into the sea of all energy.

but i always have felt karma being, a hidden truth giving me winks which i cannot profoundly grasp.
I try to listen, i try to analyze, deconstruct these winks, try to explain with personal history in this life now:
some remain as obscure as my karma if it is there. i believe it is. mine and ours.
the kama of all humanity.

karma as a way to see that all our/my actions are alive in the circle of causes and effects and in the end fall back on us one way or another appears to me clear and true.
karma in connection to re-birth and past lifes cannot be postulated
nor does it closely belong to pure buddhism nor can it be fully recognized.
it is an idea, an image of a hidden reality.

but i am deeply convinced that we are not only formed and shaped by our present life-
the only one important now-
but that we bear an imprint of past with us, in our essence, which gives us possibilities and winks to change and grow in presence on a path of openness and kindness-
this path and travel being more important than any theory or obscure and parallel reality.
i stay open to unexplored space.

Pema Chödrön, quote

"The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes."

Pema Chödrön,The Wisdom of no Escape

i have been reading this several times:
i have no comments.
It fully communicates my deepest feeling on growth as a human..

"Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to all these things. It’s seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness.

The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself."

"Precision, gentleness, and the ability to let go … are not something that we have to gain, but something that we could bring out, cultivate, rediscover in ourselves."
.....

"We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness.

This is what we are here to see for ourselves. Both the brilliance and the suffering are here all the time; they interpenetrate each other. For a fully enlightened being, the difference between what is neurosis and what is wisdom is very hard to perceive, because somehow the energy underlying both of them is the same. The basic creative energy of life … bubbles up and courses through all of existence. It can be experienced as open, free, unburdened, full of possibility, energizing. Or this very same energy can be experienced as petty, narrow, stuck, caught… The basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind — thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call “me” or “I.” Nobody else can really begin to sort out for you what to accept and what to reject in terms of what wakes you up and what makes you fall asleep. No one else can really sort out for you what to accept — what opens up your world — and what to reject — what seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery."

[…]

"This is the process of making friends with ourselves and with our world. It involves not just the parts we like, but the whole picture, because it all has a lot to teach us."

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/19/pema-chodron-the-wisdom-of-no-escape/