heya guys, not a buddhist but believe in what buddhism is trying to accomplish for us all and wanted to contribute.

i really don't get why digg has to drag on with the buddhism schtick "especially" when he's over it.

you're an intelligent individual, so i'm interested in your frame of mind sir.

i'm sure its like being in a job that one is committed to, at least physically, but in these days, seriously, that just isn't enough, is it? There's gotta be a reason your stickin it out, but all i could read into was your choices are either "get off" at the record store or sit through the meditations for whatever reason. Is that right or even close?

Seems to me the whole retreat thing has become just the opposite, and the kind of retreat you might really need is to spend like a month doing nothing BUT the record stores and that kind of stuff. kind of remind yourself why its so fucking cool to be alive and work so damn hard for humanity in the first place.

You've got infinite options man, use that brain power you've been building for all these years and focus on a direction that is fulfilling and turns you on, otherwise your just bein a drag!

Sellout.

Nolan, you never have to do anything you don't want to do. You just said something that I think is inaccurate, and I tried to clarify. I don't get why it's condescending to suggest that you read the Diamond Cutter Sutra. If you care to know what the Mahayana path is about, read it. If you don't care, why did you make a statement about the Mahayana path? And why are you upset that I said something that contradicts your statement?

If in fact you acknowledge that my motivation for speaking was good, then your annoyance at what I said can only be coming from one place: your mind. So the problem isn't with what I said - it's with your reaction to it. Would you rather pave the ground of the world with leather to protect your feet, or put on some shoes?

Mr. Matt, when we do retreats, the point is to get to a place where we don't glom on to every stimulus and react to it. Our minds become clear and focused, and we can concentrate on what we want to concentrate on. What that is varies. Meditation is a tool, and there are many things you can do with it.

More specifically, what I am retreating from when I go into retreat is the mind that I have when I'm out of retreat: the one that gets upset when it hears or sees things it doesn't like, and gets caught up in silly activities that aren't much fun and aren't of any benefit to anyone. I'm always reluctant to go into retreat, but once I'm there, it's unbelievably sweet.

Rory, what a strange thing to say. Have you never read the New Testament? What do you think the practice of Christianity is? It's completely about serving others. Likewise with Mahayana Buddhism.

It's true that you practice for your own reasons. But it's not true that "because it benefits others" can't be one of those reasons. It's also true that you can't practice a religion because someone else asks you to, or wants you to.

Indeed, sometimes we practice our religion even when the people we're supposedly benefiting would very much prefer that we just drop it. E.g., my father is an atheist, and he raised me to be one too, and it's a big disappointment to him that I turned out to be a religious nut.

I don't know, maybe I'm a weirdo, but the question I always ask myself about an activity is "does this scale?" Meaning, if everybody did it, what would the world look like? My practice is to be generous, and understanding, and forgiving, and to avoid ignorance. I don't do it very well, but I do it a lot better than I did before I started *trying* to do it. So to me the benefit is obvious, and the result of it scaling would definitely be a better world.

Maybe it is coming from my mind, and maybe you talk down to people. It's all a matter of perspective I guess. Seems kind of like you have a narcissistic "don't you see why you are so wrong about everything, silly?" kind of way of saying things. That's pretty much why I quit the Buddhism group, but now I'm just putting you on ignore.

OM rules.

Eh. I speak as if I know what I'm talking about. Dunno why that's a bad thing.

oops, i meant brian, not digg.

this might just be conjecture, but it feels pretty close to right for me.

Do you guys think enlightenment is the end all purpose of buddhism? i'm not afraid of getting into semantics here, but to me enlightenment is simply becoming aware of the fact that people other than yourself matter just as much as yourself, thus implying that helping those people is just as important as helping yourself. the whole "we're all one" spiel. Its that simple, and its the most profound thing i can imagine.

that might not seem like a big deal to some people, but here, hopefully, we can all agree that it it is something worth forming a religion over.

With that definition, i think its safe to say that pretty much everyone has reached, reaches, will reach enlightenment at some point in their life, albeit temporarily. If you hurt someone's feelings you care about, you feel a little bad. If you make someone happy, it makes you happy.

what makes an enlightened person different from one who attains enlightenment is that the enlightened person strives to be aware of this profound truth during the majority of their wakefulness. most people might enjoy it while its occurring, but won't have the capacity to operate on that kind of wavelength for any stretch of time, (for lots of very real, very understandable reasons, of course.)

If we can agree (or not) on these basic ideas, then to me it seems obvious that brian has attained the tools that buddhism sets out to grant the individual. Whereas many monks seek salvation in buddhism, i'll bet the buddha was trying to impart that what he was teaching was just one small part to moving on and up. So once you have those tools, being generally aware that people matter, then sitting around the halls becomes redundant. its time to figure out how to apply those tools in a socially constructive manner, not stash yourself away in the monastery.

I don't see buddhism as the end goal, i do believe that enlightenment is but one part to our humanity, necessary and vital to our taking the next step to realizing our potential/goal/whatever. If youre really down with what the religion is about, than once you get the basic idea, its time to use those new wings to figure out what needs to be done next.

So is it blasphemy to suggest that enlightenment isn't some near impossible state of mind that you have to become a devout monk to realize, but instead something that is and should be a normal part of our human development? And also, don't you think that once you do get it, its important to move on so we can realize the next step we need to take in order to thrive as human beings?

i hope im making some sense here because it took a great deal of effort to organize these ideas into something readable.

It certainly would be worthwhile to have a religion whose entire point is kindness. However, what you've described isn't Buddhism as it's practiced today, for the most part. Possibly it's what the Buddha intended for people to understand, but if so, the sutras passed down to us from him over the millennia have been badly corrupted.

Generally speaking, the sutras talk about various different kinds of Buddhist practice, but the common thread that goes through all the practices is the idea of future lives. If you don't accept the idea of future lives, then your version of Buddhism is the best you can do. And it's not bad, or wrong.

But really the thrust of the Buddhist teachings is the notion of cyclical existence - this is the first of the four noble truths. The problem with cyclical existence is that even if you work really hard to be a nice guy in this life, there's no guarantee that you'll do that again in the next life. And so there's no freedom. You just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and experiencing the results of those mistakes.

So if you really can't buy the idea of cyclical existence, I think the practice you're talking about is a good one, and you should follow it. And you can call it Buddhism if you want, or "Buddhism Lite," as some Buddhists call it. I tend to jump in and clarify when people say that what you're describing is Buddhism, though, because it's not what most Buddhists are thinking of when they refer to themselves as Buddhists.

Ah! i am completely down with past&future lives/reincarnation/try try again. And i wouldn't say being a nice guy is what matters, but rather being aware of other people as individual and sacred things that are vital to your own existence. So if one understands that everyone is part and parcel to the whole, than naturally (or ideally) they'll work constructively with others, therefore accelerating their absolution from karma.

If you can resolve your current issues with your karmic baggage, then next time around you'll be working with higher levels of karma, or even with other people's karma, which i think is what the mahayana is about, or at least the boddhissatvas.

Taoism FTW! or not.

Hm. Well, what you're describing is something I've heard other people express as well. It's not Buddhism as I understand it - it seems some some sort of Hinduism, if I understand Hinduism at all correctly (which is not completely unlikely, but not very likely either).

From the perspective of my lineage, the problem with what you're describing is that you don't have the luxury of "working through your issues." Because the thing that causes your future lives is karma. And if you examine your own life, even if you've lived a good life, you can probably find cases where you've committed fairly heinous deeds. I don't mean you've killed someone, but you've done something that in retrospect you really wish you hadn't done. And then there are probably lots of little things you've done that weren't major bad deeds, but were nevertheless negative in some way. Or maybe you haven't. I don't mean this sarcastically - some people really do live pretty clean lives. It's unusual, but it happens.

The problem is, so great, you lived a clean life. What's to stop some bad deed you did in a /previous/ life from being the thing that produces your next life? If you have past and future lives, it's kind of ridiculous to think that you have been around for a limited period of time. If this life leads to the next, then you can say that about your previous life as well, and its previous life, and so on. There's never a life that you'd come to thinking back that way that would be the first.

So even if you work through some karmic stuff in this life, eventually some bad shit is going to come around and you're going to wind up in the crapper. That's just the way cyclic existence goes.

And that's the point of enlightenment. The point of enlightenment is to stop the cycle. It's not to reach a higher level, but rather to transcend levels entirely. Once you reach enlightenment, you can't go back - you're enlightened. You can never be forced to take a rebirth where bad things happen to you. Some people take this to mean that you are gone, but you're not - you're just free.

It's kind of scary, and I think it's why people tend to shy away from the idea of enlightenment as something more than a nice state of mind. Is it more true than what you said? Who knows. But I think it's worth thinking about.