Buddhism and Karma (Religion)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, October 15, 2013, 00:54 (3840 days ago) @ dhw

MATT: The core to Zen is simple: Learn how to sit still and do nothing.
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> I could make a comment here about certain folk I know, but they're not Zen Buddhists.
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> MATT: Become a dispassionate observer of your own mind. It is this process that (to me) confirms the presence of "free will." 
> The benefits are subtle... there's no overnight epiphany here. Over time you learn to recognize your own thought patterns as well as their roots and motives. As you observe, you can get a peculiar sensation as I've said before--there's alot going on inside your mind that you have no formal "control" over. I'm sure that when any of us had a sick loved one, we were probably unable to force the thoughts back. However, meditation here gives you a lever so you can at least separate yourself, however slightly, from the concept of experiencing the thoughts, and observing the thoughts.
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> Clearly this does have benefits, or you wouldn't keep doing it. Levels of consciousness are fascinating, and dangerous. The theatre is a wonderful illustration of the dangers and the complexities. The actor must inhabit someone else's consciousness ... he must "be" that person. The moment he steps outside and sees himself being the character, he loses the character. There are some actors who are so immersed in this self-effacing process that they can no longer "be" themselves. They lose personal spontaneity. Watch them when they're being interviewed, and you will sense that some of them have to ACT being themselves.
> -There's alot here that is simply what I consider to be tautology: in the good sense. To be completely honest, I feel like this on most occasions. The only time I can really be "spontaneous" is usually in my head--usually while pretending I'm singing one of my songs in public. When in performance mode, I can safely say I'm not myself, and because of that, I usually feel like I can do anything. It sounds sad, but please remember that I'm talking from a position of knowing myself extremely well. I won't go so far as to say I "act" myself, but I certainly don't relish reading my own story, so to speak. I'm working on that. -> Writing for the theatre entails an even more complex separation of levels. You're absolutely right that "there's a lot going on inside your mind that you have no formal "control" over", but in this case you do and you don't have control. You are the writer. You are aware that you are the writer. The characters are inside your mind, but you are also inside their minds. And yet you are not, because they often do things that surprise you (and if they didn't, they would bore the audience). You may have to intervene, but that is dangerous because they may be right, and then the play will lose all conviction (the critics will say that it doesn't ring true). On the other hand, maybe they are wrong and you are right, and intervention is justified. All this time, you are ... like David's God ... inside and outside them and yourself. But you are also in the front row watching it all happen (like David's God again?). How many levels are intertwined here?
> -This comes back to how I view the idea of character. You know. Every character really does have their own soul. They have their own direction. The difficulty I've found thus far in being a writer, is in teasing out what those characters would really do. The character's can't come off as if they're scripted (though they are!) and I think the single sign of bad writing points to precisely this... "smell." This has to be balanced... as you're aware in my own story, I already know how the story is going to end... so I have to tread very carefully so that the discoveries of the plot and the end are still a surprise to the characters... this isn't easy. -> Of course it is these levels that we assume distinguish us from other forms of life. I doubt if an ant will sit still and do nothing except observe its own mind. Perhaps that's why ants have created such an efficient social structure. They don't question their role. They think intelligently (David disagrees), but only within the parameters of that social role. Your branch of Zen meditation seems almost to be trying to establish the same kind of oneness enjoyed by the ant colony ... by separating yourself from your mind, you can create a unity within yourself and between yourself and the world around you. I guess the effectiveness depends on your own personality. I enjoy oneness (which I certainly feel from time to time), and I also enjoy separation. But then I'm generally a happy soul, so I don't feel any pressing need to be at one with a God, or to be released from the endless pain and suffering of birth, death and rebirth.-The argument from social biologists is that the ant colony itself is the organism, and that the individual ants equivalent to cells in the human body. In that sense, David kind of undermines himself: If we can agree that the ant colony represents a single organism, but that organism displays intelligence in terms of being able to solve problems... but the individual ants themselves are simple automatons... then he's undermining the argument that chemical transactions in the brain are insufficient to produce intelligence. -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysU56JzBjTY-"I must conclude that I am not yet real." -How many of us could say the same thing?

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"