Maddie

For some reason I notice I tend to be very reactive to most practices. Not sure why.

I can elaborate a little bit more just using my own experience as a typical Westerner starting this path. So being the typical Westerner I saw the right concentration was at the very end so I thought naturally that's where I'd start. On the extended path which are sometimes called the 10 fold path right concentration leads to right insight or sometimes called right knowledge which then leads to right wisdom which ultimately leads to liberation. So the idea is they concentrated mind it's quiet enough to see what's really inside the mind and then to understand it and to gain wisdom. So I spent an excessive amount of time working on concentration and indeed I became much more aware of all sorts of things in the mind, but unfortunately since I hadn't developed the rest of the path I really wasn't ready for all of that. Had I develop Right view I wouldn't have been as confused and freaked out over the stuff that came to the surface and I would have reacted to it better. When I saw all these things instead of saying what's wrong with me I would have realized there was no me to be wrong. Had I developed right intention, such as the intention of compassion and harmlessness when I saw things that were unpleasant instead of judging myself and making it worse I would have been compassionate to myself. Had I worked on right speech more I would have realized that the way we speak to others is the way we speak to ourselves and my inner dialogue that arose during mindfulness would have been much more helpful and less counterproductive. Had I worked on right action more my meditation wouldn't have been as counterproductive as I was trying to undo past conditioning while in the present creating more non-beneficial conditioning. I'm not going to lie I think just by default I had right livelihood down pretty well. It's nice to have at least one win 🤭. If I had right effor down I don't think I would have pushed myself so hard as to make the practice miserable at times.

Forgiveness and trust are not the same thing. 😉

That was great! Do you know how these mantras interact with regular breath meditation? That seems to have become a little more challenging during all of this.

I agree you have a valid point especially in regards to mindfulness, but on the other hand I think especially in regards to concentration if some of the other foundational practices haven't been adequately developed it would seem that problems can develop.

That is indeed the process 😌

I think often overlooked is the fact that mediation is at the end of the eight fold path. There are a lot of things to be mastered first. Right view: study, contemplate. Right intention: determine to be harmless, ECT.. Right speech: be gracious in your communication. Right conduct: ethics (up they matter) Right livelihood: don't make a living causing harm. Right effort: not too much not too little. Right mindfulness and Right concentration: now start thinking about meditation.

That is a very interesting article.

I'm going to contrast this against my previous post. Medicine Buddha seems to be dredging up some crappy karma. Amitofu makes me feel better. It makes me think of what Bill Brodie said about finding one practice that you like and one that you hate. He says the one you hate is making you progress and the one you like keeps you from being too discouraged.

Since I have a lot of time to experiment with various mantras I think I'm finding that is zhunti mantra and probably nam-myoho-renge-kyo are my go-to mantras for the corona situation, in the economic since especially.

I think in my experimentation this week with various mantras and chanting that the medicine Buddha seems to be digging up the most problematic karma.

Things become easier to forgive when we separate actions from self. When it's an action then it's just an event that happened at a point in time and it's over with. When we think it's a self that committed an action and we think the self is eternal then the action by default becomes eternal in our perception.

I would say in this case an even more immediate cause of suffering than the attachment is the self-judgment about the attachment.

I only know of one manjushri mantra. Om A Ra Pa Ga Na Dhi. And yes I study the Dharma extensively.

This is why often karma tends to be self-perpetuating. You might be attracted to somebody because of past karma and then by acting on that attraction you create more attraction karma in general and for that person specifically thereby perpetuating the cycle. There is mind. Even with the partner it's ultimately mind. If it's with the partner you still experience them through the senses and the mind becomes conscious of the sensory contact through the senses thus creating more conditioning for future attachment. Without a partner with porn for example there's still seeing and feeling tactile sensations even if they are self stimulated and conceptual concepts. So in the ultimate since there's not really any difference it's still craving and clinging due to conditioning.

I think one thing that would help when it comes to trying to understand the Bible is to remember it's not one book written by one author but it's actually more like a library avascollection of books with many authors spanning of time frame of roughly a thousand years at least. So yeah in the pentateuch there is some very cruel and primitive stuff which isn't surprising for a bronze age culture. On the other hand you have some of the prophets like Isaiah that in my opinion tend to anthropomorphise the effects of collective karma into a personal judgment from a personal deity. I might not think that they got all the details right but at least they were picking up on the causes and effects of collective societal actions. Then you fast-forward to the New testament and you have Jesus saying a lot of things that sound much more like the Buddha and Lao Tze than the bronze age era pentateuch. I just think it gets more complicated when you look up the Bible as one entity as opposed to a collection of very different sources.

Does anyone know much about manjushri mantra? As I've had a lot more time to experiment with the lockdown I found that I really like this one. aside from making one smarter I wonder what other benefits come from it?

I tend to ponder karma a lot anyhow but this pandemic has caused me to ponder collective karma more. So what the sutras teaches is that karma seeks opportunity to ripen when the conditions are right for it to do so. So if you have a few people who were mass murderers in past lives but they're sprinkled out amongst people who do not have this karma it would seem very unlikely that this kind of karma on a mass scale is going to have opportunity to ripen. on the other hand it would seem logical to assume that if you have a large number of people who have a decent amount killing karma and they're all together in one place at one time then the likelihood of this karma ripening into a genocide for example is much more likely. On the other hand he have a bunch of people whose karma is predominantly one of kindness and compassion generosity then you would assume this society would be very peaceful and healthy and prosperous assuming these people didn't just go to one of the Heavenly realms. From a karma point of view though I think basically comes down to the proportion of people in the same place and at the same time with the same karma increase the likelihood of major events to occur they're pleasant or unpleasant.

What I find kind of interesting and baffling at the same time is while I share a lot of the hesitancies about Christianity already mentioned in this thread by many, but in my experimentation with chanting I have tried the Catholic rosary and to my surprise it did seem to have an effect.

Well another one that resonates very well with me is nam myoho renge Kyo which is about the lotus sutra as opposed to a Pure land so not really sure what that means?

I guess this is why when Buddha and Lso Tzu tasted the vinegar, the Buddha thought it was bitter and Lao Tzu thought it was sweet.

Mindfulness. When the mind understands this attachment is suffering it will automatically let go.

Due to the lockdown I've had a lot of time to experiment. Just from a personal experience frame of reference I've noticed that Amitofuo seems to resonate with me better than medicine Buddha but I'm not sure why.

So is there a list of things that Amitabha Buddha helps with in a similar manner as the medicine Buddha list? Besides just getting into the pure land?

Interesting as I did not realize there were sidis involved with pure land practice. I had noticed that extensive zhunti mantra practice had an opening effect on my third eye.