The Sankhara thread

"... can we still notice the areas in our life that give us trouble and change them? " -- Ian

Yes. We can, and we do.

Keep in mind that objects do not disappear. But they are perceived differently, experienced differently, from a greater distance, with less involvement, with less reactivity. Everything you could see before you can see after.

Thanks guys! Mike and Nick coming through with the exact same thing. I love it.

Jackson, no I haven't. But after hearing you recommend it over and over, I think I will have to! : )

"Thanks guys! Mike and Nick coming through with the exact same thing. I love it.

Jackson, no I haven't. But after hearing you recommend it over and over, I think I will have to! : )"

It is perhaps the most important book about the spiritual path that I have ever read.

"It is perhaps the most important book about the spiritual path that I have ever read."

Thanks Jackson, coming from you, I consider that quote the recommendation. I get the feeling you've done your share of reading dharma books, and I know our thinking on these matters tends to align (Alan Watts?).

Moving it to the top of the "to buy" list.

Guys & Gals, in Buddhism there is only one unconditioned 'thing', everything else stands in the way of the re-cognition of that 'thing'. Hence the purification, cessation, eradication language in early Buddhism. Anything that stands in the way must be put down'¦all views, objects, subjects, I amness, roles and relations, identifications, psycho/somatic states (gross or subtle) and maladies, yadda yadda yadda (you know'¦freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose). This is also a very good litmus test to tell if you or your teacher are realized. Do you/they still suffer (from greed, hatred and delusion). If they are still hanging around (i.e. Saints and Psychopaths), you/they aint awakened even though you/they could have had glimpses.

"Guys & Gals, in Buddhism there is only one unconditioned 'thing', everything else stands in the way of the re-cognition of that 'thing'. Hence the purification, cessation, eradication language in early Buddhism. Anything that stands in the way must be put down'¦all views, objects, subjects, I amness, roles and relations, identifications, psycho/somatic states (gross or subtle) and maladies, yadda yadda yadda (you know'¦freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose). This is also a very good litmus test to tell if you or your teacher are realized. Do you/they still suffer (from greed, hatred and delusion). If they are still hanging around (i.e. Saints and Psychopaths), you/they aint awakened even though you/they could have had glimpses."

Let us know when you find such a teacher. Whoever they are, they won't be human.

"Do you/they still suffer (from greed, hatred and delusion). If they are still hanging around (i.e. Saints and Psychopaths), you/they aint awakened even though you/they could have had glimpses."

So if "they" suffer they aren't enlightened? What if there is no "they" that really suffers? But those phenomena may still arise but the missing element of clinging and belief that there is a separate entity that suffers them are not there...thoughts? But would that be suffering anymore? Without the illusory belief in a separate entity sticking to that phenomena and identifying with it? Me thinks not! You just spouted some dogma there based on something someone else presumably said or wrote down. Best to keep sitting and find out for yourself. But don't let that "view" be an obstacle for you in fast progress to stream entry!!!

"Guys & Gals, in Buddhism there is only one unconditioned 'thing', everything else stands in the way of the re-cognition of that 'thing'. Hence the purification, cessation, eradication language in early Buddhism. Anything that stands in the way must be put down'¦all views, objects, subjects, I amness, roles and relations, identifications, psycho/somatic states (gross or subtle) and maladies, yadda yadda yadda (you know'¦freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose). This is also a very good litmus test to tell if you or your teacher are realized. Do you/they still suffer (from greed, hatred and delusion). If they are still hanging around (i.e. Saints and Psychopaths), you/they aint awakened even though you/they could have had glimpses."

I seem to be in a very argumentative challenging place today (yesterday I just felt kind of embarrassed all day) so usually I wouldn't respond to a post like this but today I can't not.
I don't know what you mean exactliy by "realized" and "awakened" but Kenneth Folk along with several other people who post here is an "arahat," or someone who has completed the four stage development insight model. However, I"m pretty sure he has the random delusion from time to time; greed and hatred? Not sure, but probably.
So, damn it, he isn't realized or awakened. And I had such high hopes!
I guess it's time to find another teacher

Further to our discussion here yesterday about perception versus psychology -- psychology is about concepts, ideas, explaining behavior and emotions, what makes us tick as personalities. Perception is about seeing, observing..... noting.

Just to elaborate on a distinction that I believe is critical in practice. These two things do interact (without a doubt) but if you practice psychology you're far less likely to attain a path. We all know this difference because we all struggle with it early in our practice. Some people never get it and spend decades analyzing their "stuff" to the exclusion of being with their perceptual experience.

My basic phenomenological description of the "psychological": when there is an apparent layering of contents, with the percieved surface eclipsing other content that seems not to be there- but is.
So if I understand you correctly, Chris, you are saying that someone of high attainment could notice clearly the perceived emotion to arise, choose to let it go, and never during that process take it on as "me" or "mine". Meanwhile, the perceived emotion could have enfolded within it many layers of "psychological" meaning, hidden behind the face of the perceived emotion.
The Anagami or Arhat doesn't automatically have the ability to unfold all of that, and may even have a greater capacity for "spiritual bypassing" since without the stickiness there may be little motivation to get to the bottom of any enfolded emotional meaning, but rather to merely allow the superficially perceived emotion to self-liberate.
Yet, that optimized capacity for clear or pure perception- non-reactive, non-judgmental awareness-- would greatly facilitate the process of untangling the layers of personal hangups, perhaps dispelling those neurotic patterns through clear seeing. This seems to in fact be the goal of psychotherapy- therapy actually means awareness in Greek, and there's the assumption that awareness itself is intrinsically healing. Although in much actual psychotherapy there is a more analytic, reflective tendency to describe ourselves to ourselves, this descriptive and re-descriptive activity seems to have little effect on emotions or behavior, and is just as useless in therapy as it is in meditation.
(con't below)

(con't)
Meanwhile, effective psychotherapy seems to involve bringing non-reactive awareness into play in experience, first as modeled by the therapist, then as learned by the client.
So perhaps when we are comparing effective and skillful psychotherapy to effective and skillful meditation, the whole thing looks different than when we compare effective and skillful meditation to ineffective and unskillful psychotherapy, especially insofar as the kind of "psychotherapy" that Westerners who aren't meditating correctly attempt to "do" to themselves while ostensibly meditating is precisely this unskillful mode of describing and re-describing themselves to themselves ad nauseum and to no real effect.
Meanwhile, the major differences between good meditation and good therapy may look very different: for instance, meditation is going in the "impersonal" direction, disembeding from content, and aims to optimize the bare perceptual process through reducing clinging and resistence to content. Therapy moves in the personal and interpersonal direction, into experience, but with the same dis-embedded awareness: but is guided by this modern insight that what we immediately percieve ourselves to be thinking and feeling sometimes is the tip of a mental-emotional iceberg which, lying unexamined, will tend to present again and again as unskillful mental-emotional phenomena and their associated verbal and bodily behavior patterns.
Therapy aims at permanently diffusing these complexes by bringing non-reactive awareness into the tangle to digest the incompletely experienced nuggets of memory at the heart of the complex.
Seems like two good legs for walking the path!
Just a few thoughts-
Jake

Hi, Jake. You are certainly describing what I'm getting at here. Thanks.

"Guys & Gals, in Buddhism there is only one unconditioned 'thing', everything else stands in the way of the re-cognition of that 'thing'. Hence the purification, cessation, eradication language in early Buddhism. Anything that stands in the way must be put down'¦all views, objects, subjects, I amness, roles and relations, identifications, psycho/somatic states (gross or subtle) and maladies, yadda yadda yadda (you know'¦freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose). This is also a very good litmus test to tell if you or your teacher are realized. Do you/they still suffer (from greed, hatred and delusion). If they are still hanging around (i.e. Saints and Psychopaths), you/they aint awakened even though you/they could have had glimpses.-ericlonline"

Eric, this kind of faux certainty can be reassuring at times, but the payoff isn't worth the cost. Opinions like these can stand in the way of your own awakening. There is an old blues song called, "If You So Smart, How Come You Ain't Rich?"

There are many advanced yogis here who claim to have discovered a happiness that does not depend on conditions (or ideas). Although it may make you feel good for a moment to presume to lecture them about Buddhism, the real value at this site is in the support for your own practice, so generously offered by everyone here. Time after time, people who are willing to put down their calcified ideas for a moment and observe their own minds, unfiltered by what they "know," experience a life-changing transformation.

A useful, if initially scary exercise is to ask yourself from time to time, "do I really know this, or is it just some idea I have or something I've heard?" If you can find out what you know prior to having to consult your thoughts about it, you will be doing the Buddha's practice.

"Guys & Gals, in Buddhism there is only one unconditioned 'thing', everything else stands in the way of the re-cognition of that 'thing'. Hence the purification, cessation, eradication language in early Buddhism. Anything that stands in the way must be put down'¦all views, objects, subjects, I amness, roles and relations, identifications, psycho/somatic states (gross or subtle) and maladies, yadda yadda yadda (you know'¦freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose). This is also a very good litmus test to tell if you or your teacher are realized. Do you/they still suffer (from greed, hatred and delusion). If they are still hanging around (i.e. Saints and Psychopaths), you/they aint awakened even though you/they could have had glimpses."

Not to belabor the point too much, but isn't this just clinging to the concept of no-self? Why not get rid of the concept "everything must be gotten rid" as well, and see what's left over to be seen? I'm just not sure how can anything "stand in the way" of the absolute.

(edited for grammar)

Also, Chris and Jake, thanks for chiming in as well. This helps tremendously in putting aside any doubts I might have.

Would this be a fair analogy?

Say you have a bunch of stuff to move, but you can't do it because its too heavy. Maybe you can pick up some of the stuff and move it a few feet, but not very far, so you decide to just live in the mess. Then one day, you go to the gym and start to work out, get some training, and build up your strength up. Then you can come back and move the stuff around as much as you like. But getting rid of ALL the stuff just leaves you with an empty house.

If you never go to the gym, good luck trying to move stuff. But at the same time, if you stay in the gym, the stuff never gets moved. And if you move out all the stuff, you have to sleep on the floor. : )

Look friends, don't mind me. I have been taught to put your effort into practice but keep a healthy respect for the sutras. (FWIW this is how the Thai forest monks that some of you like practiced). So I find it a bit strange that some in this group use the ontology of the old canon (stream enterer,'¦,arahant) to describe their subjective experience but have little understanding of the canons epistemological context. Could just be my hangup, so please ignore it. Kenneth, sorry if I challenged the views of your group. When I found this group it put a big smile on my face. Wow, folks interested in jhanna and sharing their personal experience of the dharma'¦how refreshing! So the core practice you teach is out of the visudhimagga via the Burmese with a dab of Vedanta for artistic license? Btw how did you know I was rich?

peace

PS Nikolai that was part of the point I was making with dharma and people language. ahipster, when all is said and done, the dharma is the teacher.

"... but have little understanding of the canons epistemological context."

What matters to folks at KFDh is the actual practice. The personal experience. The deeper, more realistic, real world, on-the-ground, validated understanding of everything that comes from the practicing of meditation and not from reading the experiences and descriptions of others in ancient scripture.

Peace to you, too, ericlonline.

@Ian ---

I don't think you can ever get rid of all your stuff. I suspect that's literally impossible. See, as you live your life your stuff tends to accumulate ;-D

No hard feelings, Eric. i hope you stay around and share your experience and get something out of this place. Yes, we use old language, and I am leaning away from that old language these days. I would prefer to call the stages of awakening 1st to 4th path as I do. When you continue practicing , noting all phenomena, disembedding from all phenomena that are experienced, mental and physical, 1st path happens. Keep doing this and 2nd path happens. Keep doing this and 3rd path happens. Keep doing this and 4th path happens. People are comparing paths here and lots of similarities are coming to the surface.These things happen to a yogi who believes it can be done, works in the correct way, and builds up a momentum with the practice. Nothing more than that. Do this and you can't stop from awakening.

Not all of what happens to a yogi is matching up to old traditional ideas. The traditional views on it seem exaggerated, in my opinion with some threads of truth there. But those ideals seem more to market and sell the buddha's teachings and awakening then explain in detail what actually happens to a yogi's brain. In this place there are no taboos about talking about what happens to a yogi's brain after a path moment.

So regardless of whether it matches up or not to some old pali sutta written 500 years after the Buddha's death by god know's who, the end result is a happiness that does not depend on conditions. Who would not want to live like that? It seriously is the shiz-nit! It can be done! If you let any belief condition your practice, well, good luck! As you seem to be of the "trust yourself" frame of mind, keep trusting only your own experience and put ALL long held views aside. You disembed from all phenomena long enough and this view and that view don't mean much. A happiness that does not depend on conditions does.

I really hope you stick around.
Mudita,

Nick

"

If you never go to the gym, good luck trying to move stuff. But at the same time, if you stay in the gym, the stuff never gets moved. And if you move out all the stuff, you have to sleep on the floor. : )"

that gave me a good chuckle! And I practically wrote an essay to say pretty much the same thing

hello!

First of all: "Thank you jackson for giving me/us more details!" (btw i am sorry i could/can not reply to your and others message. my browser does not allow me to do that!)

Second: In order not to say sth which actually nobody wants to hear and so may receive also unpleasant vibrations i would like to know if you could clarify something for me!
The situation: i am new here and just started to read posts in this forum. To speak for me i am here to get encouraged motivated guidance new ideas and ways to go ahead/across share experience help if i can ... Or simply just to feel "i am not alone (in various ways)!"! i really enjoy being here and it helped me already a lot! Thanks btw!
Now several times i read about THIS very same argument and it makes me always sad because i feel people get hurted! I dont think this is the reason why we are here/ nobody intends to do that!!

So i wanted to make sure if i not missed sth. My question: "Does this "movement" try to define the buddhist terms "sotapan until arahan" new?" Yes or No would be enough for me!

(please be gentle with me!!! normal attached human! )

Why don't you keep practicing, Max and see for yourself what eveyone is talking baout here. There are no sutta thumpers here as we rely mostly if not purely on our own practice experience when we discuss things here. You can find out for yourself and then any doubt will be left behind. Just note the doubt and confusion when it comes up. And i don't think anyone got hurt here. The only little disagreement I saw was with Eric but he seems to have no problem there and no-one here is out to hurt anyone. And certainly no bad unpleasant vibrations are being sent your and anybody's way. I hope you are noting that sadness for reading this thread.

Keep noting your expereince and sharing it with us and no doubt you will recieve a lot of advice and support. Don't worry about the terms arhat and such. See for yourself what all the fuss is about----> HAPPINESS THAT DOES NOT DEPEND ON CONDITIONS!!!!!!!!!!


Metta and mudita

Welcome Max!

Let me put your mind at ease right now by saying that no one here is trying to redefine or change anything about Buddhism or anything else. That is not the agenda here. There is no movement to change anyone's religion or beliefs.

If there is a movement here, then it really is about following the Buddha's recommendation to "come and see" and "be a lamp unto yourself." Everyone is encouraged to give the meditation a sincere try, and report exactly what happens, regardless of whether it matches with any scripture or religious beliefs. Turns out that most of us are finding that our experiences match up in some ways but not in others. No agenda, just our honest experiences.

You know, this whole thing really sheds light on why the Buddha described the teachings in terms of a raft that you leave behind once you've crossed to the other shore. The teachings can help you get going and even make it to liberation, but ultimately you have to get back on your own two feet and rely on your own experience.

Well said, Ron.

Hello!

Thanks a lot for your kindness with me!

I second "well said ron!"
Yes thats very easing to hear!! btw sadhu ron! Its empowering to read about and feel the wonderful fruits of your dilligent practise!!

Great great... because then there is at least hope that such "little" disagreements will not happen again in the future! Like ron said it should be a place to "come and see", to get encouraged to try meditation and see if the results are pleasing. As we see now some people who actually are interested in mental development to get access to such unconditioned happiness/ who search for help/advice (and this is what you actually get here plenty of!!!) get distracted by an unproper use of set terms! So they not even give the teachings/high value experiences of so many practitioners here a look! If they not look they will not try and if they not try how can they see? How can they find relief?

I mean people like eric (if i am allowed to be honest me as well) would not get confused irritated distracted agitated angry hurted etc if one would just choose/use a term which fits with ones experience and not try to make a already SET term fit to ones experience!

FACT (and you confirmed already) is the definition of sotapan till arahan (which is unchanged over so many generations of accomplished people) does not match fully with the experience of not a single person here (as you all see and reported by yourself)! ...and there is nothing wrong with that! Is one less happy, was the practise less effectiv was ones effort for vain if one does not use the set buddhist terms like sotapan or arahan??? No of course not!!! )

If the definitions of terms do not fit with someone means not that they have not fitted and fit with someone else!!! Who knows!?

Continued..