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  • hardie karges 10:36 am on January 28, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Eskimo, Fear, Greenland, , , , , Scandinaian   

    Buddhism 202: Defeating Ignorance, Fear, Hatred, and Anger… 

    Hatred and fear chase each other around the room like cats and dogs that never slept together as newborns on cold nights. Because fear is the primal emotion, even if anger usually takes the rap. You can have a commandment, “Don’t get angry!” But you can’t have a commandment, “Don’t be scared!” Or it wouldn’t make any sense if you did, simply because life doesn’t work that way. Fear is a primal reality, just like suffering. You can’t just command it to go away. And hatred usually expresses itself as anger. It’s almost like Dependent Origination.

    Because the reality that’s immediately prior to fear in ordinary consciousness is probably ignorance, since most fear is based on ignorance, just like cats and dogs that see a difference between them and assume that there’s danger, or because they were taught that way, when in fact there is only fear and ignorance. But the newborn puppy and kitty have no such luxury. They only know that it is cold, and an extra body will deliver warmth, right when and where it is needed. I learned this from direct experience in my own house in a country with no heaters and two pets that hadn’t yet learned to fear each other.

    So, there is primal knowledge, also, and that knowledge will tell you that in a desperate situation, you cling to each other, not stubborn ignorant outdated concepts. The Scandinavians in Greenland learned that lesson the hard way, dying out on the island they ‘discovered,’ rather than ask help from the Eskimos a couple hundred kilometers to the north, who were masters of that environment. You can call it racism, or you can call it fear or ignorance, but the result is the same—defeat.  But society can’t legislate primal fears.

    Society can only legislate actions, and behavior. So, if anger and hatred are among the ‘poisons’ of Buddhism, then the best cure is not only self-control, but release from the ignorance that is primal cause. If I hate someone because they are a different ‘race,’ then I should certainly exercise self-control, so as not to exhibit anger, but even better, much better, is to work on the root cause of both that hatred and anger, the fear and ignorance that is underlying. The best way to do that is to become friends. Try it. It’s called kindness. It’s contagious…

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  • hardie karges 9:41 am on January 22, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Fear, grasping, , , ,   

    Buddhism in the Bardo: Don’t Forget to Laugh… 

    Sometimes the best antidote to fear is humor, even laughter, the more the better. The proof is in the performance. And it’s contagious. That’s about as Zen-like koanic or as Vajrayana-like superstitious as I can get, not that I feel any need to give equal time to those later schools of Buddhism, but because it works, and whether the Buddha ever said something similar or not, I’m not certain, but I’m sure that he’d agree.

    Because the Buddha was a rational man, and that was a radical thing at the time, though many would prefer the latent ‘non-dualism’ inherent in Buddhism, even though that was hardly the Buddha’s central message. The central message was to reduce suffering, not by going on a shopping spree, but by removing the causes of suffering: grasping and craving, mostly. He also had impermanence on that list, as if all change is bad, but I’d probably prefer a more modern approach to that. Some change is good.

    But I see a subtle message about fear in the Buddha’s teachings, and I think that it’s important to make the implicit more explicit. Because fear is one of the horrors of modern life, since we have been so distant from it for a generation or two, and because it looms so largely on the horizon. Because we’ve become very attached, even addicted, to our lives, which more than a few Buddhist monks have pointed out, and to which I’ve often taken some offense to, but which may just be correct, after all.

    Because, even if the goal is to reduce suffering, the next question is always: at what cost? We certainly don’t expect a woman to submit to a rapist, just to avoid a bruise or two. Most suffering is mental, after all, and submission to fear is certainly not always the answer to it. Fortunately, there is usually a sweet spot between two equally unacceptable alternatives, and that is the goal of Buddhism, to find that middle path. It’s a process, after all, not dogma. Don’t forget to smile. Don’t forget to laugh. Sometimes the best antidote is an anecdote…

     

  • hardie karges 5:15 am on September 1, 2019 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Fear, irrationality   

    Submission to Fear is the Death of the Individual… 

    Worse than a life of fear is a life of willing submission to that fear. Because fear is normal, after all, and can be a valuable survival instinct, especially when you’re swimming in the ocean and the sharks just happen to be biting that day. In other words, fear can save your life. The problem is irrational fear, fear for the sake of fear, fear that has no meaning outside of the singular fact of its existence, disembodied with no antecedents and no outside connections beyond itself. And for many people, this is all too real, that fear becomes a way of life, and acquiescence a way of self-deceit, the belief that certain things are pre-ordained and that certain kings will rule domains regardless of any attempt to limit them. This defeatism thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, the idea that nothing can be done, so nothing is worth doing. This was once a stumbling block for me with Buddhism, the perception based on certain SE Asian countries that they were too passive, that they would give up important liberties without even a fight. The problem is self-correcting, though, of course, by Buddhism’s own middle path, neither too passive nor too aggressive being the brilliant compromise. After all, I certainly know of a few Western countries that I wouldn’t care to emulate, whether Christianity is the problem there or not. But many of the judgments are superficial, based on superficial readings of transient situations, white noise that crackles loudly, but means little. Bottom line: many of the world’s problems would be solved if people listened more and talked less, and that is a relative certainty…

     

    • Tim 12:46 am on September 2, 2019 Permalink | Reply

      Too true. I don’t know if you are familiar with Robert Wright’s ‘Why Buddhism is true’. I followed his online e-course, offered by Yale, called Buddhism and Modern Psychology. The term that I fell in love with was ‘catastophization’ (I’m using the American spelling here). Anything and everything becomes ‘catastrophied’ and therefore loses any fundamental meaning beyond its self reference.

      • hardie karges 1:10 am on September 2, 2019 Permalink | Reply

        Catastrophization? I like that term. Yes, gradually I’m learning what the term ‘mental formations’ means, I think, after 2 years of Buddhist studies, always a mystery to me until now. Thanks for your comments, Tim…

  • hardie karges 7:05 pm on June 23, 2019 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Fear, , , opportunity   

    Fear of the Known and the Dread of Certainty 

    I feel invisible connections to all who crossed my path, however briefly, but especially those who walked beside me for a while. For this is truly a spiritual occurrence, sacred friendship, metta, in what is predominantly a material world, of mechanical waves, percussion and repercussions, the logic of logistics, and the calculus of convenience. And this is only normal, of course, that our vision is limited to frequencies of the most ordinary sort, bland and tasteless, for fear of over-excitation, that we may start something that we can’t finish, like violence or struggle or depression or love. But none of this has to be so hard, after all, it seems. It is only our fear that makes it seems so, fear of the unknown, fear of success. Because the known is what is truly scary, that we may be stuck in some prison of our own making, and forced to repeat our actions day after day in some pattern that knows no end. The unknown offers relief from the grind of that despicable certainty. There are no problems, and no fear, only opportunities, massive opportunities…

     

    • tiramit 12:41 am on June 26, 2019 Permalink | Reply

      my naer

    • Dave Kingsbury 2:12 pm on July 2, 2019 Permalink | Reply

      Because the known is what is truly scary … true, indeed! No need to invent phantoms when we have reality! But I’ll take the positives you bring to this – creative approaches are always the best!

  • hardie karges 8:59 am on June 9, 2019 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Fear, , , , Understanding; Free Will   

    Fear and Hatred vs. Peace, Love and Understanding; Free Will vs. Determinism… 

    Life lived in fear is not much of a life, a life of hatred even less so. The beauty of it all is that you have a choice. You are limited only be your imagination and the laws of science. And while some people might think that racism and fear of the ‘other’ is intrinsic and insuperable, that is simply not true. Even dogs and cats can overcome their fussing and fighting if raised together from infancy and forced to resort to the warmth of each other’s bodies to beat the chill on some long cold nights. Necessity is a mother. And this is what religion is all about at its best, the realization that if we are self-programmed to expect the best from each other, then the likelihood of a positive outcome is significantly enhanced, i.e. peace and love just might ‘go viral’. This plays right into the hand of the old debate about free will vs determinism: you can’t change the cards you are dealt, but you can always change the hand you play…

     

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