streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 4:59 am on April 21, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 428 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 160 ), dharma ( 35 ), Hardie Karges ( 239 ), Hinduism ( 28 ), India ( 15 ), language ( 144 ), meditation ( 189 ), nature ( 17 ), Thai language   

  Buddhism 202: Nature is the Law of Life  

  

  Nature is a law, not a mountain. Rivers and oceans have no more independent existence than you or I. But this is a bone of contention among religions, now, isn’t it, and possibly the main point of division between competing philosophies? Because, if an eternal soul divides Hinduism from Buddhism in India, then the same issue is what divides almost all Western religions from their secular counterparts. After all, isn’t that why most Asians become Christians? Eternal life is Christianity’s main selling point internationally.

  But Nature tends to get a pass from such easy distinctions. Mountains are sacred and rivers aren’t bad. Beaches draw the riffraff, but sublime locations can still be had, if one cares to take a walk and distance oneself from the madding and maddening crowds. And isn’t that what makes a place spiritual, anyway, the silence and the solitude and the serenity implicit in such sublime locations? Bring in the tourist hordes, and the nicest places can quickly go downhill fast, training wheels optional. 

  But that’s neither here nor there from the standpoint of the law that is dharma. The only important thing from the standpoint of dharma is the fact that these phenomena occur in regular and predictable ways, subject to certain causes and conditions. Thus, nature is not random, not entirely, anyway, and not within the time scales utilized by human perception. The implicit beauty is just eye candy for hungry hearts. More important are the principles that govern such relationships. In Thai nature is ธรรมชาติ, dhammashart, the law of life… 

   

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  hardie karges 6:07 am on October 2, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: brain, citta ( 2 ), consciousness ( 29 ), DNA ( 44 ), Heart ( 2 ), jit, jitjai, love ( 49 ), Thai language   

  Buddha in the Mirror: Form is Emptiness, and Mind is Heart… 

  

  

  The mind should be like a mirror, reflecting everything and possessing nothing. Because no one really knows what the mind is. We only know it by its fruits, the fruits of a consciousness that is certainly important, however indefinable and possible unknowable. But that’s okay, because to define it is to limit it, and you know where that leads, roadblocks and dead ends and reasons to give up the search for meaning when that is at the heart of what mind truly is.

  That much we know, and not much else, because the mind is as mysterious as the ways in which it expresses itself. But it’s always been associated with the heart, even before we really knew much, if anything, about the workings of that anatomical organ. So, that’s probably the best clue to what we know about it, that it was long considered to be the center of not only love, but consciousness, those two aspects of human existence considered to be inseparable, even when it was presumed to be located in that chest cavity which contained so many other important organs which were essential to life, specifically the lungs.

  The importance of gray matter would only be known much later, much like DNA, so we must have been thinking: why would THAT be important? Everything important was seen to reside in that chest cavity, no matter that our primary sense organs were all located in the head. Buddhist citta makes no mention of any sense organ, to my knowledge, but Thai language quickly compounded that consciousness jit with the jai heart to make a compound jitjai which persists to this day, long after the scientific biological functions are well known.

  So it is in popular culture, also, that love is somehow located in the chest cavity, regardless of all evidence to the contrary (the kids can stay. I won’t talk about genitalia, haha). But this is important, because love IS an expression of mind, not body, even before language came along to muddy the mix. So, now we associate mind (not necessarily THE mind) with cognition and cogitation and logic and symbolism, but that is all secondary. Mind is heart, and the mind’s quest is for meaning, not truth.