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  • hardie karges 6:47 am on October 9, 2022 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , kileshas, , , , Three Poisons   

    The Poisons of Buddhism: Hate and Anger and the Path to Danger… 

    Anger destroys everything and everyone in its path, and usually a few bystanders, also. Thus, it is rightly one of the three poisons of Buddhism, as a synonym of hatred, dvesha, and co-equal to lust, raga, and delusion, moha. These poisons are also known variously as the Unwholesome Roots (good name for a Rock-and-Roll band, haha), and the Three Fires. In other words: don’t be like that. Do good things, and good things will come to you. That’s karma, in this life and this world, no need for all the generation-jumping and multiple feedback loops. Obey your Mom and Dad, and love your neighbor as yourself, also, BTW.

    But anger and hatred hold a special place in my Hall of Fame of disgusting behavior, simply because it’s so unnecessary and so easy to avoid. You don’t have to do anything! But there are a few things that you should definitely NOT do: lose your temper, raise your voice, or say and do things that you know you will later regret. But for some reason it feels so good in the heat of the moment to tell someone and his mother where to go and where to stuff it when they get there, that you just can’t help yourself, and the recriminations and guilt will only come later, like maybe five minutes later.

    Because guilt is the weapon of Karma’s choice, the punishment that should be equal to any crime, but it works only if the guilty party has been taught ethics and morality, and lives in a society where such high purposes have value. Some people are so corrupt that they are impervious to the recrimination of guilty feelings, and so the only punishment for wrongdoing is more wrongdoing, as society degenerates into madness and solutions are hard to find. Sound familiar? Such are sanctions in the city. Maybe it’s time to return to Nature. That’s the original dharma, ธรรมชาติ…

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  • hardie karges 6:07 am on December 26, 2021 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , Three Poisons   

    Buddhism Unmoved: in Support of ‘Spiritual Bypassing’ 

    The one who can control himself, can control the world—his world…

    Anger is an object lesson, not just about hatred, which seems obvious, but lust, craving, passion, and all the rest. It feeds on itself until it destroys something, if not everything. This is one of the Three Poisons of Buddhism, along with greed and ignorance, and it would be hard to decide which is worse. Because they all destroy whatever is in their path, like fires burning endlessly and mindlessly, when the obvious solution would be to simply let them go, to burn themselves out. If any three words could sum up the message of Buddhism, it would likely be, ‘let it go.’

    But it’s not always so easy, of course, given the nature of the beast, its very nature being its difficulty to let go. So, in a sense, they are all one, that fire burning, which we Westerners like to immortalize as something romantic called ‘passion,’ while conveniently forgetting that word’s roots in suffering, as in the ‘passion of Christ,’ nothing romantic about that. But so we fantasize, that our greed is our glory and our lust is our love, when nothing could be further from the truth, from any metaphysical viewpoint—at least, not in Buddhism.

    Because Buddhism is a religion and philosophy of dispassion, in both the traditional meaning of ending suffering and the modern meaning of avoiding strong emotion. This drives many Western psychologists crazy, of course, because they sense any emptiness as a cause of alarm. The first thing they teach in photography class is to ‘go for peak emotion.’ And the psychologists want all potential conflicts to be met head-on. To not do so is something they call ‘spiritual bypassing,’ with obvious derision. Well, if avoiding anger is ‘bypassing,’ then I heartily recommend it. For nothing good can come from anger. One man’s religion is another man’s aversion, I suppose.

     
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