Buddhas Descent from Heaven

will be away until 7-15
blessings

I love Blueberry Pancakes!

A huge truck, like a concrete mixer, pull up outside your house filled with blueberry pancake batter. The valve opens and pancake batter begins to pour out onto your front lawn (you love pancakes). As it continues to pump pancake batter, there is so much that it creeps across the lawn and eventually floods the front lawn. When it reaches the front door, and if the door is open, blueberry pancake batter enters and begins to flow into the front hall and if the truck is not empty and still pumping it out, it begin to creep down the hall toward the kitchen. Now containing grass, sticks, and dirt it arrives to the floor in front of stove. Now is the exciting time because we are really getting hungry and love pancakes! However, it is still on the floor, how will we get it into the frying pan so we can enjoy!

It is like that; the outer practices such as reciting mantras, visiting holy places and doing ritual are trying to go inside for transformation. However, the actual practice comes from interior through living transmission and inner meditation that is clean and free from debris of contaminated outer energies. The debris of ordinary thinking, unaccomplished karma, desires, aversions, and perceptions interfere with the actual meditation. The important purpose of the outer activities is to facilitate and encourage the inner meditation. Reducing fascination by making behavioral changes and learning high thinking, to provide high nutrition is a more correct relationship to the inner process.

Beyond that, if there is no authentic transmission to begin the inner meditation there is no inner actual practice. Therefore, seek authentic transmission as though your life depended on it. This is how the sages behave.

Mystery of Emptiness & Love (excerpt on multiple inner minds)

Buddhist sages and other early inner scientists discovered
that we possess more than one subconscious or subtle
conscious mind, which they have identified as inner, subtle minds. These inner minds have various kinds of veils or barriers that separate them from each other as well as from the outer conscious mind.
There are very specific energetic pathways toward higher development. Unlike walking into a lobby with many doors, there are not multiple doors opening from one main inner location for the purpose of our discussion of inner mind development toward the enlightened state. The structure of barriers and veils and how they work to hold space for higher development is a more secret topic. The important point here is that they do exist.
However, please note here that the increasingly subtle minds are only seen as subtle from a human realm perspective, not from the perspective of higher reality.

you can order this book from http://www.white-conch.org

I am at my best...Quote

Saving all Living Beings with a Aspirin

Guide to the Bodhisattvas Way of Life by Shantideva verse 22b "What need is there to mention the wish to dispel their inconceivable misery…"
22a"If even the thought to relieve living creatures of merely a headache is beneficial intention endowed with infinite goodness…" I’ve seen some of you rummage for an aspirin for someone. “Oh here, let me help you.” “Oh, you poor thing, I’m going to take care of you.” Like that. “I have a tincture at home and I will rush home and bring it to you.” If the thought to relieve living being of even a headache is a beneficial intention endowed with infinite goodness…. Why is that? Because it takes you away from self-centeredness. At the moment you look at others with the intention to relieve their symptoms, you are, briefly, looking away from your self-centeredness, self-cherishing. What a wonderful society [we would have] if everyone did this. Now let’s look at the vast method." Then what need is there to mention the wish to dispel their inconceivable misery?"

I’m feeling so joyful today, I don’t really want to go into inconceivable miseries. I opened my mouth and, nothing [about misery] wants to come out. The powerful wish to dispel the inconceivable miseries of living beings belongs to internal process rather than external process. A quality external process make you a good citizen, a wonderful family member and it creates your personality in a way that allows you to be pleasant to be around.

However, the external process shimmers with distortions, not in a pretty way.Shimmering like heat rising from the desert. It distorts so you cant really tell what is going on. You’re working a little bit blindly because you really cannot understand what is the need of this person and you are accomplishing good things but you must not harm the actual process, the internal vast process. The internal vast process is the seat of bodhicitta.

Bodhicitta does not happen out here (points outside the body). Bodhicitta happens on the inside. The internal process creates apowerful uprising of the your actual component of your personality, the nut of the personality that facilitates a powerful wish to achieve this high state of tremendous compassion. You must have preparation compassion in order to get the internal process so that you can arise correct compassion." The wish to dispel their inconceivable misery…"if you do not understand they are suffering, then there is nothing to meditate on and you [end up having] a luke-warm process and never get to do anything.

You waver on the edge of arising bodhichitta but the mind of bodhichitta is about the powerful needs of others, the powerful needs of living beings. Without that and using external compassion only, would be like fixing a wound by putting a little bit of gold leaf on top to make it look better. What living beings need is the removal of the actual root of suffering. Aspirin for someone who has cancer is not [correct medicine.] It’s useful if they’re feeling pain but it wont cure their cancer. You will need develop the strength of Hercules, the fully enlightened being, an unstoppable, hero that makes bodhisattvas true saviors rather than some luke-warm do-gooder.

exerpt from teaching What is Beneficial Intention 10-2003 http//www.white-conch.org

Compassion is your... Quote

Valid Practice – What That Means

We must have or seek a valid practice. It is all very nice to say, “I am going to save all sentient beings.” But if we don’t create time, or enough time for our meditation practice, that remains on the lips, only on the lips. This rescue of all living beings is often the very thing many Buddhists think is the primary part of spiritual practice but is not possible. That is because they can’t gain enough spiritual depth, valid inner, permissions and clarity in order to be able to access these sentient beings at the meaningful level where they actually can be helped. This is not the individual sentient being; it is all sentient beings in an interior form without regard to their individual present location or situation. We should ask ourselves what is or where is that profound level? Am I able to touch them in a beneficial way? If not, we must find the method to become powerfully deep with a valid practice that lead to that goal.

So, number one, the goal must be valid. Two, the genuine practice must be virtuous. That means we follow a respect system of behavior adjustments such as the vinaya for ordained persons, Bodhichitta vows, lay vows or other morality vows and hold them as dear as great treasures. That way we are not collecting virtue in order to gain power so that we can become famous, rich or have clinging to reputation. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is an inspiration of this principle. To his followers he is kindness itself, tireless in working for beings and highly skilled in meditation and teaching. To his enemies, he is a terrible person who lies, cheats and steals. If he had any hopes for clinging to reputation it would be impossible for him to work as carefully as he does. Perhaps that why he laugh so often?

Three, for a valid practice, there must be a reliance or confidence in the path, or we doubt everything that we hear. We must have some form of reliance or faith in what we are doing in order to do it. There is a cynical and harsh but popular philosophy in the West that delights to doubt everything except the cynical view. A great number of people are damaged by cynicism and become crusty, hard and difficult to contact with the authentic dharma, who lose confidence in the path even before beginning.

Four, this valid practice must have a fundamental faith in the basis of reality. Well, that sounds marvelous and important! “It must have as its basis a fundamental faith in the basis of reality”. However, this is not going so far as saying actual knowledge or experience of the basis of reality, but strong healthy suspicions that the basis of reality is connected to our spiritual path. Then we are actually looking for it. Perhaps it is that kind of a faith. “There is a basis of reality that my practice is directed to,” as a fundamental, foundational aspect of our spiritual practice.

In order to have that fundamental faith in the basis of reality, it requires some level of confidence in the value of the process connected to the value of the goal. We behave and direct a steady stream of motivation toward the mindset that it is worth it. That becoming enlightened is a good thing.

To have confidence in the value of the process means “I am happy to do my daily practice because I know that I have been given a set of instructions, and this is going to be the way that I will actually attain enlightenment, freedom, and the knowledge of the basis of reality.” That’s very powerful.

A valid practice has value beyond the elements in this short discussion. It arouses discriminations that we continue to make when we see appreciate something of value. What kinds of further discriminations could you make about yourself, your environment and attitudes regarding the value of a valid spiritual practice?

Edited excerpt from Grasping - the Sharp Thorn of Attachment 8- 2001
http//www.white-conch.org
http//satisfiedbuddhist.blogspot.com