BETTI "There is no forgiveness in nature."

 "There is no forgiveness in nature."

/////////////////////I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it ‘the backwards law’. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float … insecurity is the result of trying to be secure … contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves. – Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

///////////////////////BK Anger is an acid that does more harm to the vessel in which it is stored rather than to the person on whom it is poured.

////////////NO EMOTION ONLY ACTION

//////////////THEREFORE U FOOL, B CAREFUL

////////////‘Ask yourself whether you are happy,’ observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, ‘and you cease to be so

////////////Like people forging iron, ridding sediments to become wares, the wares are then excellent and beautiful. Of people learning the path, ridding their minds’ defilements, their practices are then pure.

— Śākyamuni Buddha
(Sūtra Of 42 Sections: 35th Section)

////////////////////// Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity - Voltaire

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///////////////Samvega is the attitude that looks at life as a whole and sees how scary it is. That’s one of the meanings of the word samvega. The other meaning is dismay. You think of how we are born again and again and again. We all want happiness but we can do some really unskillful things based on our desire for happiness. We find people whom we love and we can do unskillful things based on our love."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Remorse"

//////////////////////Remorse August 30, 2016 When you sit down to meditate and settle down with the breath, the mind becomes very sensitive. Sometimes things you did in the past that you don’t feel right about will come up. And they hurt. At times like that, it’s all too easy to start feeling remorse. Remorse is not an attitude or a feeling that the Buddha recommended. Because, as he noticed, it weakens you. We usually feel remorse for one of two reasons: One is the childish belief that if you feel bad enough about having done something, then the punishment will be mitigated. And the other, of course, is the feeling that if you don’t feel badly about something, you’ll probably repeat the mistake again. In the first case, feeling bad about it is not going to make any difference. Noticing that it was a mistake and resolving not to repeat it: That’s the best that can be expected of a human being. As for the fear that we’ve got some suffering awaiting us in the future as a kind of punishment: The Buddha recommends that, if you want not to suffer from the results of past bad actions or past unskillful actions, you develop the brahmaviharas—and particularly equanimity, along with the ability not to be overcome by pain and not to be overcome by pleasure. Pleasure and pain go together: If you get overcome by pleasure and try to hold onto the pleasure, it can turn into pain. And it’s already got you overwhelmed It’s like catching a fish. You discover that you have a huge fish on your line that can either dive way down into the ocean or jump out of the water. You see it leap up and you say, “Ah, this is pleasure,” and you hold onto the line. But then it dives down to the ocean and pulls you down with it. So if the mind is overcome either by pleasure or pain, there’s going to be suffering. But as for the question of whether you “deserve” to suffer or not, it’s interesting: The Buddha never talks about people deserving to suffer. He simply says that certain actions lead to certain results. But he’s here to cure our problem of suffering whether it’s “deserved” or not. He never said, “I’ll teach you the end of suffering only if you don’t deserve to suffer.” The end of suffering is there for everyone, whether they “deserve” to suffer or not. That point should be underlined many, many times. The teaching on karma is not meant to explain the horrible things that happen to people or to justify meting out misery to them. It’s supposed to be used to explain how you can find a way out—so that whatever you did in the past, there’s a way out for you. Think of Angulimala. He killed 999 people and yet he was able to become an arahant. So the question of fear over deserved suffering: The Buddha’s not here to tell you that you deserve to suffer. He’s here to say, “This is the way you act skillfully so that you don’t have to suffer.” And if you’ve done unskillful things in the past, note the fact, note that it was a mistake, resolve not to repeat it, and then develop the brahmaviharas. Goodwill for yourself, goodwill for others, goodwill for everyone. Compassion for yourself, compassion for everyone. Empathetic joy for yourself, empathetic joy for everyone. Equanimity for yourself, equanimity for everyone. Yet he also says you have to develop discernment. After all, sometimes you can do very unskillful things based on what you think is the compassionate thing to do, but you can’t simply trust your loving heart to tell you what to do in a given situation, thinking that where there’s a lot of love, that’ll take care of it. We can do some awfully unskillful things based on love. So what is the proper motivation to make sure you don’t repeat a mistake? The Buddha lists two qualities: One is heedfulness and the other is samvega. Heedfulness is simply realizing that whatever you do will come back in one way or another, and so you want to be very, very careful about what you do. And samvega is the attitude that looks at life as a whole and sees how scary it is. That’s one of the meanings of the word samvega. The other meaning is dismay. You think of how we are born again and again and again. We all want happiness but we can do some really unskillful things based on our desire for happiness. We find people whom we love and we can do unskillful things based on our love. In other words, as long as we’re living under the power of delusion, then no matter how good things get, there’s always an under side. There’s always the possibility that everything will fall apart. No matter how much we understand about the Dhamma, there are times when we forget. Thinking in this way gives you the motivation to want to get out of the cycle. And the path of meditation is the most skillful way out. Some people say that it’s selfish that you’re just pulling yourself out. But think about what samsara means. Samsara’s not a place. It’s an activity, something we do: We keep wandering on. We get this body and we wander through life with this body. When we can’t use this body anymore, the mind goes wandering off to find something else. And it’s driven by craving and clinging. And you know what the mind is like when it’s driven by craving and clinging. Especially when it’s being pushed out of something where it’s used to being. It’s going to look for something new and just grab onto anything. It’s like being pushed out of your house. You’ll take the first house that appears on the market. So this is an activity. And we actually create our worlds of becoming through the activity of wandering-on, through craving. We’re creating our individual worlds to feed on. So it’s like an addiction. And the best thing to do with an addiction is to learn how to end it. You’ll benefit, the people around you will benefit, too. Because as we feed off our worlds, we’re often feeding off of the same food sources that other people are because our worlds overlap, which means there’s competition. So simply pulling yourself out of the cycle really helps to at least take one mouth out of the feeding cycle. And you’re setting a good example. Because the things we do in order to get out are not just a matter of running away. We have to be generous. We have to be virtuous. We try to develop good qualities. One of the motivations for doing this is compassion. As the Buddha said, the people who help us with our practice: If we really do get out, then they benefit greatly. So it’s important to realize that no matter how good things get, no matter how much you’ve learned about things, if you haven’t reached any of the noble attainments there’s always a possibility of backsliding. That’s what’s scary; that’s what’s terrifying about all this. So the proper response when you’ve realized that you’ve made a mistake, you’ve harmed somebody, is not remorse. It’s heedfulness and samvega. And it’s interesting that, in the Buddha’s analysis for both of our reasons for wanting to go for remorse, his antidotes for remorse in both cases are the brahmaviharas: attitudes of limitless goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. But he also requires discernment because, as I said, compassion can sometimes be misleading. That’s where compassion gets scary. This is why discernment is so important. What does it come down to? An understanding of the principles of what’s skillful and what’s not. The Buddha gives some basic examples in the precepts. But then there are the subtler things, and those require a lot of discernment, a lot of mindfulness, a lot of alertness to see how the mind can lie to itself about what’s skillful and what’s not, and to learn how to see through those lies. This is why we meditate: to strengthen our powers of mindfulness, to strengthen our powers of alertness, so that we can see what we’re doing and what’s actually coming about as the result of our actions. And then remembering that. Again, you don’t have to use remorse in order to pound it into the mind that something was a mistake. Heedfulness and samvega are enough. So basically what the Buddha is doing is having us react to our mistakes as adults. One of the things you’ve learned as an adult is that mistakes are very easy to make, but you can learn from them. And that’s the important thing: learning from them—while being mature enough to know how not to repeat the mistake without having to beat yourself up over your past mistakes. At the same time, you prepare yourself: You know that you’ve got some past mistakes. There’s going to be some pain coming in the future. This shouldn’t be news. So you develop the qualities of mind that can guarantee that pain and pleasure won’t overcome the mind. In other words, you develop concentration; you develop discernment. Having concentration as an alternative to sensual pain and pleasure puts you in a safe place, so that when pains come, you have an alternative place to go. That way, the pains don’t have to drive you around. And as you’ve learned in getting the mind to settle down: If, when you’re working with the breath, there’s a sense of ease, then if you leave the breath for the sense of ease, everything falls apart, blurs out. You get into what’s called delusion concentration, where things are very nice and very still, but you don’t really know where you are. When you come out, you’re not really sure whether you were asleep or awake. That’s not the path. So you have to learn that even though there’s pleasure coming up as you’re working with the breath, you can still stay with the breath, you don’t get waylaid by the pleasure. In this way, getting the mind properly into concentration helps you overcome your attachment to sensual pleasures and also helps you not to be overwhelmed by the sense of pleasure that comes from getting the mind to settle down and be still. Now this, of course, includes discernment, because that ultimately is what’s going to free you from pleasure and pain. And notice, the Buddha’s discernment works whether the pleasures or pains are deserved or not. You realize that you’ve had enough of that back-andforth. You want to go to something better. And so you can pull the mind out of both pleasure and pain. You see the mind, or awareness, as something separate from pleasure and pain. This is one of the skills you develop as you meditate. And this is a really important skill. Because as that chant said just now, “We’re all subject to aging, illness, and death.” We have these things lying in wait and we want to be ready for them. As someone once said, the most amazing thing about human beings is that we all know we’re going to die but we all act as if we didn’t. Well, you know. Act as if you take it to heart. You can prepare. You can get the mind ready for times when there’ll be aging, illness, and death. And yet you don’t have to suffer from them because you’ve learned how to separate the concern for pleasure and pain, and the pleasure and pains themselves, from your awareness. You let these aspects of the present separate themselves into three separate things. That way, the pleasures and pains, and your concerns about pleasures and pains, don’t have to weigh the mind down. They’re there, but they’re not having an impact on the mind. That’s when you’re really safe. And you get to that safe place not through remorse but through heedfulness and a sense of samvega. Those are two emotions that you can really rely on. Of course, you don’t want to just sit in samvega. You want it to propel you to act. As with that chant just now with aging, illness, death, separation: That’s all about samvega. But the reflection on karma: That’s actually pasada, confidence that there’s a way out. It’s through your actions that you can find the way out. Always keep that in mind. Things don’t end with samvega. They move onto pasada, confidence, and from there onto release. So meditate with confidence. Think of your past mistakes with confidence, that you’re not going to have to repeat them. Because you’re the type of person who learns.

///////////////////Enlightenment is initially subconscious awakening, which is spontaneously merged with conscious awakening at the moment of breakthrough.

—Kazuaki Tanahashi, “Fundamentals of Dogen’s Thoughts”

///////////////////Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute. – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

DONT WORRY , AT THIS RATE OF GLOBAL HEATING, WAIT 2100- NO POLAR BEARS TO SEE, ONLY IMAGINE

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"‘One realises’, as the spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti once put it, ‘that one’s brain is constantly chattering, constantly planning, designing: what it will do, what it has done, the past impinging itself on the present. It is everlasting chattering, chattering, chattering.’"

//////////////////////////////////gently close your eyes, and notice the breath as it flows in and out. You can focus on this sensation at the nostrils, or at the abdomen. Just follow one breath in, and one breath out. And then do it again.’ There were nervous chuckles; surely it wasn’t going to be that simple, or that boring? ‘Other things will come up,’ Howard continued. ‘Physical sensations, feelings and thoughts will carry us away into distraction. In meditation, when we notice that happening, we don’t judge. We just return to the breath.’ It really was that simple, apparently. What he failed to point out – though we were to discover it soon enough – was that ‘simple’ didn’t mean ‘easy’."

///////////////////////////////////////////"Meditation, the way he described it, was a way to stop running. You sat still, and watched your thoughts and emotions and desires and aversions come and go, and you resisted the urge to try to flee from them, to fix them, or to cling to them. You practised non-attachment, in other words. Whatever came up, negative or positive, you stayed present and observed it. It wasn’t about escaping into ecstasy – or even into calmness, as the word is normally understood; and it certainly wasn’t about positive thinking. It was about the significantly greater challenge of declining to do any of that.

////////////////////////////////////SHAVA X SHAKTI X SHIVA

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"The founding myth of Buddhism is practically a mirror-image of all this. The Buddha becomes psychologically free – enlightened – by confronting negativity, suffering and impermanence, rather than struggling to avoid

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/////////////////////////////STORY X GFN HERO RISES TO OCCASION TO HELP OUT

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CRIME DOSE NOT PAY

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.............................;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;Anything outside me is a reflection of my inner self.

What I see outside, tells me about my conditioning , about my pattern, about my thought process. It is to see things, world with wearing a colored glasses.

Everyone had their own world. It is even right to say as many people as many are colors and by hearing others exotic color description one try hard to wipe their glasses but fails, become desperate and try again but never tired of trying with the false.

/////////////////////These days, this notion certainly gets less press than the admonition to remain positive at all times. But it is a viewpoint with a surprisingly long and respectable history. You’ll find it in the works of the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who emphasised the benefits of always contemplating how badly things might go. It lies deep near the core of Buddhism, which counsels that true security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity – in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.

////////////////////////“When we cannot keep our minds peaceful, how can the world be peaceful? The world outside is a reflection of the human mind.” - Sadhguru

////////////////////"The founding myth of Buddhism is practically a mirror-image of all this. The Buddha becomes psychologically free – enlightened – by confronting negativity, suffering and impermanence, rather than struggling to avoid" 

///////////////////////////////////////A silent mind itself is the great self, the Atman.

//////////////////////QUORA  PAUL=-In reality, though, I don’t really know what my future holds. And I am very much aware that I’m on palliative care, which means that my cancer journey will have an ending at some point. Hopefully not too soon. In the meantime, and to quote the Shawshank Redemption

, I have a simple choice; I can either, ‘get busy living, or get busy dying’.

I choose the former.

//////////////Thank you for sharing your extremely painful sickness.

Unfortunately there is no icon to bow down to you here.

People complain about simple things in life. they do not know what suffering can be.

////////////////////////DWM OAT X VASCULAR HEALTH

Oatmeal has what it is called water soluble fiber. This means that the fiber in Oats can circulate in the body. VERY helpful is you are experiencing artery issues. 1/2 cup of day of dry oats is all that is needed. Make a hearty breakfast, with Maple syrup, currants, sunflower seeds, some sea salt, and maybe some milk, or a pat of butter. Buy Old fashioned or Steel Cut Oats.

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During Spanish Flu, apparently no vaccines were available for it and millions died before it abruptly 'ended' on its own. Does that mean that if we don't develop a COVID-19 vaccine, that it will eventually 'end' on its own too?

Originally Answered: During Spanish Flu, apparently no vaccines were available for it and millions died before it abruptly 'ended' on its own. Does that mean that if we don't develop a COVID vaccine, that it will eventually 'end' on its own too?

Rather than ending, it will retreat into the background of diseases to which most people have immunity. Spanish Flu was H1N1, which made a minor reappearance a few years ago.

One of the many causes of what we call the common cold is a group of coronaviruses which probably did what SARS-CoV-2 is now doing hundreds or thousands of years ago. Viruses don’t “want” to harm us - they want us to carry on walking around, coughing and sneezing over everybody else, but not going to bed let alone dying. They aspire to become the common cold, and will evolve to do so, particularly once most people are immune.

////////////////////////////////Just let go of anything you expect from others. Then, when it comes, life is a surprise!

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