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Secular Buddhism

A nice meditation which I've been doing is this :

Saying the words:

May I be filled with loving kindness
May I be well
May I be peaceful and at ease
May I be happy.

You incorporate saying this into your meditation practice for about a month, really feeling and meaning the words. I'm just starting the month at the moment!

Then when you feel that you're really feeling the lightness and joy of these words and they're permeating your life, you expand them to incorporate other people in your circles , e.g your loved ones (may THEY be well, happy etc) ; then onto people you might have a challenging relationship with ; then onto everyone in the world :D

I'm just at the beginning of this, so I'll see how it goes. But I've done similar meditations before, inspired by Pema Chodron, involving the imagination of sunlight filling me and other people up, and they've worked really well and been utterly transformative.

Personally, I find that meditation is a bit like any kind of exercise. You have to keep doing it regularly, even if it's only a small amount (I only do 10-15 mins a time) otherwise the benefits of it gradually disappear. I really noticed that when I stopped meditating in January, and my inner peace levels went to almost zero! Fortunately I'm back into good habits and feeling very calm.
 
I'm going to sound EVEN MORE of a nutter, now, by announcing that I'm really enjoying doing the above meditation whilst doing yoga. :D
 
BigMoaner said:
Suffering about suffering
Click to expand...
It's more passing your mind over suffering to locate the cause .
When I've been in a monastery or centre (useful because of the quite and lack of distraction) for a few weeks I experience somthing similar to a psilocybin trip . That is the ability to sense the root or creation event of a specific feeling . A usefull trick when trying to remain calm.

But yes , the all life is suffering thing is somthing I could never understand . Or reincarnation.
 
VfromtheG said:
When I've been in a monastery or centre (useful because of the quite and lack of distraction) for a few weeks I experience somthing similar to a psilocybin trip . That is the ability to sense the root or creation event of a specific feeling . A usefull trick when trying to remain calm.
Click to expand...

Very interesting.

Surely, there is no suffering, without thought?

Things just ARE. It's our thoughts about them that make us suffer, isn't it?

So when you say you can sense the root/creation of a feeling, do you mean, the beginning of a thought?
 
VfromtheG said:
But yes , the all life is suffering thing is somthing I could never understand . Or reincarnation.
Click to expand...

I think the former is mostly about acceptance of the inevitability of suffering isn't it (whereas the "suffering about suffering" is avoidable)?
I'm not sure about where the "points based" reincarnation system comes from. Tacking a "just world fallacy" onto the belief system looks a little odd given some of the other parts.
 
8ball said:
I think the former is mostly about acceptance of the inevitability of suffering isn't it (whereas the "suffering about suffering" is avoidable)?
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Exactly, and bearing in mind that Dukkha means not just "suffering", but a range of feelings including "anxiety", "stress", and "unsatisfactoriness". Translating it as only “suffering” does give a slightly skewed impression to the English speaker.
 
han said:
Very interesting.

Surely, there is no suffering, without thought?

Things just ARE. It's our thoughts about them that make us suffer, isn't it?

So when you say you can sense the root/creation of a feeling, do you mean, the beginning of a thought?
Click to expand...

More the beginning of a tendency if that makes any sense. A tendency to act/react in a habitual manner without being conscious of it when faced with certain circumstance.

Erk .. the Bhuddists call them shankaras ... essentially habits formed and played out without consciousness.
They are what people in the west call daemons.

The only way to 'banish' them is to pass your mind over them to understand them .

A good example would be a trauma which plagues you for years until you face it by passing your mind over it and it dispells.

Habit and awareness are like the shores and the sea. More of one means less of the other .

I am pretty sure that suffering is possible without thought . The suffering I rekon is the habit / shankaras ... which you are released from as soon as you perceive them :/
 
VfromtheG said:
More the beginning of a tendency if that makes any sense. A tendency to act/react in a habitual manner without being conscious of it when faced with certain circumstance.
Click to expand...

This makes sense. Unconscious actions/reactions, plus our thinking that our thoughts are actual 'truth', causes suffering. Or could you call that Samsara?

As soon as we pause, and observe, before reacting/labelling, we are free from our unconsciousness. As you say, the perception releases us.
 
han said:
Beautifully put! :cool:
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Lols ... I nicked that from somewhere ... it is my favourite saying . Well it was . 8ball has confused me with that clever retort tbh.. ahh that's it .. All habit is not evil ... but illusionary and so contrary to awareness ... :/ .. so habit can not form awareness :/ but it can if the habit is seeking to reduce habits ?!?(meditation) erk.
Oh ... What your saying 8ball is that you need awareness to create a habit ? Right .. I am totally confused now.
 
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The reincarnation thing is obviously not something I can take literally, as an atheist. I’m not sure if I’ve said it elsewhere on the thread, but some secular Buddhists like to separate out what was novel about early Buddhism from what was just part of the cultural thinking in the region at the time, and reincarnation is an example of that.
 
It's got to be an element of the cast system bleeding through into their religion :/
One of my absolute pet hates is stupid hippies asserting that everybody is getting what they deserve on the back of reincarnation.
Also the last monastery I was in for a deep dive .. I was chatting to this monk about the war and he was like.... what war ? Literally a lot of monks seem to ignore the world completely ! I was not impressed.
 
realised today that i will probably meditate in some form or other for the rest of my life.

fear of missing out!
 
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danny la rouge said:
The reincarnation thing is obviously not something I can take literally, as an atheist. I’m not sure if I’ve said it elsewhere on the thread, but some secular Buddhists like to separate out what was novel about early Buddhism from what was just part of the cultural thinking in the region at the time, and reincarnation is an example of that.
Click to expand...
re reincarnation - if there is one ultimate reality, which buddhism and a myriad of other philosophical strands propose, and if eternity defines that reality, and that we are that reality, then i am not sure how there can be such things as births and deaths (or causality for that matter) in a fundemental sense. for births and deaths to exist, you'd have to have a "first cause". i'm not sure there was one. of if there was one, what was before that :D

we will never know.

but that's how i can see reincarnation can be understood. not sure if that's how the buddha saw it (though he certainly saw a ground of being, an ultimate reality...or, better to say, not one reality, but not two). the many appearing as the one, and the one appearing as the many. so birth and death and causality and time itself become very strange concepts in that regard. most western philosophy sides with this view too, in my understanding. causality as an appearance rather than any sort of fundemental reality.

also think the mind-body problem or materialism vs idealism thing comes into play heavily here too. i.e. if minds are created in brains vs brains created in minds, then if it is hte later (idealism) then conciousness is the external world - so therefore conciousness never dies, only the brains that recieve it (like the radio analogy - we need the technology of the radio to play the music - but the music is not created in the radio). but hte brains that die are also part of the external world!!! so no one actually "dies" in the fundemental sense.
 
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