Sometimes "I Love You" Means Just That (satire)

I'd like to say this to a woman I like, but don't have the balls. It's not the fear of rejection that stops me, but the fear that she might misunderstand the declaration of love.

When a man says "I love you", not all women hear it just as it is. They assume it means the guy is saying "I am saying this hoping to become more intimate with you -and have sex" when the guy actually means what he says.

Sometimes it is impossible to declare my love lest the woman mistake it for sexual desire.

Love like this is so unconditional that the very thought of making love is a ridiculous fantasy. How can one misunderstand unconditional love as the very act of making love, which has conditions about love attached to it?

Sometimes "I love you" means just that. Assuming that the person declaring it just wants to get into your pants is as sexist as other applications of heteronormative masculinity to fulfil the urges of the male libido.

Yes, I am saying that a woman who assumes a man just desires her solely for sex is as sexist as that desire.

Unconditional love removes all such sexist notions because all the conditions that apply to erotic love are removed. In their place is mutual respect for each other's rights and freedoms.

This is why sometimes "I love you" means just that, and nothing more.

---

Originally posted on August 27, 2013 at 11:32 PM

Desire Sublimated (poetic satire)

If we were truly satiated by desire,
then no one would make love anymore.
Thus it is because we are rarely satisfied
that desire motivates us.
For libido is a cunning beast.
She who understands the optimal way
to satisfy her desires knows how to
openly sublimate those desires and
is successful in the pursuit of true love.

---

Originally posted: June 16, 2010

Happiness is Peace of Mind (satire)

It is said in Buddhism that seeking happiness, which comes and goes with a person's mood, is desire which may distract the devout from Nirvana and thus lead to rebirth in the Six Realms of Desire.

In order to escape suffering in the Six Realms, I would need to extinguish the desire to be happy so that true happiness arises.

True happiness is found in the freedom from desire itself. This implies mastering my passions by behaving more compassionately towards other people who have grown to care for.

Buddhism does not advocate the neglect of family life. Rather, Buddhists are urged to act mindfully while keeping the Five Precepts (no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no false speech and no intoxicants such as coffee, tea, alcohol, dangerous drugs, and tobacco).

Even so, I like feeling happy once in a while, and associate that feeling with peace of mind. Deep down though, such fleeting happiness is due to the work of unconditional love.

However, the pursuit of happiness is indeed potentially the pursuit of suffering when a person desires to sustain it to the exclusion of the main goal in life, which is to fulfill your spiritual journey through life.

In escaping suffering, the Buddhist does so by reflecting on the Four Noble Truths (life is suffering, suffering is due to endless craving (desire), relieve desire, and embark on the Eightfold Path to aid in that relief).

It is through meditation that the spiritual journey begins by first relieving suffering by accepting the Four Noble Truths.

When my mind is calmed, I go on to meditate more deeply on the fleetingness of happiness. With my desire thus quenched, it is possible to develop peace of mind so that true happiness may arise.

Happiness is indeed peace of mind. Be ever watchful and strive for it!

Meditation - Journal Entry: September 30, 2013 at 10:02 PM

Be excellent in all
That you do, and accept
Everyone as Buddha
Without question. O!
No one is as splendid
As the bodhisattvas.

Egoless due to daily meditation,
I hold no delusions about being a god.
For what is ego but a tool to wield for liberation?
He who wields Ego wisely uses it to benefit everyone.
What is evil but utter confusion?
What is good but true understanding?

Although all of what I write
Is metaphorical, it is
For the good of us all,
Even the white lies which hold
The Truth occulted by evil karma.

Truth arises from
The pure mind, cleansed of evil
Through daily practice
Of calm abiding and
Mindful reflection on Truth.

Achieve the pure mind
By letting go of desire
Through skillful means.
All it takes is to repeat
The Nembutsu sincerely.

For the Nembutsu
Is the tool of cleansing, and
Purifies the mind.
Wield it kindly when saying
The Nembutsu, the Name-that-calls.

He who utters the Name-that-calls
Is merely moved by the Buddha
Calling to all of humanity.
With each calling his mind is
Cleansed of anger arising from
Desire until the Pure Mind
Arises, shining bright like
The moon rising after sunset,
And the sun rising in the morn.

All things in the universe
Are impermanent,
And there is no soul at all.
Instead, there is but
The Eightfold Consciousnesses.

Addiction and the Realm of Hungry Ghosts as Metaphor

In Buddhist cosmology, the realm of hungry ghosts is one of the Six Realms of Desire, being the second after the Hells.

These realms are metaphorical destinations where people are reborn due to the "evil" passions of strong emotions (anger, hate, fear, lust, jealousy, happiness, attachment, desire, etc).

What is so evil about strong emotions? That one may err and harm self or others or worse, both self and others. We have heard of crimes of passion where a murder is justified due to strong emotions clouding the judgment of the murderer who killed her lover due to jealousy.

Could even a child of two who hits his one-year old brother on the head with a hoe be due to evil passions? Yes, especially when the young lad runs like hell to the neighbor's property to escape justice at the hands of his mother!

Addiction is akin to being in the realm of hungry ghosts. In this way, reincarnation may be used as a metaphor to explain daily living.

Ever wonder why some practicing Buddhists could be so stoic? They have practiced meditation to calm the mind and maintain control over the biggest addiction of all: the passions.

For a Buddhist, passions (strong emotions) are evil in the sense that they almost lead one to the Hells when regularly experienced.

Such an addiction to emotions is an evil because a person could lose sight of the goal of Buddhism: to cease rebirth by putting out the flames of evil passion, and thus enter Nirvana.

How might one enter Nirvana? In this lifetime? Or, the next? Before answering the first question, the answer to the second and the third is, it depends on your past actions, your present actions and your future action. As well, the karma of your past may prevent Nirvana in this life. It might even prevent Nirvana in the next.

Below I give a rough guide to Samatha-vipassana meditation. Samatha is the meditation of stillness, while Vipassana may combine both sitting and walking meditation. If I have erred here, please correct me and I'll credit you and correct the text.

By sitting on his ass in contemplation of bliss, the Buddha practiced the meditation of stillness.

If this isn't your style, then the second method is useful as a guide

By walking while in silent meditation on a koan the Buddhist may find it possible to go beyond peace of mind.

Even though the strict Zen practitioners decry reading a sutra or even writing down one's thoughts, due to the risk of stirring up evil passion, the first meditation in stillness shows that even passions will dissipate when carefully observed.

What good then is the walking meditation?

It makes it possible to realize the meaning of this koan:

"What is your face before you were born?"

Answer: The face before I was born is not the face I was born with. For karma dictates that a practitioner may never know the face before being born. Yet he can be assured that it is not the face he was born with.

Nor will it be the face of my next birth, which brings us to a koan of my own: "What is your face after you die?" The answer is, "It's not the face I was born with nor the face before I was born."

Yet this is not reincarnation, but the transmigration of karma.

However, meditation when practiced with a true Buddha buddy beats sitting still alone.

---

Hungry Ghosts: http://taiyu.hubpages.com/hub/Hungry-Ghosts

The Root of All Evil

Those people who question basic goodness of people, yet are willing to assume all people are essential bad, see the cup as half empty i.e. wallow in their ignorant delusion called Ego.

It is egocentricity that blinds each of us to the goodness of other people. At the same time, the Ego arises due the lie that essentially all people are bad.

How then do we "cure" ourselves of seeing the cup as half-empty?

It cannot be done through intellectualizing a solution as that is merely the Ego's doing.

Instead the Ego must be pacified through love and patience, lest it wield anger to confuse each of us.

For anger is the root of chaos and confusion, and also death and destruction. Indeed, nothing can be accomplished while the mind is beclouded by anger. Any action done in anger will simply be forgotten, and each of us would have to search for the cause, which is merely the Ego vainly grasping, forming attachment to worldliness, rather than rising above it.

Though this be loathe to the religious, the Ego holds itself as God, not the person. When a person sees only evil in other people, that is a reflection of its own inherent evil. For no good thing comes from the action of the Ego.

Am I suggesting the Ego is "satanic"? No, not in the sense of Christian, Muslim or Jewish moralities.

For the Ego is free of "good and evil" yet each of us has the potential for great good or great evil.

Indeed, what we create may be deemed good if we benefit from such action, and evil, if we are consumed by the Five Poisons.

As well, the Ego is neutral throughout such actions, due to the subtle effects of the Seventh Consciousness. Thus it is innocent of evil karma, even though some of the actions of egocentric people may lead to worldliness rather than the Middle Way.

Anger/fear is the worst of the Five Poisons, and from it are derived the other four (attachment/desire, ignorance/delusion, pride, jealousy).

Anger is the root of anxiety with fear its companion. For what is done in anger is due to fear of non-existence of the Ego. Thus anger and fear are what drives a person to commit crimes and even murder.

Attachment/desire is the root of clinging to this world of birth-life-death, because it is based on the illusion of permanence i.e. the reified form of Ego known as the "soul", which is a hallucination about eternal life and immortality, both of which are superstitions.

Both attachment and desire leads to the carnal life of worldliness. It also motivates decadent hedonism, and thus promotes sloth and torpor when the Ego is not driving a person to live a hectic, fast-paced life which is unnatural.

In society today, productivity is deemed good or bad, based on the quickness to produce a marketable commodity. This commodity must be free of religion, and imbued with the essence of secularism. As well, it must have a short shelf-life. Otherwise, profits are lost when a product is long-lasting.

Ignorance and delusion are the root of the Ego's existence. As long as we remain ignorant of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Noble Path of the Fourth Noble Truth, we are "free" to become worldly yet become fearful of loss of wealth to the point of risking our lives just to accumulate consumer goods.

Pride is cause of the Ego's downfall. When everything is "me, mine, and I", that's due to pride. For a person filled with pride becomes a braggart, and in vain tries to make himself look good at the expense of others. A wise person would cure himself of pride by developing humility not only because it serves the greater good, but because by serving the good all sentient being by being humble, we generate compassion.

As for jealousy, that is the doing of the Ego, which leads one to fear sharing the limelight with other sentient beings For those of us who has not learn to control jealousy, everyone else is her rival. As well, jealousy unchecked may lead to much evil, including the willingness to harm a rival.

It is as though all the Five Poisons dance around the Ego, as though in worship of it. In actual fact, the Ego never existed in the first place!

For the Ego does not really exist. All that exists is the conception of the Ego. In its most evil incarnation, it is called the soul, and the Buddhist principle of non-self helps the disciple to see the soul as a figment of the imagination and as a reified mirror image of the Ego.

Since the Ego does not exist, so too the soul does not exist. To believe in the soul, one would have to call Buddhism a fiction. Yet all of the Buddhist sutras confirm that Sakyamuni Buddha lived over 2500 years ago.

For it is the Buddha who declared that belief in a permanent soul that reincarnates is tantamount to the root of evil.

Why? Because it leads to suffering.

If the disciple wishes to be free of suffering, then the Eightfold Noble path is the cure.

For the Eightfold Path is the way out of suffering, and relieves the disciple of mental unrest for good.

All it begins is with taking one breath...

Buddha Recitation as Mind Tool

With each breath I take, I let go of attachment, and cease constructing in my mind all conceptions detrimental to understanding the nature of reality as it is.

Thus, "I, me, mine" are pronouns that describe the person writing these words, yet this person is not attached to such words. For "I, me, mine" are empty of inherent permanent reality.

Then, being the practice to prepare the mind, Buddha Recitation is also empty of permanent reality.

Also, the desire to be reborn in the Pure Land of Bliss is impermanent.

Thus the desire for rebirth inspires me to practice Buddha Recitation, a mindful practice.

Being a mindful practice, it settles my mind and helps me to prepare for meditation.

Thus Buddha Recitation ceases to be a pervasive mental construction, and becomes one of many tools in the Buddhist's tool kit to free the mind.

For it helps me to develop the Pure Mind that is pacified by the pure heart of compassion. This compassion is reflected in the idea that when I call out to Amida, it is actually him calling to me. Realizing this, I will continue to maintain the practice of Buddha Recitation before meditation.

Buddha Recitation helps me to remember the Buddha. As Buddha Remembrance is essential to my meditation, I practice daily.

As well, having realized the importance of always maintaining happy thoughts through understanding the essence of Master Hui-Neng's advice on the topic, I endeavour to remain in the present moment.

For all of this I am grateful to Amida Buddha.

Attaining Nirvana

Some people are born again;
evil-doers go to hell;
righteous people go to heaven;
those who are free from
all worldly desires
attain Nirvana. — Dhammapada 126

Nirvana is freedom from suffering due to worldly desire.

Worldly desire is also called evil passions, which cause us to calculate how to profit at the expense of other people's right to happiness and self-determination.

In this context, evil refers to the negative selfish affect of passions i.e. egoistic desires.

Passions refers to lust, anger, pride, attachment to worldly things, etc.

In this context then, evil passions arise when all worldly desires distract us from our spiritual path in life.

Our spiritual path in life is to attain Nirvana.

To serve others and be helpful to friends, family and strangers is the means by which all Buddhists attain Nirvana.

Thus through selflessness one is able to attain Nirvana, and be free of desire.

The Solution to Ego Addiction

Dialectic Behavior Therapy requires a trusted facilitator with a psychotherapy background to help the client realize that the root of his problems is ego addiction.

A brief definition of ego addiction is the unhealthy exercise of a person's ego which results in negative feelings of abandonment, grief, guilt, psychic pain, and remorse out of proportion with any given situation.

Furthermore, ego addiction may be harder to recover from, because the afflicted have only a vague concept of ego and how it arises; yet they cling to it strongly.

Easterners have a stronger concept of ego and its originations. This is why they reject psychiatry and the DSM. It also explains their belief in karma.

In the East, it isn't the ego that leads to mental illness.

Rather, it is clinging to the idea that the ego is a permanent entity to the point where one fears nonexistence, and strongly believes the self-as-neutral-observer to be a permanent soul.

For certain Easterners who have carefully studied esoteric Buddhism, the five senses and their organs are the five consciousnesses, the mind is the sixth, and the ego and that "soul" are the seventh and eighth consciousnesses.

For advanced meditators, relief from mental unrest is found by visualizing oneself as the deity (usually Amitabha Buddha) and where one is meditating as the mandala palace (the Pure Land). In Vajrayana Buddhism, it may be White Tara and her Pure Land.

Amida Buddha and his Pure Land of Bliss is actually the symbol for peace of mind.

Thus the solution to the mental unrest caused by ego addiction begins by first stilling the mind through meditation in a social setting conducive to it.

Then, as a result of dialog and practice with a trusted master (therapist), the practitioner behaves in a peaceful and non-violent manner.

Desire (poem)

Were I to suppress my desire,
I would sleep my life away,
lost in a dream.
For it is desire
which leads me to practice
mindfulness & awaken to
relief from my mind's unrest.
Without desire,
I would be lost to endless craving,
subject to addiction
with this crazy world.
Everyday I am driven
to practice mindfulness,
until ego is appeased.
Indeed, it is desire
which leads me to practice
mindfulness & awaken to
relief from my mind's unrest.

Endless Craving

Synopsis:
A man and woman meet, fall in love and marries. The husband corrects wife's spelling.

The wife refuses to wash husband's socks because they are stiff with dried sweat.

Later, after several kids (3), the wife claims kids are like hubbie.

The hubbie now talks through morning paper, while the wife tries to clue hubbie into #1 son's drug habit; then hubbie claims he'll snap out of it.

#1 son has nervous breakdown due to bickering between spouses, and rest of children are taken by wife during separation.

The hubbie and #1 son enjoy a spliff together, and consider running a grow op to finance alimony and child support.

The hubbie and #1 son get busted in pot raid by police. At this point the hubbie considers suicide.

#1 attempts suicide when they are charged for grow op and become another statistic in the war on marijuana.

Later the father and son become medical marijuana advocates after stint in jail. Secretly they also grow pot to supply gangs.

Moral of story: endless craving is the root of suffering and its reality ruins lives.

Reflection on the Tao (poem)

With the right training
the mind is a precious tool.
Ego forgotten, feelings yielding
to the tamed mind leads
the way to the heart of Tao.

Yet when common sense fails us,
neither ego nor the untamed mind are of use.
All that is left then is the heart.

Fed by desire and passion,
emotions and feelings seem wonderful,
yet are worthless clothing the ego.

Indeed, the humble power of the heart
helps us to forget ourselves,
and to wield Mind softly with love.

Gently desires paint
the soul with the melody of passion,
until the sunrise of compassion
awakens our hearts to the Tao.

Letting go of desire,
grasping only straw,
let the heart lead.

Emptiness of mind

Actually, emptiness of mind is not even a state of mind, but the original essence of mind which Buddha and the Sixth Patriarch experienced. "Essence of mind," "original mind," "original face," "Buddha nature," "emptiness"--all these words mean the absolute calmness of our mind.

-Shunryu Suzuki, "Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind"

Commentary: Indeed, an empty mind is not filled with ego-delusion. To conquer ego-delusion, Suzuki urges the practitioner to "have a firm conviction in the original emptiness of your mind".

Empty mind is described as infinity, so that we "give up calculating" with our mind.

Interest in infinity helps us "to stop the thinking of your small mind".

Suzuki's "small mind" is his term for the ego-delusion which is part and parcel of samsara.

Thus samsara is the mundane world consisting of the cycle of birth, life and death. It is empowered by ego-delusion.

To escape samsara, one has to awaken to this and put out the flames of desire.

True Love is Unconditional Love (poem)

True love transcends all bounds
when both parties make the effort
to move beyond desire
and all that is human.
To merely indulge
in human love is to restrict
oneself to suffering.
In transcending desire,
unconditional love becomes
the source to help
cross over to the divine.

Rise Above Passion: a Second Look (poem)

Chasing passion,
my desire has ended,
now to be fulfilled.
I chased the girl of my dreams.
Who can do better than that?

Time and time again
crawling after mirages,
I had fooled myself.
Now I rise above passion,
and start to know what love is.

Indeed, love makes clear
the heart shrouded in passion.
It controls the mind
with the music of the heart,
until passion goes away.

For love is greater
than the conditions we place
on the ones we love.
Though passion has brought me here,
it is love that holds me close.

Rise above passion (poem)

Chasing passion,
my desire is endless,
always unfulfilled.
Why chase the girl of my dreams?
I can do better than that!

Time and time again
crawling after mirages,
I have fooled myself.
When I rise above passion,
I start to know what love is.

Indeed, love makes clear
the heart clouded by passion.
It controls the mind
with the music of the heart,
until passion fades away.

For love is greater
than the conditions we place
on the ones we love.
Though passion has brought me here,
it is love that holds me close.