Quote:
Originally Posted by Spadetaker
What about optimism and happiness? From what I read Buddist try to maintain a constant state of balance, uneffected by pain or happiness. So we should never feel happiness? Please understand I mean no disrespect just very curious
Also thanks for the pm, at work atm but I will skype you sometime soon.
Actually this is the biggest misconception about buddhist thought/meditation. : )
The goal is not to be like a robot, a zombie, or like Spock or Data from Star Trek. The perspective is one of loving-kindness for all, to include oneself, as well as to be perfectly realistic in the view of circumstances. This is often misunderstood for good reason. We should want to experience joy and do (as evidenced by the fMRI studies...nobody does it better) but when minor things go wrong like getting cut off in traffic, or having someone scream at us about wearing a t-shirt that supports a local sports team, taking a bad beat (or twenty), or the millions of trivial shocks we get in life we should see those things as they really are. Even when things are serious, we should not be traumatized by things we can change...because being stressed out will logically only encumber us from doing as well as we can to modify the situation, and we should not get stressed out about the things we can't change, because what would be the point of that? So, what should be try to be?
We should see things that happen in life as like a deep lake, when winds whip there may be turmoil on the surface but that is just superficial, and the vast majority of the depths are unchanged. That is what we should strive for.
The truth at the depths of our emotional lake is that we are all one essentially, anger is useless (with a couple of exceptions), and loving-kindness for all things makes us happy and is the most wise and realistic approach to dealing with things.
Pain is often a useful thing since it warns us before we do damage to ourselves, but when it is just discomfort that we need not worry about, we can learn to acknowledge that we are uncomfortable give our full attention to that fact and we can learn to more and more quickly move our thoughts to other things and not dwell on merely annoying things. Some are better at this than others obviously, what we aspire to be is like world champions of equanimity like the story of a couple of Tibetan guys that were held hostage and tortured for 30 years. When they were released they were given an audience with the Dalai Lama and one mentioned that he was in danger at least twice in those three decades. The Dalai Lama was curious and asked him what he meant since it was his understanding that they were often tortured and unspeakably horribly treated...and the man confirmed that this was true but that he had not understood the man's meaning....but that twice in the thirty years he was in danger of hating the guards that had been torturing him. That is the goal that most of us repeatedly fall well short.
By repeatedly gently, lovingly, and kindly pulling our thoughts back in line with what we know to be realistic, wise, and joy-inducing we can use every single annoyance to get closer and closer to that goal.
Last edited by Kentucky Buddha; 07-22-2010 at 10:08 PM.
Reason: I look very much forward to being able to have a video chat and you can clear up any questions you have. : )