A Burden that is No Burden

A troubled man named Wo could not figure out how to live. So he began meditating to find some answers. After many months he felt no progress, so he asked the temple priest for help.
The priest said, "Go see old Jah."
So he hiked to old Jah's village and came upon the happy-looking old man coming from the forest under a heavy load of firewood.
"Excuse me, honored Jah," he said. "But can you teach me the secret of life?"
Jah raised his eyebrows and gazed at Wo. Then with some effort he twisted out from beneath his great bundle of firewood and let it crash to the ground.
"There, that is enlightenment," he said, straightening up with relief and smiling.
The troubled man looked on in shock at the prickly firewood scattered over the ground. "Is that all there is to it?" he said.
"Oh, no," said Jah. Then he bent down, collected all the scattered sticks, hoisted them carefully up on his back and made ready to walk on.
"This is enlightenment, too. Come. Let's go together for tea."
So Wo walked along with Jah.
"What is old Jah showing me?" he asked.
Jah replied, "First, yes, you are suffering a heavy burden. Many do. But, much of your burden and much of your joylessness is your craving for what you can't have and your clinging to what you can't keep.
"See the nature of your burden and of the chafing you experience as you try to cling to it: useless, unnecessary, damaging - and you can let it go.
"In doing so, you find relief, and you are freer to see the blessings of life and to choose wisely to receive them."
"Thank you, old Jah," said Wo. "And why did you call picking up the burden of firewood again enlightenment as well?"
"One understanding is that some burden in life is unavoidable and even beneficial, like firewood. With occasional rest it can be managed, and with freedom from undue anxiety about it, it will not cause chafe.
"Once the undue burden is dropped, we straighten up and see and feel the wonder and power of being. Seeing others suffering without that freedom and blissful experience, we willingly and knowingly pick up their burdens out of compassion -- joining and aiding others in their various struggles for liberation, enlightenment and fulfillment."
"Thank you, Old Jah," said the exhilarated Wo. "You have enlightened me."
"Ah-so," said Jah. "Your understanding is enlightened. Now to make it part of your living and your spirit, you must go follow the practice and meditate. Then you will learn to detach yourself from your useless burden of cravings and to attach yourself to the profound source of being out of which life, creativity, joy and compassion form and flow."

"You give birth to that on which you fix your mind." -- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Compare:
यत् भावं तत् भवति yat bhavam tat bhavati

ON DEATH

It is not death that one should fear.
One should fear never beginning to live. ~Marcus Aurelius

In this world
nothing can be said to be certain,
except death and taxes. ~Benjamin Franklin

When the day's work is ended,
night brings the blessings of sleep.
So too, death is the ending of a larger day
and, in the night that follows,
every person finds rest until, of one's own volition,
one returns to fresh endeavor and to labors anew.
So has it been with this our friend,
so will it be for all of us. ~Buddhist funeral service

Death is never far away in one's eighth decade of life, and going quickly isn't that bad.
The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson said it gently:
"God's finger touched him and he slept." No heavy pain, no long goodbyes.
~Alfred Tennyson

To anyone who listened to us, we are prepared to maintain
that death is the necessary outcome of life.
In reality, however, we show an unmistakable tendency
to put death to one side, to eliminate it from life.
The complement to this cultural and conventional attitude towards death
is provided by our complete collapse
when death has struck down someone whom we love. ~Freud, Sigmund

Death on a grand scale does not bother us.
We can sit around a dinner table and discuss war,
involving sixty million volatilized human deaths,
as though we were talking about bad weather;
we can watch abrupt bloody death every day,
in color, on films and television, without blinking back a tear.
It is when the numbers of dead are very small, and very close,
that we begin to think in scurrying circles.
At the very center of the problem
is the pending naked coldness of one's own self,
the only reality in nature of which we can have absolute certainty,
and it is unmentionable, unthinkable. ~Thomas, Lewis

Death is not just a matter of fact,
like what doctors are trained to feel;
it is a matter of Fate, intimately connected with life.

Normally, in a patient’s final hours, doctors close the curtain around the bed and disappear,
leaving family members alone with their dying relative. But one doctor, trying to console an elderly woman whose husband is dying,
stayed with her by the side of the bed. As she holds her husband’s hand, he tells her what the strange sights and sounds on the monitors are saying,
and what her husband is experiencing as life ebbs away. That scene of compassion and communication, in the midst of high-tech beepings and buzzings,
shows what doctors can do when nothing can be done.

To wish to see the dearest ones as long as possible in the flesh
is a selfish desire and it comes out of weakness or want of faith
in the survival of the soul after dissolution of the body...
The more I observe and study things, the more convinced I become
that sorrow over separation and death is perhaps the greatest delusion.
To realize that it is a delusion is to become free.
There is no death, no separation of the real substance.
And yet the tragedy of it is that although we love friends
for the substance we recognize in them,
we deplore the destruction of the insubstantial
that covers the substance, for the time being. ~Mahatma Gandhi

Everyone who is being overtaken by death asks for more time,
while everyone who still has time makes excuses for procrastination! ~Hadrat Ali

No man is an island, entirely of himself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends
or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore,
never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; --
it tolls for thee. John Donne

In his 'Meditations' John Donne wrote further:

Tribulation is Treasure in the nature of it,
but it is not current money in the use of it,
except we get nearer and nearer our home - Heaven, by it.
Another man may be sick too, and sick to death,
and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine,
and be of no use to him;
but this bell, that tells me of his affliction,
digs out, and applies that gold to me;
if by this consideration of another's danger,
I take my own into contemplation, and so secure my self,
by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

Now, this Bell tolling softly for another,
said to me, Thou must die

Premature death may come as a result of sickness;
but, like birth, death as such is not a sickness at all.
It is the natural and necessary end of human life,
as natural as leaves falling in the autumn.
Physicians should therefore,
explore the possibility of treating death and its pangs
as they have treated labor and its 'pains'.
Death is, after all, a great event.
So long as it is not imminent,
we cling to ourselves and our lives
in chronic anxiety pushed into the back of the mind.
But when the time comes
when clinging is no longer of the least avail,
the circumstances are ideal for letting go of oneself completely.
When this happens,
the individual is released from his ego-prison.
In the normal course of events this is the golden opportunity
for awakening into the knowledge
that one's actual self is the Self which plays the universe,
an occasion for great rejoicing. ~Alan B. Watts

How does one find out about this strange thing that we all have to meet one day or another?
Can you die psychologically today, die to everything that you have known? For instance:
to die to your pleasure, to your attachment, your dependence, to end it without arguing, without rationalizing,
without trying to find ways and means of avoiding it. Do you know what it means to die, not physically,
but psychologically, inwardly? Which means to put an end to that which has continuity; to put an end to your ambition,
because that’s what’s going to happen when you die, isn’t it? You can’t carry it over and sit next to God!

When you actually die, you have to end so many things without any argument. You can’t say to death:
"Let me finish my job, let me finish my book, all the things I have not done, let me heal the hurts which I have given others"
— you have no time. So can you find out how to live a life now, today, in which there is always an ending to everything that you began?
Not in your office of course, but inwardly to end all the knowledge that you have gathered — knowledge being your experiences,
your memories, your hurts, the comparative way of living, comparing yourself always with somebody else. To end all that every day,
so that the next day your mind is fresh and young. Such a mind can never be hurt, and that is innocence.
One has to find out for oneself what it means to die; then there is no fear, therefore every day is a new day
— and I really mean this, one can do this — so that your mind and your eyes see life as something totally new.
That is eternity. That is the quality of the mind that has come upon this timeless state, because it has known
what it means to die every day to everything it has collected during the day. ~J Krishnamurti

There's no cure for birth and death
save to enjoy the interval. ~George Santayana

This is the turning of life's wheel--one of those constants that unites all of us as the fragile yet surprisingly strong human beings that we are.
The one thing that connects us--presidents, celebrities, waitresses, office workers, homeless people --is our mortality.
It's the winding down of years, the inevitability we can't get away from, no matter what we do, or how much money we have,
or how famous we might be. It's a parent getting older, changing before our eyes, slipping and falling, slipping away from us in other ways,
leaving us to wonder how the years could have gone by so fast, how we could have been so reckless with time, with words, with our hearts.
~ Patti Davis, daughter of President Reagan

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Thomas Gray's "ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCH-YARD"

DIRECT PERCEPTION

WATCHING YOUR "I"

We must become deeply aware of our bondage if we value freedom. We begin to watch our behavior throughout the day; we notice the fear, the anxieties, how much behavior is controlled by acquisitiveness, how we compare ourselves with others and want to become something that we are not. When we watch our own lives, then there is the pain and agony that the awareness of the bondage creates. If we don't observe this in ourselves, we are only theorizing about freedom. [...]

As long as we cling to the idea that this is "my mind, my own personal mind," we'll have a strong tendency to want to look as good as possible. But if we observe the mind, from a nonpersonal viewpoint, from the perspective of nonownership, simply observe our minds and how they function, we'll be less trapped by judgments.

To be attentive to the psychological structure doesn't mean we must disappear somewhere and give up all relationships, responsibilities. The aim is to stay within the movement of relationships, to continue with work, to be a responsible citizen and to be attentive to the play of the mind. But we'll have to be very alert, for the mind is subtle, wily, full of tricks.

It's a tremendous thrill to see the beginnings of anger or jealousy or greed, not simply to be caught unawares when the emotion is full-blown and has us in its grasp, but to see the first tiny movements of emotion. Where does it spread, what does it do to our behavior? Just as there is joy in exploring the unknown wildness, there is a delight in exploring the inner territory, in watching the volcanoes explode without any movement of defense, judgment, sense of ownership.

If we have never observed anger in ourselves from subtle beginnings to full explosion, we will always be caught in its force. We may try to suppress the behavior of anger, but still it will do its damage and we will not be free from it.

Attentiveness without any movement of the defense structure has its own intelligence. But the automatic tendency is to bring in defenses, judgments and to move from observation to justification, evaluation. We may say to ourselves, "My mother or my father was an angry person. I can't help it; I've had an unhappy childhood, I am an angry person because of that." [...] All the explanations, justifications may be true, but they prevent direct perception of what it is that anger does to our bodies, to relationships, to the work we do.

- Vimala Thakar, from 'Ego: Emergence and Merging Back of the "I" Process'

What is SIN?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin

SIN & Hinduism

In Hinduism, the term sin or pāpa is often used to describe actions that create negative karma.

Sin, in Hinduism, besides creating negative karma, is violating moral and ethical codes as in the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In fact, it is much described in the scriptures that chanting the name of Hari or Narayana or Shiva is the only way to atone for sins, prevent rebirth and attain moksha. For reference, see the famous story of Ajamila, described in a story described in the Bhagavata Purana.[9]

Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami explains in the lexicon section of his book, Dancing with Siva, that "sin is an intentional transgression of divine law and is not viewed in Hinduism as a crime against God as in Judaeo-Christian religions, but rather as 1) an act against dharma, or moral order and 2) one's own self." Furthermore, he notes that it is thought natural, if unfortunate, that young souls act wrongly, for they are living in nescience, avidya, the darkness of ignorance.

He further mentions that sin in Hinduism is an adharmic course of action which automatically brings negative consequences. Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami explains that the term sin carries a double meaning, as do its Sanskrit equivalents: 1) a wrongful act, 2) the negative consequences resulting from a wrongful act. In Sanskrit the wrongful act is known by several terms, including pataka (from pat, "to fall") papa, enas, kilbisha, adharma, anrita and rina (transgress, in the sense of omission).

He comments that the residue of sin is called papa, sometimes conceived of as a sticky, astral substance which can be dissolved through penance (prayashchitta), austerity (tapas) and good deeds (sukritya). Note that papa is also accrued through unknowing or unintentional transgressions of dharma, as in the term aparadha (offense, fault, mistake).

Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami further notes that in Hinduism, except for Dvaita school of Shri Madhvacharya, there are no such concepts of inherent or mortal sin, according to some theologies, which he defined as sins so grave that they can never be expiated and which cause the soul to be condemned to suffer eternally in hell.

(Adapted and cited from lexicon section of his book, Dancing with Siva., with italics to indicate non-quotes.)
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No Illusions, No Resistances - Lao Tzu

Source: http://www.ijourney.org/index.php?tid=606

Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep it to the original Oneness?
Can you let your body become supple as a new born child’s?
Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light?
Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will?
Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course?
Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things?

Giving birth and nourishing, having without possessing,
acting with no expectations, leading and not trying to control,
This is the supreme virtue.

Act without doing, work without effort.
Think of the large as small, and the few as many.
Confront the difficult while it is still easy;
accomplish the great task with a series of small acts.

The Master never reaches for the great: thus she achieves greatness.
When she runs into a difficulty, she stops and gives herself to it.
she doesn’t cling to her own comfort: thus problems are no problem for her.

The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings.
He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to;
No illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body.
He doesn’t think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being.
He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death,
as a man is ready for sleep after a good day’s work -- Lao Tzu (translated from Tao Te Ching)

Time & Tide Wait for no Man

This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning. – The Buddha

Time runs out so soon! - Eknath Easwaran
In our teens and twenties, even our thirties, we have ample margin to play with the toys life has to offer. But we should find out soon how fleeting they are, for the tides of time can ebb away before we know it.

As we grow older and our family and friends begin to pass away, we see how relentlessly time is pursuing all of us. There is no time to quarrel, no time to feel resentful or estranged. There is no time to waste on the pursuit of selfish pleasures that are over almost before they begin.

All-devouring time follows us always, closer than our shadow. As long as I live only for myself, as a little fragment apart from the whole, I cannot escape being a victim of time. It is good to bear in mind how evanescent life is so that we do not postpone the practice of meditation.

Poet Bhartrhari expressed this succintly thus:

bhogaa na bhuktaa vayameva bhuktaaH
tapo na taptam vayameva taptaaH .
kaalo na yaato vayameva yaataa-s
tR^ishhNaa na jiirNaa vayameva jiirNaaH

Pleasures have not been enjoyed by us;
we have been consumed in the pursuit of pleasures.
Penance and austerities have not been performed by us;
we have been burned by the practice of tapas.
Time has not just passed by us;
it has ravaged us without our consent.
Our desires have not been fulfilled;
we have been drowned in our desires.

Swami Vivekananda described our situation caused by desires/expectations thus:

If we examine our own lives, we find that the greatest cause of sorrow is this: we take up something, and put our whole energy on it–perhaps it is a failure and yet we cannot give it up. We know that it is hurting us, that any further clinging to it is simply bringing misery on us; still, we cannot tear ourselves away from it. The bee came to sip the honey, but its feet stuck to the honey-pot and it could not get away. Again and again, we are finding ourselves in that state. That is the whole secret of existence. Why are we here? We came here to sip the honey, and we find our hands and feet sticking to it. We are caught, though we came to catch. We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our life. We are being worked upon by other minds, and we are always struggling to work on other minds. We want to enjoy the pleasures of life; and they eat into our vitals. We want to get everything from nature, but we find in the long run that nature takes everything from us–depletes us, and casts us aside.

Had it not been for this, life would have been all sunshine. Never mind! With all its failures and successes, with all its joys and sorrows, it can be one succession of sunshine, if only we are not caught.
in the net of expectations, desires)

DRINK IS A DEVIL

Extract from article in NY Times d.5th Jan 2009:
http://proof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/the-give-and-the-take/#more-39

All of this gave booze the aura of a magic potion to me. It wasn't just that I happened to like how it made me feel — most anyone who has a drink will attest to that. I believed that a certain modicum of it was needed — like food, water or oxygen — for me to lead a happy and successful life. In retrospect, I knew that I was over-drinking by the time I was 30. But I figured that I was a "high performance" alcoholic — an interesting oxymoron, if there ever was one — and honestly couldn't imagine life without the stuff.
As time went on, this became more or less literally true. I can remember a day when a bartender who'd served me unknown thousands of gallons of booze over the years observed that, "You know, when you walk in, it's like you're a zombie until about the third drink. Then, all of sudden, your eyes clear up and you come to life. Amazing!"
The sad thing is, I knew exactly what he meant.
In time, my relationships with loved ones, especially my wife, my career, my health — all began to spiral down in a death dive. Even though I knew booze was the culprit, I just ordered another because that's what I did when I had a problem: I drank. At the root of this twisted thinking was the absurd belief that I'd just lost my touch when it came to the bottle, misplaced my ability to find that "sweet spot" of inebriation where there's a perfect balance between disinhibition and control, euphoria and calm. I just needed to get my swing back.
As with a marriage gone sour, I didn't want to admit that my relationship with booze was suddenly doing me more harm than good. And like a battered spouse, I didn't know whom else to be with.
If I'd been clear-headed enough to take stock, I could have seen what was going on very clearly: Feeling "normal" was requiring progressively larger amounts of the stuff. And while it had become a kind of lifeblood to me, in the real world, alcohol was still basically just a poison (it's what we put on a wound to kill invading bacteria, one of the most effective destroyers of human tissue known to biochemistry). The body and mind and spirit could handle a bit of it, even on a regular basis. But I was literally and figuratively drowning myself in it. While once it had given me things that nothing else could, now it was taking away the two things everyone needs to lead a life that even has a chance of being complete: my dignity and my good health.
In retrospect, like many drunks, I had reached a stage with alcohol where I was paralyzed, frozen in time, stuck in a tiny crevasse between what had been my best friend and what had become my worst enemy. I needed to find a true bottom before I could begin to regain control of my life.
It finally came one night in February, 1993, when I found myself in a drunk tank at the county jail with a bunch of guys you really wouldn't want to meet, wondering how I'd wound up there.
I entered treatment a week after I hit bottom, on February 11, 1993. Alcohol had finally crowded me into a corner from which there were only two escapes — sobriety or death — but I didn't really realize how literally true that was until my third day of treatment, when I noticed that a particular fellow patient was missing. When I inquired about the patient, who was an alcoholic and a heroin addict, I was told the patient had been taken to the hospital with a severe infection related to the drug and had subsequently died. "This business about this killing you is not just a slogan," a therapist observed dryly.
At that moment, I finally grasped what the stakes were — what they'd always been. And while, at the time, I still wasn't sure what all this sobriety business would entail, where it would lead me — whether, indeed, I could do it — I did know that I didn't want to die. That turned out to be enough of an epiphany, I guess, because I haven't had a drink since.