During my, as yet, brief study of Buddhism and meditation, I have been truly lucky enough to gain insights into a number of related subjects. Insight I should explain, is a kind of daydream which starts off as a thought and end up with you gaining all sorts of knowledges (which you haven't learned in a book or off a teacher) which you are 100% sure is indeed actual truth. These periods of realisation may come at the very beginning or at the very end of a lifetime of meditation in the Buddhist way. What follows are my own translations of those initial insights which may be able to help you understand the fundementals of basic Buddhism.
(Anicca) Everything is constantly changing, nothing remains stationary forever. Consider the view you see from a hillside. You may not be able to see it but all living things within that view are continually growing and changing, however slowly, from the trees to the grass to the people who live there. It may seem the houses are not moving, but they are decaying - they were built in the past and will not stand long into the future. The fields may have been around for hundreds of years; yet imagine the view full of trees - this is what life used to be like before it changed. Even the hill you look out from may seem stable, but go back or forward just a few million years and you may not think so. The state of change is the wheel of life. The Yin/Yang of the universe. The state of arise, decay and arise again.
(Anatta) There is no constant 'I'. This is one one of the hardest concepts to understand for beginners who have always been taught I, Myself and Mine. But consider this, if you cloned yourself at the beginning of this day and defrosted yourself tonight, would you be the same two people? Of course not, you are constantly learning and changing yourself and your mind, making you a slightly different person. Are you the same 'I' that broke your mothers tea cup when you were 8 years old? It was still you but the 'I' has changed so much since that time, can you really say the opinions of yourself then represent YOU now? And so the 'I' remains constantly changing from young to old without one snapshot of yourself being the definitive version or the complete representation. To take this a step further, if you believe in reincarnation when who was it who lived those past lives? It was still you but the 'I' goes out the window...
What makes up a 'Myself' anyway? We are made up of thoughts, emotions, the senses, the memory, urges (such as hunger and movement), the body parts and many more. Any one of these can fire a signal into the brain at any time and quite a few of these can be registering at the same time. So the 'I' is made from a whole host of individual things, making up the constantly changing self. If you took away any of these things, you would still be YOU but would you still be 'Yourself'. If the self is always changing, how can it be a constant 'self'?
A similar story can be related to Mine, such as My Book. Again, things change. You may think the book belongs to you but rather it remains on temportary loan to you from the world. Before you, lots of people regarded the book to be theirs and lots will say so after you. There are only two possibilities, either the object is destroyed or eventually gets passed on to somebody else to take care of. Everything you 'own' is handled in this temporary way, from the house to the car to the TV set in the back bedroom. The only thing you can do while you wait for one of these two actions to arrise is to take good care of things so they will be of lasting benefit to others.
Anger and worry and unsatisfactoryness (Dukkha) often arrise from a feeling of dislike of unsatisfactory situations. This dislike springs from an uncontrolled subconcious emotion of not being in control of events happening all around you. Because these emotions are uncontrolled they often spiral out of control and take over the whole body, causing feelings of uncomfortability or sparking rage and anxiety. This is where a fundemental aspect of meditation can help - the acquired ability to stand back from ones self and analyse the situation with a more open mind. Through this action you may eventually find the key to unlocking the whole unsatisfactory situation.
The next time something happens that really gets your goat, or the next time you get a job you really could do without, just think: 'It doesn't matter whither I like it or I don't like it; whither I want it or I need it; this problem is temporarily here, and I have no choice but to move through it. So if you can't do anything to change a thing, accept it. There really is no point in getting emotional or angry or even loosing your contentment of life by these things. They may have been caused by someones elses short sightedness or self-centeredness, or be the fault of politics, burocracy or bad management, but you can only change a situation bt accepting it and moving though it - not by being resentful or angry. Sometimes you can change things; or remember lessons to prevent situations happening in the future; so in this case, you can be even more content by knowing you have gained a valuable knowledge for the future. Perhaps next time you are given a laborious chore, or you hear foolish words, or you see situations on TV, or you feel dread or stress or part of an unneccessary situation, first accept it (as dukkha), then find your own truth behind it so you may move on.
Everybody is equal in their own right. You are just as capable as anyone else (without disability) to do anything in the world, you can play any sport, do any job, use any tools and even play any musical instruments the world has to offer. Just because you don't choose to play the banjo or practice law enforcment doesn't mean it is too late to become a good banjo player or a good police officer does it. Even though some people may seem to be better than you it is YOU who must realise you are just as good as every other human you may see walking down the street. Physical perfection - who needs it? You could look like anybody and still feel the same as you do now. It's what's inside that counts.
There is no right or wrong, just more or less appropriate action. No matter what actions we take in life, there are always alternatives. Some of these are unquestionably inappropriate, such as stamping on somebodies foot when they get in your way. Some are obviously more acceptable, like saying 'excuse me' in the same situation. Some people don't seem to concern themselves with the outcome of their actions, they are quite comfortable suiting their own needs alone. For this reason, it is not uncommon for people to see themselves self-righteous enough to be able to say anything they choose without concern for the feelings of others. We all know these people, some are unwittingly self-centered for as long as they wrap themselves up in their own problems, some have matured these ideologies into there own personality.
In the UK, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher developed a reputation as a hard minded, hard working and hard handed lady. Among other things, her ideas lead to the closure of 150 coal mines throughout the country and the loss of a quarter of a million mining jobs. Yet, her ideas on politics didn't start out so harsh, things only changed after years of fighting against other ministers who tried to force their own ideas upon her. In the end, she became hard towards everybody and depended instead on her own single-minded, limited experienced motives. As the saying goes, 'being a hard bitch is the only thing some women have left to cling to'. While she thought her ideas were wise and 'right', many others thought her solutions became more and more inappropriate.
There are many reasons for a person to act inappropriately. A gossip monger may enjoy back-stabbing and spreading rumour, even about their friends, if their own lives are dull or just too hard to cope with. What about the company boss who likes to order people around, or the collegue who always upsets you? Rather than getting anxious yourself, try to see life from anothers point-of-view. Many people said to be 'bad' can also be seen as under pressure, most often they can be seen as unwise with there ideologies or just missinformed, so is it the person or the ideas the person adopts which leads to inappropriate action? Everybody thinks their opinions and ideas are wise and necessary or the ideas would never be actioned in the first place. And so, if everybody thinks their actions are driven to the best of their informed ability, can you really blame them? If you can't blame the individual then the fault must lie with opinions of other people, who, with their own informed ideas, can step back and make judgments in their own way. Who is right and who is wrong? If everybody thinks they are right then they will go on beleiving in their own ideas until somebody changes their way of thinking. If this doesn't happen, people will tend to think they are always right and will become self-righteous.
The problem of ideas and decision making is also affected because 200million people will also have 200million individual problems and anxieties which cloud their judgment and greatly affect their ability to make appropriate decisions. So just as you can't blame them for their problems, so you can't blame them for making misjudged, misinformed and ultimately inappropriate actions. Take away the blame and there is no reason for hatred. Without hatred there is forgiveness and empathising compassion, without doubt the most appropriate action of all. So if you can't change the individual, change yourself.
The key to metta
In order to receive you must give. Love, unconditionally, without greed or need or out of obligation will be rewarded justly in time, so it is important to give for the good of others rather than for reward. If you give love you will receive a small amount of joy or gladdness in return, sometimes unconciously or subliminally but there all the same, giving peace of mind. If you give love to a group you will receive a greater amount of loving kindness in return. If you give love to the whole universe, you will in turn receive a very great amount of unconditional love. The more you love the universe the more you will feel part of, at one with, and in tune with the universe. The more in tune you are, the more you can appreciate and feel the life and love which flows though everything. As you give away your heart, so it becomes easier to open. As you learn to open your heart the more readily you will give and receive, growing the love hole still further. You will start to see your heart and use it in partnership with the head, balancing the body. The more in tune you are with the heart the more you will feel your heartfelt feelings such as compassion and sympathy and you will command the feelings of the past, present and the future. The more you use the heart the less you feel the need to worry about worries in the head. You will develope insight into where you are and where you are going, without the need for fear or hatred. You will see you are, and have always been, on the right path of life, even the hard times are teaching you good lessons. You will get in touch with your emotions, feel comfortable with the world, love your surroundings and love yourself. In return, everything around you will love you back.
More than 90% of the living things we see, we will never see again in our lifetime. Think of all the insects and birds flying around. They could have come from any corner of the world, seen many places and flown many miles, to be in front of you for a brief moment. How privileged are we to be able to be with them. How lucky are we to be able to notice them at all. People can be noticed too, how many of them will you see again? The mother with four heavy bags of shopping, the man looking in a book shop window, the girls eating chips on a bench, even the guy who cuts you up on the motorway. Every living thing is striving hard for life. The path is long. Then they are gone.
Everything can be seem to arrise, exist and then to pass away. To rise and fall. Everything we see was once created, will exist and then will be destroyed or taken away. The land, the trees, books, technology, beliefs, religions, pleasure, pain, emotion, awareness, planets, stars, you, me, the spirit, the life force, the whole universe. This is the Law of ceasation - everything comes from the fabric of the universe, and eventually everything will return to it. Appreciate the things which are before they cease to be.
Sometimes I may be forgiven for thinking I know something, yet the only thing I know is that I know nothing about anything much at all. If all the knowledges were cramed into a space the size of the world, and buddism was the size of Great Britain, I would be the tinyest raindrop in the tinyest steam. From here I can mingle with other lost raindrops, I get hit by boulders and washed against hard places and I can see the world rush by at an alarming speed, yet I flow with the world and I am part of it. I can in no way be said to see more than the smallest part at any one time. Only by being and interacting with other raindrops, flowing downstream together, will we even manage to complete the long journey to the vast ocean, where we could ever hope to plunge the depths of the greatest collective wisdom. Many don't get this far or are diverted in other directions in the hope of a short cut to happiness. But short cuts only lead to dukkha.
There are three outcomes of any argument; positive, negative and indefferent.
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