Doing service for others as a spiritual practice is a way to be in the world without separation. In the Buddhist tradition, we call this recognizing that everything is an expression of emptiness. The Heart Sutra says:
Form is no other than emptiness, Emptiness no other than form; Form is precisely emptiness, Emptiness precisely form.Sensation, perception, reaction and consciousness
Are also like this.
All things are expressions of emptiness.
Form is the world of phenomena: spiritual teachings, individuals and ideas. Emptiness is the oneness of life, which means life as it is, without any distinctions. We get confused when we see others as separate from us, when we take form alone for reality. However, to see that "all things are expressions of emptiness" means to recognize that each one of us is totally affected by every other person. We are mutually interdependent. The part is the whole and the whole is the part. If we see that we are all interconnected, we can break down the barrier between Self and Other and experience that we are all One.
There are many ways to be in the world with separation. If you walk down the street and divert your eyes when a homeless person says hello, this is separation. You may take it further by avoiding the neighborhood with homeless people altogether. You are physically separating yourself from other members of society because they don't fit your idea of how people should live.
While engaging a homeless person, you can still hold onto a sense of separation. If you enter a soup kitchen, you will see things that you typically do not see: people who haven't showered for days or men who are drunk and arguing with each other at 6 a.m. If you get wrapped up in thinking, "All men should be clean and sober and polite" or, "Society should offer jobs and rehab for these men," you will get overwhelmed, drowning in sadness or anger. Your thoughts about how the world should be are separating you from the experience of what is in front of you.
But what happens if you sit down next to one of the men and engage openly in conversation? You may find that the man could help you with your calculus homework because he has a Ph.D. in mathematics. He may offer some valuable insight regarding your interactions with your parents. He may share his happiness about discovering a new Jazz musician or his sadness because a friend just died of AIDS.
You will certainly encounter suffering. The man's stories may stick around in your head once you leave the soup kitchen, and you will ruminate on them, reviewing the details worriedly in circles. When you come home, your spouse may get frustrated with you because all you talk about is the stories from the soup kitchen and you don't pay attention to them. This is not engagement from the standpoint of bearing witness. This is the road to burnout.
Being fully present to another person without clinging is medicine, not poison. Meaningful engagement deepens your heart and helps you be more fully present to any given situation that comes up -- at the soup kitchen, with your spouse or in solitude. You can be deeply present to other peoples' joy and suffering while they are sharing with you. You can let it wash through you to your bones and then let it pass. This way, you can feel deep joy or sadness without the added edge of anxiety.
If you venture out to remember society's forgotten people, and you do so with a spirit of presence and equanimity, you can experience deep fulfillment and wholeness. If you deepen your practice of moving outside your comfort zone, letting go of fixed ideas and bearing witness to the joy and suffering around you, loving actions will emerge that reduce suffering in the world. There are many ways to cultivate such presence and equanimity. Some compliment their social engagement with meditation or prayer. Cultivating a connection to the Oneness of life or to God means that we can both be perfectly content with the perfection of the world exactly as it is and do loving actions to make it better.
There are infinite forms that our loving actions can take. Perhaps we help an injured woman walk up the stairs. Perhaps we create jobs and affordable housing for hundreds of people off the streets. The Zen Peacemakers did just that in the 1980s in Yonkers, N.Y. The Zen Peacemakers, along with Jeff Bridges, are currently developing "Let All Eat" Cafés, centers that provide free community meals with love and dignity. Other offerings we made did not achieve their intended goal. Our loving actions can make big contributions to reduce suffering, but we are not attached to those results. After any particular offering, we simply regroup, reevaluate, note lessons for the future and return to the practice of our three tenets: not-knowing, bearing witness and loving actions.
Join Bernie in his upcoming travels: find a workshop near you, bear witness at Auschwitz or participate in a Socially Engaged Pilgrimage to India or the Middle East.
Follow Bernie Glassman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/BernieGlassman
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Buddhism Suffering and the Problem of Evil
http://www.zenpeacemakers.org/
As a dharma stepping stone.
Conditioned mind won't like it,
And will try to say " No!"
Keep walking on those stones,
One step at a time.
Soon you'll reach a gate
And you'll feel just fine.
Wisdom Mind takes over,
And you'll find your way home.
Wisdom Mind takes over,
And you'll find your way hame.
A Doha by Erma Pounds.
The mystical body of God is mankind. Selfishness causes suffering and opposition to God who is mercy and Charity. In charity we oppose our selfishness and share in divinity by emulating God. In doing this, we are saved from our own self imposed suffering.
Shelfishness is not the only cause of suffering. Those who support God are often in opposition.
Your use of charity still misses the point, you are the one with the problem.
You have never seen God or seen Him do anything. You may believe he has influenced or entered your life but that would not be the traditional Christian view.
Your charity requires the suffering of others as the 'consequences' of their poor behavior which you are chartiable to releve but your Christianity that created consequences, the suffering. You are being dishonest about what it is you have done, just struted around proclaiming that since you have overcome rapacious, greedy, hateful and evil nature of mankind so can others. What stares back at you is the the consequences are not the result of nature or man but the created consequences of religious culture.
Christianity does not cause the suffering of mankind, delusional people do. The consequence of suffering results from mans opposition to Truth and Love (selfish hedonism).
Two men stand at a cliffs edge, one steps back in knowledge and fear of the Truth, the other jumps off believing he can fly. One opposed Truth and suffered the other submitted to Truth and thrived.
http://www.amazon.com/How-See-Yourself-You-Really/dp/0743290461/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298183928&sr=1-1
Unlike those who don't know they are lost and think they know the absolute way and no longer search.
A perfect definition of pure and perfect awareness. All consciousness contains some level of ignorance or less than perfect awareness. This perfect awareness has perfect infinite intelligence and has infinite vitality.
The absence of all ignorance is infinite intelligence. Infinite intelligence and infinite awareness are synonyms. The world confuses intellect and intelligence as synonyms. World of difference. Knowing and is of the intellect; intelligence is a knowing beyond knowing and removes all doubt. A knowing beyond knowing of any truth comes through a realization. One can have a knowing beyond knowing of a divine truth and not be all knowing.
An atheist could have an IQ of 160 and still be in the realm of an intellectual knowing and not a knowing beyond knowing of a divine truth. We see this often on huff post comments. The same applies to a religious person, indeed to all that exist in this world and other worlds/dimensions of consciousness.
Turning to suffering or duhkha, it is an ontological problem. Paradoxically we are the absolute substance (svabhavakaya) but we are wrongly identifying with its phenomena—not it. This condition always gives rise to suffering. If we wish to end suffering we must pluck the fruit of the Bodhi-tree.
But you have outlined a better way in this brief piece. Hopefully most will open their hearts and minds to this instruction on how to be LOVE in action.
no difference other than I prefer not to use the concept of emptiness. western throught thinks of emptiness as nothingnesÂs. emptiness is anything but nothingnesÂs it is all and all, the absolute, ie perfect and infinite awareness, so it appears to our limited awareness as emptiness.
emptiness is empty of all thoughts and form but it is also thoughts and form and vitality and intelligenÂce. interestinÂg paradox is it not? we are expressionÂs of that so called emptiness and as expressionÂs we must have limited awareness. seek deeply the necessity and meaning of our limited awareness and a whole new world will be revealed to the sincere seeker.
if a seeker already is a follower of a religion or has strongly held religious beliefs than becoming a sincere seeker is next to impossibleÂ. the hidden paradigm effect on our consciousnÂess.
my comments at 12:26 pm below was an attempt to go beyond the origin of suffering into the origin of that unawarenesÂs as a necessity for the absolute to manifest the many. ie to define the origin of our ignorance.