Selfless Being: 09/25/11

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Different Religions & Beliefs

~by Pamela J. Wells

If we accepted and respected the fact that there are different beliefs and religions in the world without fighting about which belief/religion is correct and which one is not correct, that would drop the wall of separation between people and maybe, just maybe there would be more peace in the world.

Fighting over beliefs is all just a big ball of the egoic state of consciousness. I’m right, your wrong—is at the kindergarten level of thinking and consciousness.

On a superficial level it is easy to judge and argue and fight over religion or beliefs, yet let's get back to what it is really all about. Under all of that superficial nonsense, it is really all about coming together and being accepting of each other, regardless of what each person believes or does not believe.

Until we get past our own delusional ways of interacting and communicating with each other, history will continue to repeat itself, from generation to generation, from society to society. There is a deeper dimension underneath all of that madness.

Belief/religion should be about love, not just for a select few. If a belief or religion is not based on love or it is not communicated from a place of love, then it is ego, the mind. Instead of fighting verbally or otherwise there should be compassion, giving, and helping those who need help the most; those who are suffering, hungry, or poor.

I truly believe that there is an Ego God out there masked as belief.

When the mouth opens to speak, does it attack or does it love? That is the question.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

What Does It Mean To Be Undivided?

~by Adyashanti

In these teachings, I’ve talked about being undivided, and I’ve equated awakening with being in an undivided state. But I want to make sure that no one gets a mistaken idea of what it means to be undivided. Nondivision is the effect of awakening; it is the expression of the realization of our true nature. As I have said, being undivided has nothing to do with being perfect or saintly.

Also, there is no guarantee after awakening that, in any particular moment, you will not experience division in some way; there is no guarantee that division will never happen again. In fact, to be free, to be awakened, is to let go of concern with such things, with how awakened one is or isn’t.

One of the great poems of the Zen tradition ends with this description of the awakened state:

“To be without anxiety about imperfection.” So, to be undivided does not mean to be perfect. Being undivided does not conform to images we might have in our mind about holiness or perfection. If someone were to look at my life, I’m sure they could come up with lots of reasons to say something like, “Oh, that doesn’t fit my idea of what an enlightened being would be. That doesn’t fit my image of what an undivided being is like.”

I’m sure that my life would probably not conform to a lot of people’s ideals about what they think enlightenment should look like. Because, in truth, I’m much more of an ordinary person than most people would imagine. To me, part of awakening is dying into ordinariness, into non-anxiety.

Regardless of what someone might say looking at my life or anyone else’s life, the state of Nondivision is not something you can understand until it starts to wake up within you. I can only encourage you not to believe any image that may arise in your mind of holiness or perfection, because these images only get in the way.

Being undivided—seeing and acting from nonseparation, from oneness—is something that we must each discover for ourselves. What is it to see beyond love and hate, beyond good and evil, beyond right and wrong? These things must be discovered in your own experience. Evaluating other people’s experience of Nondivision is not helpful. The only thing that matters is where you are. In any moment, are you experiencing and acting from division, or are you experiencing and acting from oneness? Which is it?

~by Adyashanti – From his Book: The End of Your World

Adyashanti's Website

Zen Buddhism – Hyon Gak Sunim (Part 1 of 3)

Dennis Wholey Interviews Hyon Gak Sunim.

Zen Buddhism is about human beings returning to their nature—in this moment. Buddha is from a Sanskrit root that means Wake Up.

One’s own awakening is the awakening of other things, see because when you wake up to yourself your nature and the nature of all things is revealed to be the same awakened nature. There is no me that’s awakened and you that’s not. We don’t realize we’re awake.

Everything is already awake. It just doesn’t know it. Buddhism teaches that when we wake up to our nature we don’t get this spiritual quality, this divine quality, we are it.

I Believe with Dennis Wholey

www.ibelieve-tv.com

(Part 2 of 3)

Buddhism recognizes that in this dimension that we exist in and in dimensions that are inconceivable to us that there are always enlightened natures waking up and waking others up.

Dennis: Why at this point in time do you think that people are attracted to Buddhism?

Hyon Gak Sunim: I think the extent to which we have been able to develop and kind of magnify this exteriorization of our experience through technology and architecture and materialism and I don’t just mean that in a negative sense of materialism; the sense of our senses being outwardly directed to lights and colors and flavors and possibilities and things and values and everything and music. We’re so fascinated exteriorly, at the same time we’re numbed to the fact that it doesn’t satisfy us ultimately, so in some sense we are numb. And as long as we grasp exteriorly we have learned to believe that it just does not satisfy.