stella41b
Posts: 4258
Joined: 10/16/2007
From: SW London (UK)
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Again maybe I can add a few thoughts to perhaps clear up misconceptions..
There is nothing which is permanent - everything changes, and changes constantly. A tree grows, we age, the world turns but every minute finds itself in a completely new place in the Universe, which is also expanding and changing.
There is truth and reality, but it is influenced by our perceptions. What we may perceive to be the truth may be the truth, or it may be our illusions. Perceptions may lead to different truths, or they may illusions. We can see ourselves as a single entity, as complete as the world itself or indeed the Universe just as much as we can see ourselves as a component of a greater whole, a part, an element, no more influential to this world or the Universe than a single grain of sand.
I can give another analogy here - life and living is like smoking a cigarette. There is a craving, you reach for a cigarette and light it up, inhale the smoke, and the nicotine goes through your lungs into your bloodstream and to your brain and gradually the craving is satiated, the cigarette is no more and the butt is discarded.
We crave life through our souls and reincarnate into bodies and through living we satiate that need to live until we reach that point when our bodies are used we age and living becomes too much and we die.
However looking at it from a slightly different perspective it is healthier not to smoke and this explains the Buddhist concept of non-attachment. The cigarette calms your nerves, makes you feel more alert, but it also introduces harmful substances to your lungs and causes diseases. Similarly in becoming a smoker you become attached to the cigarettes and you suffer when you don't have a cigarette from cravings for a cigarette.
And so it is with material and physical desires. Yes they provide happiness, pleasure and fulfilment but these are temporary and fleeting and they also cause suffering as does attachment to such desires which also causes unhappiness and misery.
Your neighbour has a house and car. You have a house but no car. You want to be like your neighbour and have a car, and you are unhappy because you do not have a car and thus have formed an attachment to a desire for a car and are blind to the happiness you may experience through accepting that you do not have a car and not becoming attached to an illusory or imagined car. However if you accept that you do not have a car and can find happiness in the fact that you can walk then you are practising non-attachment and eliminating both the craving and the suffering.
By cultivating non-attachment you learn to not give into such desires but learn self-control, greater awareness and it is from this increased awareness, or spiritual awareness and seeking to follow the middle path through life that you can eventually work towards attaining nirvana, or Enlightenment.
Should you therefore seek to abandon all physical and material desires? No, because suffering and disease is an essential part of life and you must endure such suffering because you are on the wheel of life and death and are constantly being reincarnated. As you are born you are also made of flesh and blood and live in this world and so should take proper care of your body and health as you do of your soul.
Hence the necessity to follow the middle path, to cultivate non-attachment and through this greater awareness, wisdom, knowledge, to reject falsehood and illusion, and to cultivate kindness and compassion for all living beings. Through this you release yourself from the endless cycle of reincarnation of death and rebirth as you attain enlightenment.
This is as best as I can explain it.
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