The Mind is Mightier than the Sword: Enlightening the Mind, Opening the Heart by Lama Surya Das

Author:Lama Surya Das [Das, Lama Surya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53051-4
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2009-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

There is a lot of talk in the spiritual and New Age ghetto about enlightenment, wisdom, mind training, clarity, mindfulness, awareness, higher consciousness, divine mind, spiritual intelligence, and so on. Now Western meditators are excited about brain research and neuroscience. It always seems to start from the head, and go upward. I think we need to ground this talk in our bodies and in the ground of our total experience, not just intellect. We must bring it down to the ground of being, not just in the skyscrapers of thinking and doing that we are all so high on. I think our own life needs to be more grounded in a softness, a friendliness, a warmth that truly connects with earthiness, not just with the rarefied heights of heavenliness.

In looking for Western ideas that are useful here, I have been thinking a lot lately about friendliness, friendship, and cheerfulness. You don’t hear so much about that in the meditation halls, perhaps because it has become so much a cliché that we hesitate to mention it. But without joy and celebration, where would we be? I think that sangha is a significant yoga, an important path of the coming decade and centuries. Sangha requires mutual respect and friendly collaboration, a sense of ourselves as kindred spirits working and exploring and playing together. There is wisdom and higher consciousness in that. There is everything that we talk about built into that, and without that we are dead in the water. All the Buddhist learning, all the scholarship is wasted, is useless without that. If we don’t pull together, we’ll be pulled apart.

There is a story in the sutras: Ananda, Lord Buddha’s longtime personal attendant and monk disciple, asks Buddha: “Lord, is it true what has been said, that good spiritual friends are fully half of the holy life?”

The master replied, “No, Ananda, good spiritual friends are the whole of the holy life. Find refuge in the sangha community.”

Lately I have been feeling this more and more. We cannot do it all on our own. Enlightenment needs a minyan! It is a collective endeavor, not an individualistic, selfish pursuit. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh—who has written wonderful books and is a fine teacher, peace activist, and living example—says that Maitreya Buddha, the coming Buddha of the future, is the sangha. He means the coming Buddha is the community itself; not an individual, not a seven-foot-tall human man as it says in some scriptural teaching. It is the sangha—something taller in stature than any one of us. That’s the meaning of this kind of teaching myth.

I feel it is very important that we work in this spirit in our own lives and feel it in the visceral level, with feelings, emotions, and passions. Viscerally feel and experience intimately the truth that is self-evident, as it were, very true and obvious when we tune in to it, and let go of concepts and fixations, including our preconceived notions and self-centered striving. Then we

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.