The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace by Epstein Mark

Author:Epstein, Mark [Epstein, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Feelings Matter

The Buddha once gave a teaching in response to his followers’ repeated requests to explain the mysteries of the universe to them. Known to possess a “divine eye,” the Buddha was asked over and over again to talk about how everything really worked. Okay, he finally cried. I give up. You want to know about the world? I’ll tell you. The world that matters is what you experience. The world is your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, and mind; your sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations, thoughts, and feelings; the visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic, and intuitive consciousnesses that accompany them. Like a contemporary neurobiologist, the Buddha explained how each of his disciples was constantly remaking the world through his own sense organs, breaking it down and reconstructing it through his own relational mental processes. You and the world are not really separate, he explained, although that’s the way it seems. In fact, each person, each organism, is inextricably interwoven into the fabric of the world, constantly reproducing a version of it through their interactive, sense-based, experience of it. The self is not the same as any of these processes, nor could it be said to exist separately from them, he affirmed. The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not. While other spiritual disciplines counseled a rejection of the body, suppression of the emotions, or the eradication of the personality in the hopes of connecting with a divine soul or spirit or essence that could survive death, the Buddha taught his students simply to attend to the shifting landscape of mind and body. Nothing else matters, he claimed. Only this.

This way of speaking was the Buddha’s introduction to his biggest discovery, known in its shorthand version as the doctrine of “no-self.” The shorthand version is a bit of a problem, because the Buddha’s teachings on the subject were actually quite nuanced and always varied depending on whom he was talking to. If the person believed strongly in a concrete soul or self or spirit, the Buddha would emphasize its empty nature, but if they believed in an empty self, if they were convinced they were vacant or hollow or unworthy or didn’t matter, he would tell them that too was mistaken, that they were attached to emptiness, that their human birth was immensely precious. For the supersophisticated, he would often say there is neither self nor nonself and then further confuse them by saying that if they took that too seriously they would be wrong too. His efforts were always in the service of releasing people from their fixed ideas about who or what they were, about freeing them from attachment to whatever concept they were clinging to, about loosening the hold that the fear-based ego claimed as its birthright. The Buddha understood the traumas of everyday life, but he was determined to challenge both the protective reactions of dissociation and the underlying hopelessness that accompanies them.

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.