The Eight Realizations of Great Beings: Essential Buddhist Wisdom for Waking Up to Who You Are by Brother Phap Hai

Author:Brother Phap Hai [Hai, Phap]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BODY; MIND & SPIRIT, Mindfulness & Meditation, Religion, buddhism, Sacred Writings, philosophy, Eastern
ISBN: 9781946764874
Google: xbn8DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 2021-09-28T23:21:01.477953+00:00

The first of the four demons or Maras is unwholesome mental factors. Earlier we discussed developing the awareness of mental factors within us that prevent us from nurturing the qualities that we’d like to see in ourselves or in the world. The foundation for this awareness is understanding our deep aspiration and aligning our lives fully with it. This requires a certain level of discernment.

The second of the four demons is identifying ourselves with the five skandhas of form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. Many of us identify ourselves with our body. There are whole industries built up around this idea that aging is wrong. Recently I was at a dermatologist’s office, and on the wall was a sign advertising $8 Botox shots. Just one shot and everything will be okay. We can get rid of the crow’s feet, but something else will inevitably pop up.

Please contemplate deeply: in what way is this body, which even in this very moment is in a constant process of change and disintegration, really me? Then continue the contemplation with the other skandhas: your feelings (painful, pleasant, and neither-painful-nor-pleasant), your perceptions, your mental formations, and then the seeds in your consciousness. Are any of those permanent? Which one is you? Also, which skandha do you find yourself identifying with more strongly?

To identify ourselves with form, with feeling, with perception, with mental formations or with consciousness is a deep form of illusion since all of the skandhas are all in a constant state of change. As we saw before, science tells us that in this very moment our body is completely different on a cellular level than the body we had seven years ago. Every single second, millions of cells are being born and are dying. The same with our thoughts. If you’ve ever watched your thoughts during meditation, you’ll notice one thought leads to another and another, and in the space of three minutes you could have written War and Peace with the thoughts that flowed through your consciousness.

The third of the four demons or Maras is death or annihilation. Death is the big one, for many of us—the scariest. We have this idea of a lifespan, whether it’s a physical lifespan or the lifespan of an experience or idea, and we think it’s going to end at some point. Is that really true? Can something become nothing? Who are we in this moment? Who will we be three hundred years from now? A powerful practice is to contemplate our death using the charnel ground meditations in the Discourse on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness. In these, we visualize our body and the disintegrative processes it goes through after death. It’s through the integration of the reality of our death that we’re invited into the celebration of life.

Finally, the fourth of the four demons or Maras is distraction. Distraction here needs to be considered on both the micro and macro levels. It’s both the constant moment-by-moment lapses in attentiveness that we experience, as well as the loss of sight of our deepest aspiration.

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.