Hi Anthony, > When a psychological pain occurrs, one can see it as an illusion and it can > go away.
To me, seeing it as 'illusion' does not make the pain go away. Its existence just does not trouble me as much and I don't really suffer from the pain. >When a physical pain appears, one cannot eliminate it with any thoughts, but >you can use Mayka's method of 'making friends' with it, and will learn to live >with it with more equinimity. This method, is similar to convincing myself that the pain is just an illusion. It works for Mayka, but doesn't work for me. Anyway, I don't have actual experience with cancer pain either, so when it comes to it, the above is also only an assumption. Siska -----Original Message----- From: Anthony Wu <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:26:21 To: <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Zen] Re: Experience Merit Siska, Without my own experiences, I can only make the following assumptions: When a psychological pain occurrs, one can see it as an illusion and it can go away. When a physical pain appears, one cannot eliminate it with any thoughts, but you can use Mayka's method of 'making friends' with it, and will learn to live with it with more equinimity. Anthony --- On Thu, 17/2/11, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: From: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Zen] Re: Experience Merit To: [email protected] Date: Thursday, 17 February, 2011, 5:46 PM Hi Anthony, > When you have acute pain, e.g. from cancer, you would have big trouble > convincing yourself that it is just illusion. I think this applies to any case, not just cancer. However, to me, the problem seems to lie at the need of convincing. When one see the pain as illusion, then it is an illusion. When one does not see the pain as illusion, then it is not an illusion. Any efforts to convince oneself that it is otherwise would be really difficult. In my case, it would never work. siska From: Anthony Wu <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 06:07:29 +0800 (SGT) To: <[email protected]> ReplyTo: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Zen] Re: Experience Merit Steve, You say, "Nagarjuna said, those who try to turn Emptiness into a fixed explanation of reality are incurable." So we should not discount everything as illusion. You also say, " Gotama wasn't trying to explain reality to us. He was just giving us a skillful medical prescription to cure us of our Dukkha." When you have acute pain, e.g. from cancer, you would have big trouble convincing yourself that it is just illusion. Gotama also says the world is like a man hit by a poisonous arrow. The first thing to do is to pull it out and cure the disease. Then, I think, we should think about why he was hit by an arrow. It includes the question of karma. Anthony --- On Thu, 17/2/11, SteveW <[email protected]> wrote: From: SteveW <[email protected]> Subject: [Zen] Re: Experience Merit To: [email protected] Date: Thursday, 17 February, 2011, 2:01 AM --- In [email protected], Anthony Wu <wuasg@...> wrote: > > Steve, > Â > Neither I nor my demon are responsible for your karmic misfortunes. No bribes > can alleviate your problems. BTW, do you believe in karma? If not, what rules > this universe? > Â > Anthony > > Hi Anthony. If everything is "One Bright Jewel" as Dogen put it, then all this talk of "my" karma and "your" karma is meaningless. For that matter, if the arrow of time is an illusion and everything is Here and Now, then karmic cause-and-effect is also an illusion. You think that the past causes the future, but there is no reason not to say that the future causes the past! (There have been physics experiments demonstrating this aspect of quantum weirdness.) When Nagarjuna wrote his famous Negations, he wasn't, imo, trying to give us an ontological explanation of reality, but nobody can that. So everybody tries to turn Emptiness into a fixed view-point. As I have said before, the basic Buddhist teachings on karma, the 12-fold chain of Dependant Origination and the teachings on impermanence and no-self are useful expedients for practice, but cannot be taken for a final and absolute explanation. I refer you to The Mahaparanirvana Sutra and the Dzogchen literature on this. The fact is that it will always be a Mystery from our finite, relative, rational view-points, because we cannot step outside of What Is in order to look at What Is. But we can rest in that Such-As-It-Is peacefully. So I really can't answer your question, Anthony, and I suspect that neither can anyone else. Gotama wasn't trying to explain reality to us. He was just giving us a skillful medical prescription to cure us of our Dukkha. But, as Nagarjuna said, those who try to turn Emptiness into a fixed explanation of reality are incurable. IMO. Steve >
