Ethical feeling
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 2 minute read This excerpt is taken from the chapter on ‘Buddhist Practice’ and follows on from ‘The Metta Bhavana.’ Recognizing worldly and spiritual feeling Worldly feeling It might be helpful, when we are practising the metta bhavana, to bear in mind the meanings of worldly and spiritual feeling. When we are in the unskilful mental state of hatred and see our enemy and the experience is painful to us, this is worldly feeling. Likewise, when we are in the unskilful mental state of craving and get what we want and the experience is pleasant, this too is worldly feeling. Imagine you are walking down the street, and you see your enemy coming towards you: as a result, you experience a painful worldly feeling. You then have a choice: you can either act on the feeling and turn down a side street and avoid the person. Or, you can recognize the feeling as a worldly feeling and decide to not act on it. By not acting on it you will continue to experience it, that is, until you address the underlying cause: the unskilful mental state of aversion. By practicing the metta bhavana you can work on this mental state and come to see your former enemy as a human being, rather than as an ‘object in your way,’ and it is at this point that the painful worldly feeling will go away. Similarly, imagine seeing something you desire in a shop window: the newest iPhone or Android: as a result, this time you find yourself experiencing pleasurable worldly feeling. Again, you have a choice: you can either act on the feeling and go into the shop and buy the phone. Or, you can recognize the feeling as a worldly feeling, and not act on it. By not acting on the feeling you will be forced to address the underlying cause: the unskilful mental state of craving. By cultivating contentment, through practising being happy with what you have got, you will avoid the mire of compulsion and addiction, and the painful worldly feelings of unsatisfied avarice that comes with it. Spiritual feeling On the other hand, when we are in the skilful mental state of sympathetic joy and see our friend doing well and the experience is pleasurable to us, this is spiritual feeling. Likewise, when we are in the skilful mental state of compassion and we see somebody suffering and the experience is painful to us, this too is spiritual feeling. Imagine encountering a beggar in the street, who looks in...
Imagination
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 4 minute read This excerpt is taken from the chapter on ‘Buddhist Practice’ and follows on from the section on ‘Insight.’ Imagination Conditionality has a constructive aspect—when conditions come together to produce something new, just as much as it has the destructive one—when conditions fall apart, as we rehearsed in the latter meditations. In order to build something new—as it were from the ashes—we need to engage what Sangharakshita calls our Imaginal faculty. Just as we used constructive imagination in the metta bhavana, we need to use it to chart the path to Nirvana; ‘lmagination is a power or capacity or even faculty of the individual.… Everyone has that faculty of imagination as a potentiality and it is the essential vehicle of a genuine moral, aesthetic, and spiritual life.… As a potentiality it is intrinsic to the human mind. It does not however actively function in everyone, or at least it does not function as a dominant or controlling force and is not at all conscious. It must be recognized, educated, and cultivated if it is to come into decisive play. The metaphor of faculty teaches us the attitude we need if that cultivation and education are to take place. It is not a matter of constructing something or bringing something into being, but of discovering a capacity we already have, identifying it and giving it importance—just as athletes might develop bodily skills they were born with once they recognize their capacity. We each need to feed the imaginal faculty we already have so it grows in range and vitality and plays an increasingly significant part in our lives.’[1] The way imagination works is the mind selects an image which it assigns significance to, and then ‘follows’; for example, if we wanted to encourage ourselves to be more courageous, we might identify with a superhero on TV, using their qualities as a blueprint or lead. The challenge then becomes whether or not our life lives up to that vision; if we never actually are heroic in real life, then our imagination in this case is fantasy. But if our contemplation of that person does result in our being more heroic, then we might call that imagination proper. But without imagination in the first place, there would be nothing for us to live up to. Right View is that view which is in line with Reality—the way that things are, which leads to Nirvana. Man cannot take too much reality, which is why we need poetry, myth and symbol as intermediaries to help us approach it. Symbols...
Ritual and devotion
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 5 minute read This excerpt is taken from the chapter on ‘Buddhist Practice and follows on from the section on ‘Imagination.’ Ritual and devotion Ritual and devotion is an important aspect of Buddhist practice, which most Buddhists engage in, to some degree—although admittedly some people are more temperamentally averse to it than others.[1] Some of that resistance may be due to the person questioning the value of imagination per se—as in seeing imagination as fantasy, and therefore as a form of delusion—but this is a wrong view: when imagination takes us into a world of unreality—then it is fantasy, but when it brings us closer to reality—then it is Imagination proper. Generally, ritual and devotion are a way of building confidence in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha; through bringing them to mind and engaging with them emotionally—even physically—as when we make offerings to, or bow to, a Buddhist shrine. Image of Wat Phra Dhammakaya in Pathum Thani, Thailand by suc on Pixabay. Confidence Shraddha means “to place one’s heart upon” and represents an emotional interest in Buddhist practice and the confidence that such practice will bring ourselves and others the happiness that we desire; to the extent that faith (in Buddhism) is present, a person’s attention, thought and emotion—that is, the whole of their citta—is oriented towards its object. This idea is reflected in the fact that there are three grounds for confidence in Buddhism—reason, intuition and experience. Unlike its equivalent in theistic religion, faith in Buddhism is never blind. And just as reflection practices are designed to cultivate wisdom, by guiding the intellect towards Right View, devotional practices are designed to cultivate confidence, by guiding our emotions towards the Buddhist Ideal. What we value we adorn! The design of the Apple iPhone ‘adorns’ the view that ‘technology will solve all our problems.’ Buddhist devotional practices such as offering a stick of incense, bowing to a shrine or performing a devotional ceremony (called a puja) similarly adorn an idea—but a very different one, that the practise of Buddhism will satisfy our deepest needs. They thus help solidify our emotional connection with it. Reviewing what we explored in Chapter 1: the Buddha Aksobhya represents Non-Literalism—seeing poetry or symbolism as such; the Buddha Ratnasambhava represents the Quality of Refuge—taking up the highest value object of devotion; the Buddha Amitabha represents Non-Skepticism—acting ‘as if’ a story is true if to do so is helpful or effective; the Buddha Amoghasiddhi represents Effective Ritual Action—acting ritually in a way that fortifies devotion to a particular Ideal; and the Buddha Vairocana represents Effective Transformation—transforming the individual through the effective...
The theme of ‘Change’ in Postmodernism
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 8 minute read This excerpt is from the chapter ‘Postmodernism and the academic mindset’ and follows the section on Postmodernism. The theme of ‘Change’ [Mathew] Mullins gives an example of the ‘change theme’ from postmodern fiction: ‘Perhaps the best illustration of this notion of change comes from Octavia Butler’s unfinished Parable Trilogy. In the two completed novels, Parable of the Sower[1] and Parable of the Talents, Butler’s protagonist and primary narrator Lauren Olamina records her experiences in a not-so-distant apocalyptic future where the infrastructure of the US government has withered, and the rule of law has become legend. After her walled neighborhood is attacked and burned by local drug addicts, Lauren leaves her hometown and her father’s orthodox Christian religion behind and strikes out with two other survivors on a northbound journey in search of jobs and safety.’[2] Image by qimono on Pixabay. Earthseed ‘Along the way she develops the religion she had begun to craft for herself as an alternative to her father’s faith, a set of verses she calls Earthseed. The God of Earthseed is change: All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change. ‘God is change, and change is also God. Each of the Earthseed verses either directly or obliquely speaks to the nature of change, and the most important aspect of change is its ubiquity, its atmospheric, foundational, state-of-things, all-encompassing nature. …’ ‘As Lauren develops her religion, she retains the language of “God” to talk about change. Various characters question this approach: “But it’s not a god. It’s not a person or an intelligence or even a thing. It’s just … I don’t know an idea,” says a young man named Travis. ‘Her new religion changes traditional Christianity by reimagining God as an impersonal force rather than a personal being. When Travis points out that no one worships impersonal forces such as change or the second law of thermodynamics, Lauren responds, “I hope not […] Earthseed deals with ongoing reality not with supernatural authority figures.”[3] Here we are in the realm of secular religion: ‘Most of Butler’s characters do not struggle with Earthseed as a practice. They struggle with changing their minds about who or what God is. They struggle with “ongoing reality.” Postmodernism deals with ongoing reality.’[4] In other words, they struggle to accept a religion whose concern is not with discerning an ethical structure to the Universe and aligning oneself with it, but: ‘with the processual nature of...
Postmodernism
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 5 minute read This excerpt is from the beginning of the chapter ‘Postmodernism and the academic mindset.’ Beyond the Postmodern Mind In Beyond the Postmodern Mind, Huston Smith states; ‘The dominant assumptions of an age colour the thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and images of the men and women who live within it’;[1] he outlines three great ‘configurations’ of such basic assumptions; the Greco-Roman or Classical period—which flourished up to the fourth century CE; the Christian worldview—which dominated Europe until the seventeenth century; and the era instigated by modern science, which ‘has come to be capsulated in the phrase ‘the Modern Mind,’[2] or just ‘modernity.’ Modernism[3] The modern outlook can be summarized by identifying its three controlling presuppositions. ‘First, that reality may be personal is less certain and less important than that it is ordered. Second, man’s reason is capable of discerning this order as it manifests itself in the laws of nature. Third, the path to human fulfilment consists primarily in discovering these laws, utilizing them where this in possible and complying with them where it is not.’[4] Modernism took its cues from the new worldview that Science introduced, but Smith claims that twentieth century science has abandoned not just that worldview but worldviews generally.[5] He uses a great image to illustrate this: ‘the Modern Mind’s mistake was to think that seeing further in a horizontal direction would compensate for loss of the vertical dimension.[6] If we visualize a line that wanders upward and then downward again to silhouette the Himalayan range, it is as if Modernity grabbed hold of both ends of that line and stretched them apart. Image by 12019 on Pixabay. This collapsed the humps to a straight line along the base of the range, but Modernity reasoned that since that line could be indefinitely extended, it would enclose a volume greater than the one the line originally defined.’[7] In other words, Modernity—underpinned by the natural attitude (the philosophical stance of science)—has ‘flattened out’ values. In Chapter 1 I explored how this is inevitably the case because Science and values occupy different domains—Science deals in third-person evidence, whereas values—represented by Religion (of whatever sort)—are an ‘affair of the heart’, and are thus represented by first-person evidence. Ketumati expresses his personal impression of the state of the world in early 2022 at the beginning of his talk Ethics and Transcendence in the 21st Century–Lifeview as Primary.[8] He talks about the distasteful end of the year orgy of consumption as problematic given the general state of the planet and the mood of darkness...
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