Whinge, Moan, Complain

A blanket ban on smoking in pubs and private clubs has been approved by a massive margin of 284 MPs. Tony Blair joined those using a "free" vote to overturn his own Government's policy of exempting private clubs and those pubs that do not serve food.

I think there is a naive idea of reincarnation that sounds bizarre and is often what people take the Buddhist idea of rebirth to mean. The question is - what is a person in the first place? I think the crude idea is that we are some kind of living entity that flits from life to life, even when the worlds that we find ourselves in are not connected to this world at all.

For example we might think we were an ancient Egyptian in a past life - but what was it that connected us to that time and place? Our body is obviously not connected, we may think, but then how is our mind connected? What is the mind? How does it connect to a body at birth? It’s all rather incredible isn’t it?

How do we get in there between the sperm and egg and somehow make it our home? Were we already there or did the sperm and egg somehow create us? How did our mind emerge from stuff like cell tissue and DNA and so on? What has our mind got to do with DNA? How did it produce its first thought - what made it suddenly think 'I am'?

So it’s important to reflect on how odd it all is and on how, ancient Egyptian apart, it’s all pretty incredible! The point is that our view of materiality is too material and our view of mind then becomes too material too - both body and mind are mysterious and cannot be grasped as this or that. Nonetheless we can know what they are simply by being them in a very simple and direct way. That is the path to Awakening.

It would be like being the dream and being the awakened person who knows they are dreaming and somehow being so in touch with the experience that you can know exactly what the dreaming mind can and cannot do - how it deceives and gets lost and then wakes up - just by being it - just by recognising its nature from the inside as it were. Similarly we can be in touch with what our body and mind really are and somehow wake into what the whole of experience and the whole of the Universe is - Universes in fact.

When you realise this you stop thinking of the mind as a kind of entity that can somehow hop from one time and place or one universe to another - instead we can gradually understand from the inside how we emanate as an empty but distinct emanation that can be grasped as solid and real by the deluded minds of ourself and of others to create worlds we can enter, create, engage in, share with others and in the end step or slip out of again. Yet the essential nature of our being remains unchanged. This is the Indestructible Heart Essence.

We can discover this mysterious reality and recognise how it manifests as the whole world around us and how that world dissolves and reappears again and again. It is like life and death - a timeless display - and rebirth is taught within that context.

From the practical point of view it’s as if we pass from life to life just as we seem to live from day to day. Analysed logically that doesn’t make any sense. You cannot find anything that travels through time from past to future. We cannot find it even in our every day life. That is what Buddhism teaches us to notice. Buddhism doesn’t say 'you have to believe this in order to be saved' but challenges us to look and see for ourselves. It is pointing out something that we are overlooking all the time, to our cost, to the cost of our ultimate happiness. So it’s a challenge.

You can follow the path to Awakening without taking on blind beliefs but just like people asking a guide to show us the way, it’s no good if we start off by declaring that we don’t believe in either the starting point or the destination. In any situation like that it’s a calculated risk, you check out the guide as best you can and then you go for it - but keeping your wits about you all along the way.

--- By Lama Shenpen Hookham

I got this in an e-mail from Buddism connect.

In my e-mail from India today my bloke said:

Thank you for being part of my life and I hope I can give you
something in return. Long may our relationship continue - i guess that's up to both of us. Love and Best Wishes for Valentines Day.

He has also used the word 'love' in other e-mails. He normally runs away from any mention of love. He is a bit mixed up though and I do wonder if he will still feel the same when he returns or whether he will get scared again. I really care about him and would like to work on our relationship. But if he doesn't ever want to live with me, where can it go? Up until now it has felt like a teenage relationship IE just sex and going out. May be he has decided he wants to be more grown up now, I hope.