Followers

Wednesday, August 09, 2006


One night while the Buddha was
meditating, a brilliant
and beautiful
devata named Rohitassa appeared
in front of him.
He told the Buddha,
"When I was a human being, I was
a spiritual
seeker of great psychic
power, a sky walker. Even though I
journeyed
for 100 years to reach
the end of the world, with great
determination
amd resolution, I could
not come to the end ofthe world. I died
on the joruney
before I found it. So can you tell me, is it
possible to journey
to the end of the world?"
And the Buddha replied, "It is not
possible to reach the end
of the world by walking, but I tell
you unless you reach the
end of the world,you will not reach
the end of suffering. "
Rohitassa was puzzled and said, "Please explain
this to me,
Venerable Sir." The Buddha replied, "In this very fathom-long
body is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation
of the world, and the way leading to the cessation of the world."
(A 4.45, S 2.26)

In this instance, the Buddha used the exact formulation as
in the
Four Noble Truths. The world, "loka", in this respect means the
world of our experience. And this is how the Buddha almost always

uses the term "the world". He's referring to the world as we experience
it.
This includes


Sight

Sound

Smell
Taste

Touch
Thought

Emotion
Feeling

That's it. That's what "the world" is - my world, your
world.
It's not the abstracted, geographical planet,
universe-type world,
it's the direct experience of the
planet, the people, the cosmos. Here
is the origin
of the world, the cessation of the world, and the
way
leading to the cessation of the world. He said that
as long as we created "me and my experience" -
"me in
here" and "the world out there" - then there is dukkha,

we're stuck in the world of subject and object. Geographically,

it's impossible to journey to the end of the world. It's only
when we
come to the cessation of the world, which literally
means the cessation
of its otherness, its thingness, will
we reach the end of dukkha,
unsatisfactoriness. When we
stop creating sense objects as absolute
realities and stop
seeing thoughts and feelings as solid things, there
is
cessation.
To see that the world is within our minds is one
way of working
with these principles. The whole universe
is embraced when we
realized that it's happening within
our minds. And that moment
when we recognize that it all
happens HERE, it ceases. Its thingness
ceases. Its
substantiality ceases. Its insubstantiality is known.
We're not
imputing soidity to it, a reality it doesn't possess. We're
just
looking directly at the world, knowing it fully and completely.

It all happens internally. When we stop creating the world
we stop
creating each other. We stop imputing the sense of
solidity that creates
a sense of separation. Yet we do not
cut off our senses in any way.
Actually,we shed the veneer,
the films of confusion, of opinion,
of judgment and conditioning
so that we can see the way things
really are. At that moment
dukkha ceases.

There is knowing.
There
is liberation.
There is freedom.
There is no dukkha.


-Amaro Bhikkhu

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