Buddhism - "I" got it !!!!!!!!!!!!

Its not been quick coming that is for sure but two nights ago I finally got the key to Buddhism and the ending of suffering. [Still in beta though as it's not fully tested]

Verses 48 & 49 from the Dhammapada

The man who gathers flowers (of sensual pleasure), whose mind is distracted, and who is insatiate in desires, Death brings under his sway.

As a bee without harming the flower, its colours or scent, flies away, collecting only the honey, even so should the sage wander in the village.

Always it has troubled me quite what this means. How do you take the honey while leaving the flower?

It has always seemed to me that to want the honey means that one is drawn to the flower and only when one doesn't want the honey will one be free from the flower. Thus desire makes us slaves to passions and victims of suffering when our desires are not met.

But aha! I got it now :-)

The problem is the Ego. We can view ourselves like a ball with a copy of ourselves rolling around inside. The outer ball is really big and has room for everything. But the little ball inside has to be either here or there. We put a flower inside the big ball and the big ball is quite happy enjoying the honey and the scent. We take the flower away and the big ball has something else inside it which is gets on with. Thr problems begin when the little ball rolls over to the flower. It starts to enjoy the honey and scent but in a different way - it fills itself with the flower so that when the flower goes it is empty. It then struggles to get the flower back, rolling around the big ball calling everything not-flower and creating disharmony.

The problem is not in the desire of the pleasures or the sensations but in the taking sides. The inner movement whereby we say "this is mine", or "I am enjoying myself", or "this is good (for me)". Such rejoicing is the sin because it is not enough for it to be what it is and our enjoyment to be what it is, we add an extra imperceptible clause to the agreement which states that "it is mine". Which is great while it lasts, but then we get the "it is not mine" when the experience ends. Because we have taken sides we are faced with having to change sides, or live with the experience of "being without" or being with what "is not mine". This empty negativiness which is conjoured magically from nowhere confuses us, we can't understand where it has come from, our "taking sides" self then takes against the negativeness and it all kicks off and we are negative and miserable.

We were so confused and furious at the suffering that has magically occurred that we never read the small print of the contract we signed. It clearly states that what we are currently experiencing "now belongs to us" so that what happens to it happens to us also. When it goes, so do we. Ego's don't like this, the feeling of being destroyed is exactly what they are built to resist. What is an ego afterall this doesn't exist! That can't stand on a mountain and proclaim to all lower beings around it that - it exists and it knows this fact for sure. The mountain turns round and tediously says: yes you exist there at the moment, but I can assure you that later you will have wandered to the other side of me, and for a while you won't even exist. It is not you that is constant but me who is everywhere that you walk. The ego doesn't listen - everything is from its point of view, again, and again, and again. The mountain (which is the true self) on the other hands sees the many sides and the coming and going and doesn't grasp at one one of the many things that lie across it. They are all mine says the mountain, is any of them are.

Ego's are selective. This one, not that one. I take Your side, not your side. I will fight for you againt them. They are right, you are wrong. I like You, I don't like you. This one is good, that one is bad. Egos love opinions and styles and fashions anything that sets them on one side or another. It is not that all these sides and styles and fashions don't exist.. its not even that arguments can't be right or wrong it is the taking of sides, the claiming one side of Mine, taking it personally, and in rejection of the other that causes the suffering. It is the rolling around of the small ball into position and being so small not being able or willing to move off that causes the tension.

There are times as we have seen in the last few years when the whole society goes mad. When hundreds of thousands of people are killed unnecessarily and millions of lives made a misery in your own name and with your own money given in good faith in taxes. People you trusted have willfully abused that trust and lied openly without even taking the time to lie convincingly. A sham operation designed to obscurate and shake off all the responsibility that comes with representative power. People whose expensive and endless efforts to protect their pretence to good dismally fail to disguise the hidden and unilateral agendas of a ruling minority. People who have the nerve to blacken the name of goodness and religion by claiming authority over people who are accused of no greater crime than their own. And they have never commented it or apologised.

I speak obviously of the war in Iraq. Personally I believe that what is said above is true and it amazed me that there are still people who endorse the war in Iraq which unless they know something I don't, still remains to be justified in any way even as we enter the end game of the conflict. It was pure bloody mindedness.

Yet analysis of the argument above determine whether I experience any suffering from this situation. It all depends not on the reality, but whether I myself take sides. It seems a priori that we should take sides with what is correct and true, and hence the confusion and anger at those who take sides with what cannot be correct or true - even with the entire press at the feet and the money to fund any amount of propaganda they still haven't tried to justified the war. Yet it is a fact that people take sides and worse even take sides with what seems absurdity. Taking sides is clearly not the display of truth. Regardless the truth, different people take different sides. It can't be argued here that the war in Iraq was correct because it is so clearly incorrect. It is a fact that people take sides with the incorrect side - even after deep and reasonable debate.

The point for the Ego to realise is that the Iraq issue is clearly huge and covers many territories all the way from the clearly correct and truthful world, to hazy worlds of political and personal contingency. People have many things to gain by taking different sides, and not everyone is only interested in the "truth". Plus we know there are deep layers of secrecy that disguise the real motives and reasons for the war. And yes it is supposed to be a Democracy and these people are supposedly elected - but that is another many sided discussion.

If the ball of my ego rolls around into the shadows and the people who are not so free to observe from the touch lines like myself - suddenly the soup thickens , the light grows dim and the arguments less pellucid. My ego resists doing this for fear that it may lose membership of its side, that side it has invested so much reputation in supporting; for fear that it heaven forbid it might turn to the unpleasant world of shadows itself. These are the small minded fears of the ego which has no choice but to exist in one place at a time. If it goes there, it will no longer be here. If it explores the darkness, it will no longer be in the light. Yet unless it explores the darkness, it's light is very small and threatened. So it is bias that comes from taking sides - regardless the actual terrain that exist - that causes the suffering.

What Ego is not however is self-confidence or allegiance. We can quite aimeably support a football team, a company, a wife, a family, parents, brands, tastes, fashions, likes and reject dislikes, and incorrectness but the ball of the ego must not be allowed to get brought into the game. None of these sides are "mine" and each exists in dialectic and relation to what we in the same move reject. A wife will by definition always define the many other women who are not-wife. It is only a problem however if our ego aligns with her and she becomes "mine" - normalised in many cultures unfortunately - but not the foundations for happiness. When she becomes "mine" then the thought of losing her becomes painful, and the meeting of another woman who we like, if it attracts the ego, causes pain also. The key to "my muse" lies in that very name! My experience of meeting the "One" has an instantaneous subclause - she's "mine". In a Kierkegaardian fashion it was a "mineness" that I realised was shot through with imperfection and in a Kierkegaardian fashion (a man I forgot I modelled myself on) the justice lay in a spiritual world of justice so that she could remain "mine" even while the evidence of the world lay contrary.

I imagine Buddhga means that equanimity and middle-path is characterised by the stillness of the small ego ball. Its strict restraint so that it rolls neither to one side or the other. If we can keep it dispassioned and without claim to any parts of the stream of many sided happenings that pass through "our" (unsided ;-) ) minds and lifes then the mind is liberated and we are happy and without suffering. This way we can experience, but have no suffering. This way we can live, but have no survival.