Another Buddhism thread. someone school me.

Awesome subject.

And I'm glad you've got a flame suit, you need to wear one of those if you want to go riding in the cosmos with Buddha.

The search for truth is finding the balance... Treating others how you want to be treated is overcoming your fear, and finding your own soul.

People always treat you how you treat them. It's a law. If you want to be successful you have to act like it. That goes for anything.

Searching for truth comes like searching for purpose, it's a long path but if you really believe in it you can find some answers.

The Universe will teach you if you don't give up.

One of the first things you need to do though is to unlearn everything you know, and then look for the universe to fill you up again.

But at this stage it really comes back to "do unto others as you would have them do to you". Because if you want to keep your purpose solid, you have to really know who you are. To know something is one thing, but to actually follow what you know is another.

To do and to walk in that path allows your learning to continue. However if you are not receptive of doing what you know, then you are not worthy of more knowledge, and you may find yourself on a fast exit out of this life.

 

I'm not a Buddhist but I used to be one.

Siddhartha came up with a set of truths he called the Four Noble Truths:

1. Life is suffering. More accurately, this should read "life is anguish, stressful, imperfect." The original word in Sanskrit is dukkha, which doesn't translate exactly into English. For some reason, many translators settle on "suffering"
2. The imperfection/suffering/anguish is caused by our attachment to the material world. We try clinging to things as a way to permanence but things, by their very nature, are transient and always changing, so our attempts are always frustrated and this leads to dukkha.
3. You can extinguish your attachments to the material world and realize the totally imperfect, impermanent, and interconnected nature of everything. Such a state of realization is called nirvana (literally, "extinguishing").
4. You do this by following the Noble Eightfold Path.

Connected to these four truths is the idea of samsara: the cycle of death and rebirth. Basically, you just keep coming back for more of the same bullshit when you die, so the only way to really stop all this nonsense is to achieve nirvana.

Of course, that's just the very basic core of Buddhist philosophy. Practically every society in Asia that's heard of Buddhism has put its own spin on it and then there's the normal fragmenting and schisms that occur in any religion... it's a diverse body of thought.

I've done a bit of studying of Buddhism and reading up on Siddhartha and I've found this website to be a pretty good basic introduction to Buddhism: http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/buddhaintro.html

 

I am a Buddhist (among a couple other things), and I think I might be able to help.

Buddhism is both a religion and a philosophy, depending on what you follow. Just as Christianity has a philosophical part (love thy neighbor as myself) and a theological part (God), Buddhism does also. The philosophical part would be Buddha's teachings oe f the Four Noble Truths, as previously mentioned, as well as many other insights into how he feels one should live one's life. The theological part would be more about the belief in reincarnation, or reaching Enlightenment, etc. Buddhism is very open and mixes well with many other religions, Eastern and Western.

Basically Buddha believed that there's suffering, and we suffer because we are attached to things, therefore we must detach from things in order to cease suffering. Now Buddha didn't mean that we must be numb and not live fully, but to just have a constant sense of knowing that ALL things are impermanent, all the relationships you have, people you know, objects you own, and even yourself will one day perish. Knowing this principle of impermanence, one is able to recognize that attachment to any finite thing will only cause suffering.

Another core teaching is that of the Middle Way, which is that one should avoid extremes. One should not be hedonistic nor ascetic, for example.

This is only a beginning to many of the things Buddhism has to offer; feel free to ask any many questions as you like. Buddhism is one of my favorite things to talk about.

 

Rather, you wake up to the impermanent nature of all material forms (everything that exists in the dimension of space, including our bodies), the eternal nature of life and the cosmos itself, the perfect nature of the cosmos, and interconnectedness.

 

I'm pretty certain it's imperfect. The overarching idea is you escape dukkha by realizing that it's fundamental to the material Universe- and a commonly-used metaphor to describe the phenomenon of dukkha is a wheel poorly mounted on its axle, so it screeches and doesn't go smoothly. The Universe itself is described as maya- illusion, a phantasm- in many Buddhist schools of thought. The connotations surrounding illusion and phantasm aren't ones of perfection, or at least they don't connote such to me.

 

Material 3d universe of space time is identified as an illusion - maya. It is impermanent. Dwelling in it and being attached to it causes dukkha. Realization of 'no-mind' awakens one to these truths and awakens one to a higher realm of nothingness-allness source-everything, one, godhead, bhagawan, where one realizes perfectness and eternalness of the source behind the material world.

 

Id have to say im interested in Buddhism's chakra system, I do believe in the third eye, hence the ajna under my username, but I find myself to be more of a pantheist. I accept the universe to be the divine power, not any thing by itself, but it as a whole.

 

op got schooled

 

The chakra system isnt just Buddhist, its existed in India for thousands of years. Both Buddhism and hinduism, Eastern spirituality and philosophy in general, are pantheist.