Prabhaker

Buddha has said it is not the nature of desire to be fulfilled. Fulfillment comes only by desirelessness. Buddha wanted and prescribed complete celibacy for his monks. He did not want to let women enter his Sangha. They were later on allowed on the intervention and request of Anand, when the (Mahaprajapati) maternal aunt of Buddha, who had brought up Buddha after the demise of his mother a few days after giving birth to him, and had also breastfed him, applied for entry in the Sangha. Anand was even given a charge sheet by the Sangha after the demise of Buddha, and one of the charges was that he personally intervened to get ladies entered in the Sangha. One more charge was that he managed that the ladies get the first right to see Buddha, before the male devotees. The charge sheet was dropped, after Anand explained his position. So, the very desire of Buddha to not let the ladies enter the order of the monks was a proof that Buddha wanted celibacy in the order, and that was why he declared that the entry of the ladies had reduced the age of his Sangha to half, from a millennium to just 500 years. When after his enlightenment he declares that he will not initiate women into his sangha. He does so because the danger inherent in admitting women is obvious. The danger is that around a luminous man like Buddha, women can flock like moths and they can overwhelm the sangha merely with the weight of their numbers.It is not necessary that women will come to him just for spiritual growth. Buddha’s charisma, his masculine attraction will have a big hand in drawing them to him.

For an extrovert person religion will be an altruistic act, prayer. God is outside him. Introvert religiousness meditates. Buddha is the path of the introvert; it talks only about meditation.

Originally Indian classical music was used for meditation, it was developed as a method of meditation. To the classical musician the silence is important, he uses sound only to create silence. He raises sound to a high pitch and then drops it so suddenly that you fall into a deep silence.

Buddha was staying in a village. A woman came to him, weeping and crying and screaming. Her child, her only child, had suddenly died. Because Buddha was in the village, people said, “Don’t weep. Go to this man. People say he is infinite compassion. If he wills it, the child can revive. So don’t weep. Go to this Buddha.” The woman came with the dead child, crying, weeping, and the whole village followed her – the whole village was affected. Buddha’s disciples were also affected; they started praying in their minds that Buddha would have compassion. He must bless the child so that he will be revived, resurrected. Many disciples of Buddha started weeping. The scene was so touching, deeply moving. Everybody was still. Buddha remained silent. He looked at the dead child, then he looked at the weeping, crying mother and he said to the mother, “Don’t weep, just do one thing and your child will be alive again. Leave this dead child here, go back to the town, go to every house and ask every family if someone has ever died in their family, in their house. And if you can find a house where no one has ever died, then from them beg something to be eaten, some bread, some rice, or anything – but from the house where no one has ever died. And that bread or that rice will revive the child immediately. You go. Don’t waste time.” The woman became happy. She felt that now the miracle was going to happen. She touched Buddha’s feet and ran to the village which was not a very big one, very few cottages, a few families. She moved from one family to another, asking. But every family said, “This is impossible. There is not a single house – not only in this village but all over the earth – there is not a single house where no one has ever died, where people have not suffered death and the misery and the pain and the anguish that comes out of it.” By and by the woman realized that Buddha had been playing a trick. This was impossible. But still the hope was there. She went on asking until she had gone around the whole village. Her tears dried, her hope died, but suddenly she felt a new tranquility, a serenity, coming to her. Now she realized that whosoever is born will have to die. It is only a question of years. Someone will die sooner, someone later, but death is inevitable. She came back and touched Buddha’s feet again and said to him, “As people say, you really do have a deep compassion for people.”

Hinduism includes almost everything. Hinduism has no "one truth" - it has multiple truths and respects opinions of all varieties. Want to know how Indian Law defines a Hindu - "A Hindu is a person who is not Muslim, Christian, Jew, or Parsee by religion." The population in the subcontinent had no concept of religion. In the subcontinent, for millennia, God was a possibility, not an identity. Religion stems from identity. A Hindu can be polytheist, monotheist, or atheist. A Hindu can pray, meditate or can be a materialistic. Charvaka , originally known as Lokāyata and Bṛhaspatya, is the ancient school of Indian materialism. Charvaka holds direct perception, empiricism, and conditional inference as proper sources of knowledge, embraces philosophical skepticism and rejects Vedas, Vedic ritualism, and supernaturalism. A Hindu can follow path of Yoga which lays emphasis on celibacy. A Hindu can be on path of Tantra in which sex is a door to super-consciousness. Hindus consider Buddha as a incarnation of God.

@Dinesh Karki

Not at all. Jews are the most intelligent people in the world. Jewish religion is extrovert. That extroversion made them businesslike. Eastern religions are stargazers. They talk about no-mind, enlightenment which is beyond reach of an ordinary person.

Buddha created a religion without God. For the first time God is no longer at the center of a religion. H.G. Wells, in his world history, has written about Gautam Buddha, he writes, “Gautam Buddha is perhaps the only godless man, and yet, so godly.”

Buddha was very disciplined. At that time India was one of the richest country, India produced great spiritual teachers and philosophers during that period. Buddha received an excellent education. Whole Indian culture and education system was based on spirituality before British Invasion. Contemplating "enlightenment" questions was a tradition in educated families. There were many princes and kings before Buddha who left their kingdom and became enlightened.

@Ether Buddha was a prince, he was educated, sophisticated and cultured. As soon as Buddha left his palace, he immediately escaped to the neighboring kingdom.

Buddha had seen all that was possible in those days for a man of power and riches to see, but he could not find peace, contentment, silence. He could not find himself. Utterly frustrated, he moved out of the palace one night Buddha was afraid that if he went into the mountains of his own kingdom, his father’s armies would find him; he would not be able to escape. He was the only son of an old king, who was hoping that he would succeed him. And he had made a big kingdom for him So he immediately passed beyond the boundaries of his kingdom to the neighboring kingdom. And the king was very furious. He ordered the armies not to leave even a single inch unsearched: ”Look around, all over the country.” Gautam Buddha was not found, but he was not aware that the kingdom he had entered belonged to a friend of his father. So the father informed this king and other kings surrounding his kingdom, ”You have to find my son. In my old age at least you can do this much for me; we have been friends.” The neighboring king found Gautam Buddha and he said, ”If you are angry, if you have fought with your father… It happens. It is not something strange or unfamiliar; fathers and sons have always been fighting. Don’t be worried. I have only one daughter and no son – get married to my daughter and you will have two kingdoms together. Your father is old; he cannot live long. And my kingdom is far bigger than your father’s. He is my friend and I have come with a request. You have everything to gain, nothing to lose. You get a beautiful wife, a great kingdom, and of course your own kingdom is there. You will be a greater king than me or your father because your kingdom will be bigger than the kingdoms we have. You will have two kingdoms together.” Gautam Buddha said, ”You don’t understand the point. I have not fought with my father, I have not been angry with him, and I have not come here in search of a girl. I am not interested in a kingdom, howsoever big it is. But I would like to ask you a few questions; you are my father’s friend. First tell me, you say your girl is very beautiful – is this beauty going to remain forever? Will she not one day be old?” The king said, ”You ask strange questions. Everybody becomes old.” ”And do you think,” Gautam Buddha asked, ”she will never die?” The king laughed. He said, ”You are hilarious. Everybody dies.” Gautam Buddha said, ”I don’t want to get married with someone who is going to die.” The king said, ”She is not going to die tomorrow.” Gautam Buddha said, ”You cannot give any guarantee. Are you sure you will be alive tomorrow?” The king said, ”I have never thought about it. I hope that I will be alive, but I cannot be certain. But you are creating anxieties in my mind. I had come to take you to the palace and it seems you are trying to convince me to follow you to the mountains.” Gautam Buddha said, ”It is better – there is still time, it is still light; maybe you have a few days more to live. Devote these few days to a search for something which cannot be taken away from you. Your youth will disappear, your beauty will disappear, your kingdom will one day belong to somebody else. And what does it matter, when you are dead, to whom your kingdom belongs, whether he is your son or somebody else’s son?” The king said, ”You are a dangerous fellow. I don’t want to talk to you.” He informed Gautam Buddha’s father, ”I have met your son; he is in the mountains in my kingdom. I tried hard, but he is very convincing. And he has created such anxiety in me that I have not slept since. I am continuously thinking of death – what is going to happen after death? What have I gained by having this big kingdom? I am a poor man inside. I have never looked into my own being; I am not even acquainted with myself. I request to you: don’t try to prevent him, let him go and let him search. What we have missed, perhaps we can hope he will find it.”

It is important to first recognize that we are not necessarily using a common language. And it is not just the spiritual teachers who use ‘awakening’ with different meanings; you can find references from the enlightened masters as well. Although if one looks carefully at the context in which the words are being used it is not as confusing as it seems. Awakening is when one realizes oneself to be out of the mind’s conditioning. Here one is being out of the mind and is able to see the mind clearly as an object of perception. It is not that the mind has disappeared, no, but one is not living within the mind. And it is here that witnessing really emerges. The mind is still present but one is not captive to its many grips. But it is important at this stage to allow witnessing its full force through meditation. If one is not mindful it is extremely easy to slip back into the clutches of the mind. But one is also able to see the horizon. One knows what needs to happen. Awakening means that the dream is over , the dream of unconsciousness we all spend most of our lives in. Awakening is dropping the false, entering into the real; just being yourself. Before Awakening you are just a person, a personality which is consequence of living in the society, but not an individuality. Before awakening you are a person, not an individual. 'Person' comes from a root which means persona, a mask. Awakening gives you individuation. Awakening is getting very close to your center. And as you get closer to the center, falling back becomes more and more difficult because your new experience is gathering power, strength, experience, and the old is losing. But the old is still there; it has not disappeared. Ordinarily people don’t fall from awakening, but the possibility remains: one can fall. Self-realization is reaching to your center. Buddha used 'no-self realization'. The is-ness will be felt. Nowhere will there be the feeling of I or of am; only that which is remains. So here will be the perception of reality, of being - the perception of consciousness. But here the consciousness is free of me; it is no longer my consciousness. It is only consciousness. Many religions have believed that self-realization is the end, you can't become one with existence (or God). It is almost impossible to fall back from self-realization. Some meditators stop here. Now what more is there to seek? What is to be sought? Nothing remains to be sought. Now everything is attained, because there seems to be nothing ahead. No-self realization is the last barrier in the ultimate quest of the seeker. Now only the being remains, but non-being has yet to be realized. Then one quantum leap more, disappearing into the eternal, into the infinite. You are no more, only existence is. The ultimate truth can only be known when both are known , existence and nonexistence. Language is inadequate to express it; that’s why it is called an “experience”. It is not an experience, because in experience there is a division of the experiencer and the experienced, and in this experience, the ultimate, there is no division. You are the knower, you are the known, you are the seer, you are the seen, you are the experiencer, you are the experienced . Buddha called it Nirvana, the Enlightenment.

Fasting and exercising for a day or two usually doesn’t harm a healthy person, but when a fast lasts for longer durations, it can have an impact on your health. The body will also begin to use body fat, muscle to keep you moving. If you don't have any energy, you can fall down below the mind: then too a no-mind happens, but it is not meditation, if you are not blissful. It is easy to meditate if you don’t want to be blissful , it is very easy to meditate. But meditation minus bliss is not true meditation.

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@TheSomeBody The posture should be steady and should be very, very blissful, comfortable. So never try to distort your body, and never try to achieve postures which are uncomfortable. For the Westerners, sitting on the ground, sitting in padmasan, lotus posture, is difficult; their bodies have not been trained for it. There is no need to bother about it. In the East people are sitting from their very birth, small children sitting on the ground. In the West, in all cold countries, chairs are needed. If you can be steady and comfortable in a chair, it is perfectly okay – no need to try a lotus posture and force your body unnecessarily. A posture should be such that you can forget your body. Whenever a posture is comfortable it is bound to be steady. You fidget if the posture is uncomfortable.

The future will be born out of your lived present. If the present has been lived totally, the future will have even more totality to it. But if you have an idea what to be in the future, today you will live very partially, because your main concern becomes the future. Your eyes become focused on the future, you lose contact with the real and the present. And the tomorrow will be born out of the real with which you are not in contact. The tomorrow will come out of today, and today was unlived. It is impossible to be miserable in the present. People are always miserable because of the past or the future. People are worried because they have done something in the past or something has been done to them, or they are worried about whether they will be able to do something right in the future or not. The present moment is utterly free of worry. It has a taste of the divine... the door to god opens through it.

Awareness means transcendence of the mind, so it is not the mind that is aware. It is only through transcendence of the mind, through going beyond mind, that awareness becomes possible. Awareness is absolutely devoid of any subjectivity or objectivity. There is no one who is witnessing in awareness; there is no one who is being witnessed. Awareness is a total act, integrated; the subject and the object are not related in it; they are dissolved. So awareness doesn’t mean that anyone is aware, nor does it mean that anything is being attended to. Awareness is total – total subjectivity and total objectivity as a single phenomenon – while in witnessing a duality exists between subject and object. Awareness is non-doing; witnessing implies a doer. But through witnessing awareness is possible, because witnessing means that it is a conscious act; it is an act, but conscious. You can do something and be unconscious – our ordinary activity is unconscious activity – but if you become conscious in it, it becomes witnessing. So from ordinary unconscious activity to awareness there is a gap that can be filled by witnessing. Witnessing is a technique, a method toward awareness.

@Ether Many people have attained enlightenment on the full moon night. It may have been a coincidence, but it is significant to remember: Buddha was born on the full-moon night, he became enlightened on the full-moon night and he died on the full-moon night. Something in the full moon seemed to be synchronizing with his energy. The 7 week – 49 day – period is the most common. Now Westerners have started learning yoga postures, in which the lotus posture is the most important because Buddha became enlightened in that posture. But Mahavira, became enlightened sitting in a certain pose which is very strange because you are rarely found in that pose. In yoga that posture is called, "cow-milking posture." In India, machines are not used; men sit on a tripod and milk the cows by hand. But what is accidental, people start thinking of as if it is the cause — as if that posture is a necessity for enlightenment. Nothing is a necessity for enlightenment because enlightenment is not caused by anything that you can do. It is not a certain sequence of causes that brings enlightenment. Enlightenment happens only when you are absent, so utterly silent that it is not your doing.

~ Gautam Buddha's Enlightenment ~ Buddha tried for six years continuously to know what the divine is, and it cannot be said that he left anything undone. He did everything that is humanly possible, even some things which seem humanly impossible. He did everything. Whatever was known up to his day he practiced. Whatever methods were taught to him, he became a master of them. He went to all the gurus that existed in his time, to everyone. And whatever they could teach, he learned, he practiced. And then he said, "Anything more, Sir?" And the guru said, "Now you can go, because all that I could give you I have given, and I cannot say, as I say in other cases, that you have not practiced. You have practiced. This is all that I can give." Buddha said, "I have not known the divine yet." With each guru this happened. Then he left all the gurus. Then he invented his own methods. Continuously, for six years, he was in a struggle of life and death. He did everything that could be done. Then, at last, he was so tired of doing, so deadly tired, that one day when he was taking his evening bath in the Niranjana River near Bodhgaya, he felt so weak and so tired that he could not come out of the river. He just clung to a root of a tree and a thought came to his mind, "I have become so weak, I cannot even cross this small river. How will I be alive to cross the whole ocean of the world? I have done everything, and I have not found the divine. I have only tired my body." He felt that he was on the verge of death. At that very moment he felt that he had done everything, and now there was nothing to do. He relaxed, and new energy came upon him because of his relaxation. All that was suppressed through those six years flowered. He came out of the river, he felt just like a feather, a bird's feather -- weightless. He relaxed under a Bodhi tree. It was a bright fullmoon night. Someone came -- a girl, a shudra (untouchables in india) girl named Sujata. The name shows that the girl must have been a shudra because to have the name Sujata means she has not come from a higher caste. Sujata means wellborn. She had promised the Bodhi tree to pay it some homage daily, so she has come with some sweets. Buddha is there -- tired, pale, bloodless, but relaxed, absolutely unburdened -- and it is a fullmoon night with nobody around. The girl, Sujata, felt that the deity of the tree had come to receive her homage. Had it been another day, Buddha could have refused. He would not rest in the night, he would not eat any food. But today he was totally relaxed. He took the food, and he slept. This was the first night after six years that he really slept. He was relaxed with nothing to do. Then there was no worry. There was no tomorrow even, because tomorrow exists only because one has to do something. If one has not to do anything, then there is no tomorrow. Then the moment is enough. Buddha slept, and in the morning, at five o'clock, when the last star was withering away, he was out of the sleep. He saw the last star disappearing, with no mind, because when you have nothing to do there is no mind. The mind is just a faculty for doing something, a technical faculty. No mind, nothing to do, no effort on his part, indifferent to whether he was alive or dead, he just opened his eyes, and he began to dance. He had come to that knowing to which he could not come through so many efforts. Whenever someone would ask him how he achieved, he would say, "The more I tried to achieve, the more I was at a loss. I could not achieve. So how can I say I have achieved? The more I tried, the more I was involved. I could not achieve. The mind was trying to transcend itself, which was impossible. It is just like trying to be a father to yourself, just trying to give birth to yourself." So Buddha would say, "I cannot say I achieved. I can only say I tried so much that I was annihilated. I tried so much that any effort became absurd. And the moment came when I was not trying, when the mind was not, when I was not thinking. Then there was no future because there was no past. Both were always together. Past is behind, future is in front; they are always conjoined. If one drops, the other drops simultaneously. Then there was no future, no past, no mind. I was mindless, I was I-less. Then something happened, and I cannot say that this something happened in that moment. I can only say that this was always happening, only I was not aware. It was always happening, only I was closed. So I cannot say I have achieved something." Buddha said, "I can only say I have lost something -- the ego, the mind -- I have not achieved anything at all. Now I know that all that I have was always there. It was in every layer, it was in every stone, in every flower, but now I recognize it was always so. Only I was blind. So I have lost my blindness; I have not achieved anything, I have lost something."

There is a difference between awakening, self-realization, and enlightenment. We use common term 'Enlightenment' for all experiences on this forum. These stories do not describe details of Buddha's six years long journey towards enlightenment.

There is only one possibility for sanity to exist in relationships so they don't turn into inferiority and superiority games, so they don't become sado-masochistic tortures. And that only possibility is in the presence of an unconditional love. Love is the greatest alchemy. The moment love becomes a relationship, it becomes a bondage, because there are expectations and there are demands and there are frustrations, and an effort from both sides to dominate. It becomes a struggle for power. In relationship either you have to surrender or the other has to surrender. If you love a person, how can you destroy his freedom? And if he finds that he would like to move into love with somebody else, it is perfectly okay. Even if you feel pain, that is your problem; it is not his problem. And if you feel pain, that is not because of love, that is because of jealousy. If he wants to leave you, thank him for the beautiful moments that you shared with him.

Slow walking can be done during prolonged meditation and fasting. Yoga and fasting are not compatible. What is type of exercise that you want to do?

If you chose to life of solitude, assuming that your basic needs are fulfilled; do you think you will remain happy forever ? Unless you are grown spiritually , transformed after a long and arduous journey; you can't be blissful even in solitude. If your consciousness is raised, then you can live in society, untouched by everything. You can be alone in a crowd if you want. You can be in a crowd even while you are alone.

Man is born in the society, he lives in the society. He is a social animal. You are born of two person's love affair. Society was there even in your birth. Your mother was following a certain rule, your father was following a certain rule; husbands and wives and this and that. Because they followed certain rules, they brought you up, otherwise they would have thrown you into the river. Why bother? Who are you? Why should you disturb their life and become a burden on them? They followed a rule that children have to be looked after. So the game has to be understood and if you want to play the game, you have to follow the rules. There are many evils which are needed; they are necessary. In real life the choice is always between a bigger evil and a lesser evil, a bigger wrong and a lesser wrong.