Buddhists: Why the emphasis on not enjoying the pleasures of the senses?

[Aupmanyav]

Come on! No person can be happy when hungry or cold because of poverty.

I never understood this from you. Who's Rama to you if you're an Atheist? Just a feel-good character from a kids tale?

I'm beginning to realize that almost everyone I meet says something different about the Buddha. My experience from what thoughts (I believe) I received from the Buddha is that he wasn't agree with injustice, but he wanted me to abandon feelings of hatred. The problem is you can't destroy those who cause injustices if you don't have a little of hatred in you. It gives you a lot of battle determination.

"Duḥkheṣu anudvigna-manāḥ, sukheṣu vigata-spṛhaḥ;
vīta-rāga-bhaya-krodhaḥ, sthita-dhīr munih ucyate." BhagawaatGita 2.56

One who is not disturbed in mind even amidst the threefold miseries or elated when there is happiness, and who is free from attachment, fear and anger, is called a sage of steady mind.

"Sukha-duḥkhe same kṛtvā, lābha alābhau jaya ajayau;
tato yuddhāya yujyasva, naivaḿ pāpam avāpsyasi." BhagawadGita 2.38

Considering happiness and sorrow without considering happiness or distress, loss or gain, victory or defeat - take up the fight in life, and by so doing you shall never incur sin.
(It is not just about a war, it is about all actions in life)

"Mātrā-sparśās tu kaunteya, śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkha-dāḥ;
āgama apāyinah anityāh, tāḿs titikṣasva Bhārata." BhagawadGita 2.14

O son of Kuntī, the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, O scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.

You may have read BhagawadGita, but perhaps you have not understood or practiced it. No need to worship Krishna, understand what he (or whoever wrote these verses) says.

Rama, yes, very much feel good and a beacon for life, fulfilling one's dharma. That is most important for one's life and society. What if he is only a character of mythology!

"The problem is you can't destroy those who cause injustices if you don't have a little of hatred in you."

That is where you falter. In a war, the trigger should be pulled without hate or anger - the enemy also is a soldier just like you, fighting for whatever reasons his side may have. It is hate or anger which makes it a sin (in Hinduism). Hate or anger degrade your fight, also emotions make you fight less efficiently. It is not a personal fight. It is a fight, because it is your 'dharma' at that time. There have been umpteen cases where soldiers of one side have helped the soldiers of the other side after they fell.

 

[sayak83]

I didn't say we should think we are a body. I said it's possible to avoid ageing. As many other things are possible when you change your mind. Many Buddhists believe supernatural powers will eventually come when you meditate for a long time. What kind of enlightened person would you be without being able to achieve power over your physical body and your environment?

Buddha severely upbraided people who sought such power out of meditation.

You can either enjoy them or you detach from them. How can you do both? Unless you are talking about a moderate attachment. e.g. Enjoying a glass of wine instead of swallowing the whole bottle.

You can, and no I am not talking about moderation. Detaching from the desire enables one to be mindful of all that is happening in the subjective awareness associated with the sense experience. Only simply notices the flow and texture without being decentered by it.

I'm beginning to realize that almost everyone I meet says something different about the Buddha. My experience from what thoughts (I believe) I received from the Buddha is that he wasn't agree with injustice, but he wanted me to abandon feelings of hatred. The problem is you can't destroy those who cause injustices if you don't have a little of hatred in you. It gives you a lot of battle determination.

Read what he said in the Suttas. You cannot receive communication from Buddha. You are confused about this.

Maybe for a religion that doesn't exist: One that doesn't force me to behave well with the bad guys. One that doesn't manipulate me into becoming a sheep. One that doesn't force me to accept a culture that I don't feel identified with. One in which I can grow and become wiser and more powerful. One in which I'm the god or at least, the gods help me free the god that I already am. One that doesn't repress my wish for enjoying life. One that doesn't want to impose me the ideas that I am everything or I am nothing, when Krishna taught me once in a trance that we are eternal individuals. "Every man and woman is a star"; at least in that statement Crowley was right.

You cannot become a god or a Bodhisattva without letting go of attachment to desire and ego that drives it. As long as you are bound by such attachments, your desire driven actions and desire for passions of life will keep you in the mortal worlds of humans, animals and lower demigods, asuras, mara etc. The function of God's and Bodhisattvas is to serve all beings with selfless compassion and duty, a person still attached to one's own ego is not suited for the role. Only those who feel no desire for power, are fit to have it. That is dharma. No exceptions.

Luckily I'm beginning to feel the same love for Norse culture than for the Celtic one and I feel some Norse gods approached to me. So I thought I could say I'm Ásatrú, but Ásatrú people don't want to accept my belief that gods are powerful ghosts of ancient aliens. So let's say nowadays I accept the guidance and protection of Norse gods (and maybe some gift, who knows) while managing with the capabilities of my higher self.

Err... OK.

 

[ajay0]

I beg you pardon, but that sounds like you want to achieve an eternal orgasm. 100% joy, the whole time? I think it would be unbalanced. I once felt something close to that, after only hearing 5 repetitions of the Gayatri mantra. At the time I was a Krishna devotee and I thank him for bringing me back into normal. That feeling of constant joy was interfering with everything! I don't know how to describe it... maybe like a constant inner smile.

These are just mental projections of your past conditioning.

As per Buddhism, peace and joy follows a pure mind or no-mind or emptiness which is the natural state. Emotional anxiety is a consequence of an impure mind, which is an unnatural state, caused by cravings and aversions, and to get rid of this, one moves onto external objects and sensations for temporary relief.

That's the same as if someone would recommend me to masturbate instead of depending on "external women".

So you want no love, no interaction with other people... that's sad. It's like you are afraid to enjoy life. And I mean LIFE, whether here or after the death of the physical body.

As I said, bliss born of meditation is superior to the pleasures of all other sense-objects. You can still indulge in sense-pleasures, but it would not be as a dependency as it used to be and which creates the basis for external attachments and addictions.

Hence it is the pure mind that is the true hedonist as he or she enjoys sense-pleasures without getting attached or addicted to them. The rest are slaves to sensory objects and sense-pleasures and suffer for it. As a saying goes , ' Every ounce of pleasure brings a pound of pain with it.'

No it's not. The Buddha, wanting more time to teach, supposedly enlarged his lifespan to 80 years, when most people lived half that time.

Nice assumption. I suppose you have the statistics to back this as a fact that most people lived till 40 back then.

I didn't say we should think we are a body. I said it's possible to avoid ageing. As many other things are possible when you change your mind. Many Buddhists believe supernatural powers will eventually come when you meditate for a long time. What kind of enlightened person would you be without being able to achieve power over your physical body and your environment?

Nirvana is not a power trip. It is the cessation of suffering.

You can either enjoy them or you detach from them. How can you do both? Unless you are talking about a moderate attachment. e.g. Enjoying a glass of wine instead of swallowing the whole bottle.

In the natural state of mindfulness or non-conceptual awareness, there is no attachment to external sensory objects due to absence of thought. It is thought associated with past psychological memories of pleasant and unpleasant sensations that results in likes and dislikes, cravings and aversions, attachments, which is the basis of the impure mind.

In mindfulness or non-conceptual awareness, one is automatically in a state of non-attachment. One enjoys sense-pleasures without any of the clinging or attachments due to absence of thought.

You enjoy a delicious ice-cream mindfully, and that is the end of it. However, if you think of this past pleasant experience instead of being in thoughtless present moment awareness, you create a liking for it. The more the thought invested, the more the liking intensifies into a desire or craving , even addiction . And through this suffering arises.

 

[Brickjectivity]

***Moderation: Name changed and moved to General Religious Debates. The new thread title adds 'Buddhists:' to the beginning. All members please keep in mind Rule 10 of forum rules and do not post opinions in Dirs with which you are unaffiliated. ***

 

[Rinchen]

It's true that Krishnamurti was not Buddhist. He was a Buddha himself.

Let's not forget that Buddhism was meant to create Buddha's, not Buddhists.



Shunya or void as per Osho is the same as the Buddha's. Would be interested in knowing what you think are the features which separate them !

I'm not even going to respond to the first part.

As for the second part, read up of Nagarjuna. Emptiness, as per buddhism, is the state and nature of things. I read osho for years and this isn't the emptiness he speaks of, at all. The emptiness osho speaks of is becoming empty, emptying yourself and then coming into full realization that everything is consciousness, rather than the realization that the components of and phenomena themselves are emptiness. Osho always comes to the conclusion that consciousness is the essence of everything, buddhist emptiness is litreally finding no essence. His view of emptiness i am explaining is from his "Book of Secrets", a commentary on the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. Since he is explaining a Hindu tantra scripture, there is very little chance he would come upon the need to explain Buddhist Shunyata (and he didnt).

If osho taught buddhist emptiness, it would be IMPOSSIBLE for him to come to the conclusion, as he often did, that consciousness is everything.

 

[Rinchen]

Why would I get old? Ageing is up to you really.

Try this: Every night look into the mirror, into your eyes and repeat 9 times "I am perfection" or "I am eternal youth" and see what happens in a few weeks. Maybe less. This world is an illusion, your body is an illusion and you should be able to change this illusion as you wish. Easier said than done, I know.

Lol, say that all you want. Trust me, you'll get old and die, just like everything.

And just because something is an illusion doesn't mean you have control over it. It simply means it's an ungrounded appearance.