From Limited Mind and Body to Our True (No) Self

Abstract: Concepts such as heaven and hell exist in almost all religious traditions. Abrahamic traditions believe that, once you're liberated on this planet earth, you can go to heaven. Buddhist traditions mostly deny this claim and believe that we must reincarnate into this human world again from these celestial realms. Some believe that, these are merely mind-made concepts and in reality do not exist. Abrahamic traditions rely on the attainments such as ego-death, resurrection at their enlightenment while Buddhist traditions state, "Nirvana" is the highest goal leading to the final liberation. So there is a conceptual and a practical difference between the two. However a meditator who followed the bodhisattva path may have been exposed to both of these spiritual traditions and might have a different perspective, entirely based on his meditative experience. This post is about that. Fig. 1: Depiction of heaven in an old painting (left), heaven as a meditative vision and a...

Abstract:  Understanding everything written so far in this blog, intellectually is not a big deal. Our human mind has the potential to contemplate, re-derive, re-define concepts, philosophies and everything. They all sound true and convincing at the same time to the "mind". This is due to the relative and interdependent nature of the concepts and mind. For instance, it is not difficult to understand the duality and non-duality even without any meditative experience, within the limitation of our consciousness. However that understanding is with respect to the "mind". Why this is not so fulfilling? This article sheds some light on that. This is a conversation between a Zen master (not a teacher) and a disciple.  Disciple: Master, I understand the concept of duality and non-duality. It is not so difficult to grasp. Now what ? Master: Could you please give me an example ?  Disciple: Basically the difference between opposite polarities, such as male-female, hot-col...