[ReggieRed]

I found an article ''The Weight of Mountains" in which Thanissaro Bhikkhu uses the expression "inter-eating ".......

" - what some people call our interbeing — is, at its most basic level, inter-eating."

excerpt from the article ....


So we start the path to the end of suffering, not by trying to drop our clingings immediately, but by learning to cling more strategically. In terms of the feeding analogy, we don't try to starve the mind. We simply change its diet, weaning it away from junk food in favor of health food, developing inner qualities that will make it so strong that it won't need to feed ever again.

The canon lists these qualities as five:

conviction in the principle of karma — that our happiness depends on our own actions;
persistence in abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones in their stead;
mindfulness;
concentration; and discernment.

Of these, concentration — at the level of jhana, or intense absorption — is the strength that the Buddhist tradition most often compares to good, healthy food. A discourse in the Anguttara Nikaya (VII.63) compares the four levels of jhana to the provisions used to stock a frontier fortress. Ajaan Lee, one of the Thai forest masters, compares them to the provisions needed on a journey through a lonely, desolate forest. Or as Dhammapada 200 says about the rapture of jhana,

How very happily we live,
we who have nothing.
We will feed on rapture
like the Radiant gods

As for discernment: When the mind is strengthened with the food of good concentration, it can begin contemplating the drawbacks of having to feed.

This is the part of the Buddha's teaching that — for many of us — goes most directly against the grain, because feeding, in every sense of the word, is our primary way of relating to and enjoying the world around us. Our most cherished sense of inter-connectedness with the world — what some people call our interbeing — is, at its most basic level, inter-eating.

We feed on others, and they feed on us. Sometimes our relationships are mutually nourishing, sometimes not, but either way it's hard to imagine any lasting relationship where some kind of physical or mental nourishment wasn't being consumed. At the same time, feeding is the activity in which we experience the most intimate sense of ourselves. We define ourselves through the pleasures, people, ideas, and activities we keep returning to for nourishment.

So it's hard for us to imagine a world, any possibility of enjoyment — even our very self — where we wouldn't inter-eat. Our common resistance to the idea of no longer feeding — one of the Buddha's most radically uncommon teachings — comes largely from a failure of the imagination. We can hardly conceive of what he's trying to tell us. So he has to prescribe some strong medicine to jog our minds into new perspectives.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/a...mountains.html