[mymnarorump]

I am interested in the viewpoint that Buddhism necessarily involves the study of mind and naturally through the process of meditation involves an increased awareness of the mind and how it operates. Therefore Buddhism offers great insight into psychology and in fact has many more years of study and practice of psychology than Western psychology. That it has a lot to teach Western psychology.

I am reading a book at the moment called: "The sanity we are born with - a buddhist approach to psychology" by Chogyam Trungpa.

I would like to share some pieces from this book and invite comment from people about their experiences, thoughts, insights in response to these. The first topic is our awareness of ignorance verses our awareness of the seed of enlightened awareness.

" Ignorance feels the other, the awakened, aspect of the polarity; therefore it does what it does. There is some subtle relationship ignorance is making with the basic intelligence of buddha nature. So ignorance in this case is not stupid, it is intelligent. The term for ignorance in Tibetan, marikpa, means "not seeing, not perceiving." That means deciding to not perceive, deciding to not see, deciding to not look. Ignorance makes certain decisions and, having already made a certain decision, it tries to maintain it no matter what. Often it faces a hard time keeping that decision constantly, because one act of ignorance cannot persist indefinitely, once and for all. Ignorance also is based on sparks or flashes of ignorance operating on some ground, and the space between two sparks of ignoring is the intelligence that this process of ignorance is operating on. It also happens occasionally that ignorance forgets to maintain its own quality, so that the awakened state comes through. So a meditative state of mind occurs spontaneously when, occasionally, the efficiency of ego's administration breaks down." pp 108

Maybe some discussion points could be:

* Do you relate to this?

* What occurs to you when reading this in relation to your own experiences?

* How do you utilise these experiences to assist yourself / others to decide to see, perceive, look?

* Or anything else that occurs you ...