The Escape Hatch from Samsara
 

The Escape Hatch from Samsara

This is a video of Ajahn Sumedho giving a talk in Seattle earlier this year.


The Escape Hatch from Samsara

Please note that when mentioning death Ajahn Sumedho doesn't expound about karma and rebirth theories, instead he says that we speculate about what happens after death, we don't know about it, and we project what people tell us.

He also says he will "wait to find out!"

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Thanks for the video Aloka-D-Aloka!

I particular liked where he said "Be the observer, not the owner of the conditions."

Wanting to do something with emotions, to get rid of the painful ones and prolong the delightful ones, is, I think, a trap we can fall into again and again, even after we learn what should be done with emotions, namely that they should be simply acknowledged and observed.

It takes time and repetition and habit-formation before we remember consistently the right thing to do when emotions arise. At least, that is how it has been for me.

It is, in my view, a WISH(my emphasis)-and one that entails some magical thinking- that we could change reality (and an implicit belief that we can) but, of course, we can't - we can only learn to better live within it(reality).

Did you mean your statement to imply that acknowledging and observing emotions involves changing reality? If so, here is my response.

We can't change the nature of reality. However, we can change our response to it. In the case of emotions, one approach is to see them as part of conditioned reality. For me, it has been like this:

I learned through Buddhism that one could see emotions as part of conditioned reality instead as part of self.

When negative emotions (the ones which seemed to be causing me the most suffering) would arise, I began on occasion to remember that one could see them as part of conditioned reality. When I so remembered, the emotion was immediately ameliorated to some small extent because I was, so to speak, looking at it from the outside rather than being "within" it.

As I did this more and more often, my painful response to negative emotions began to weaken. What response? Guilt, hating their presence, wanting them to go away, and a whole raft of related thoughts that led, for example, to placing the blame for that emotion on some person in my past.

The related thoughts, in particular, would lead to the arising of new negative emotions in their own right. The response to the original negative emotion was worse that the emotion itself.

What does everyone think Ajahn Sumedho meant by "unitive consciousness"?

He seems to be likening consciousness to space, as if a vast or infinite field of consciousness exists, and each human exists within that field.

This is what I was trying to say! This is what I meant by " a wish" - and an unrealistic impicit belief that such a wish can change reality, which is, of course, it can't.

Emotions, more often than not, have only a tenous relation to reality and using them, rather than reason, to make decisions regarding actions will mostly lead to confusion and further suffering. Emotions create a smoke screen and, if we are to see through it, only reason will allow us to do so - that is acurate awareness, right thought.

Thanks for clarifying.