That's nice.  M



On Sep 7, 2012, at 4:17 AM, Jan Anders Andersson <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Marsha
> 
> I can see the picture of my face in the water mirror. I can see the waves I 
> make when I swim. I can float on my back and look down into the sky. But I am 
> neither a cork, nor a stream. I am the one that chooses, where to swim, the 
> next word to write, watching for alligators!
> 
> Jan Anders
> 
> 7 sep 2012 kl. 07.28 skrev MarshaV:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> "While I am thinking about it there is a very good book on Buddhism recently 
>> out called 'Buddhism, Plain and Simple', by Steve Hagen and published by 
>> Tuttle Publishing. I recommend you get it because it shows the similarities, 
>> between the MOQ and Zen Buddhism more clearly than any other I have seen."
>> 
>>   (Pirsig to McWatt, May 6th 1998.)
>> 
>> 
>> When the Buddha spoke of individuals, he often used a different term 
>> “stream.”  Imagine a stream flowing --- constantly moving and changing, 
>> always different from one moment to the next.  Most of us see ourselves as 
>> corks floating in a stream, persisting things moving along in the stream of 
>> time.  But this is yet another frozen view.  According to this view. 
>> everything in the stream changes except the cork.  While we generally admit 
>> to changes in our body, our mind, our thoughts, our feelings, our 
>> understandings, and our beliefs, we still believe, “I myself don’t change.  
>> I’m still me.  I’m an unchanging cork in an ever-changing stream.”  This is 
>> precisely what we believe the self to be --- something that doesn’t change. 
>> 
>> The fact is, however, that there are no corks in the stream.  There is only 
>> stream.  What we conceptualize as “cork” is also stream.  We are like music. 
>>  Music, after all, is a type of stream.  Music exists only in constant flow 
>> and flux and change.  Once the movement stops, the music is no more.  It 
>> exists not as a particular thing, but as pure coming and going with no thing 
>> that comes or goes.
>> 
>>  Look at this carefully.  If this is true --- how a stream exists, how music 
>> exists, and how we exist --- see how it is that when we insert the notion of 
>> “I” we’re posited some little, solid entity that floats along, not as 
>> stream, but like a cork in a stream.  We see ourselves as solid corks, not 
>> as the actual stream we are.
>> 
>> If we are the stream, what is it that experiences the flux, the flow, the 
>> change?  The Buddha saw that there is no particular thing that is having an 
>> experience.  There is experience, but no experiencer.  There is perception, 
>> but no perceiver.  This is consciousness, but no self that can be located or 
>> identified.
>> 
>> 
>> (Hagen, Steve, ‘Buddhism: Plain and Simple’, p.128)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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