[Gem]

Originally Posted by CrystalSong

This is where the conversation got muddled - the judgement, labeling and dismissal of others experiences. It is good to share one's approach and its welcomed by many, its one of the many beautiful parts of sharing the internet with the citizens of the world and we all learn much from each other and grow.

You may find judging others experiences as illusions and fantasy's won't gain you popularity in an International forum with many who experience and use such as daily tools. They come from many religious backgrounds and training or none at all - yet each has found their own way and their own abilities.

Dismissing their experiences and knowledge on a mere taught belief that such doesn't exist, is dangerous, is bad or otherwise not worthy - is something you were taught by others, and have adopted as a personal belief for yourself without first hand proof. It is not however consistent with many other peoples reality and first hand experience.

You have much to offer in teaching about this form of meditation and I would like to see you continue teaching it and leave out the judgement bits as they seem to not be working well for you in this thread and have derailed it from the intention you had to educate and share a meditation style.

Wisdom is not judging that which you do not know. =)

As I have understood it, Pure Land Buddhism meditation involves chanting Buddha's name... and I don't see that being inherently different from visualation. It doesn't seem to have much to do with the Meditation that Gautama supposedly taught. As far as I am aware, Gautama was the proponent of Vipassana, which involves neither visualisation or chanting. Actually, all beliefs are baseless assumptions, including my own, but in the absence of reality, belief is all there is, and in the absence of Truth there is only trust... and I guess that's the recipe for faith.

The most fundamental teaching of Buddhism is anatta, which in the western view, can be inadequately translated as no-self; but the eastern mind thinks less in nouns, so it's not accurate to interpret is as an absence of something...

OK... it's more the verb, which we can call behaviour, so in Buddhism there isn't a soul, there isn't some thing which is there at all. The Western view is of an ego, something which must be transcended, and that notion has been used in modern Buddhist sects as well, but it wasn't Gautama's concept at all... and it was probably Freud who brought that term into common speech, it's not an Abrahamic Religious notion or a Buddhist one, and as far as I'm aware it wasn't partial to any world religion.

Buddha suggested that there is Dukkha, which refers to the temporal changing universe in context to personal reactivity to it, your reaction to the universe, basically.

Re-incarnation isn't a soul that moves from body to body... it's the continual reactivity creating a perpetuated motion of thought, which manifests as 'I' reacting to the universe...

Reaction stems from two underlying factors, aversion (hatred) and desire (greed), and these two go hand in hand together and are the sourse of all suffering. Now suffering is not discomfort or pain, it's the personal reaction to them... and pleasure is also suffering, not because of the sensation of it, but because of the desire for it.

The core tenet of Vipassana is non-reaction, and as one sits in meditation they merely remain aware of discomfort, pleasure or any sensation that occurs... they don't chant to invoke a desirable vibration nor do they visualise their desired imagery, they do not seek out any experience, they are aware of the experience as it spontaneously occurs.

The aim of Buddha's technique is the quell the habitual reactivity of the mind, because when reactions cease there is no self. Anata, therefore, means non-reactive. Without reaction, there is no more cycle of birth and re-birth because there is no construction material to build a self with.

When the person reaches Anatta, their self continues for a time while the old storehouse of reactions dispell their energy... it's kinda like, just you stop adding wood to the fire, but it takes a while to die out.

Well, that's the way I interpreted the thing, anyway.