How does compassion and love lead to favorable rebirth?

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PowerfulCrumbs
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How does compassion and love lead to favorable rebirth?

Post by PowerfulCrumbs »

I can see how compassion and love lead to my happiness in this life by transforming my mental state, but how does compassion and love create the physical circumstances I find myself in?

How does my thinking attract or create the type of body and life I am born into?

Thank you :smile:
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Queequeg
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Re: How does compassion and love lead to favorable rebirth?

Post by Queequeg »

Part of the answer is that the distinction you draw between mind and body is illusory - your mind determines much more of you physical body and environment than you seem to acknowledge. In one sense this idea is readily obvious, we can consider that compassionately motivated activity will condition your body and order the physical world around you. A fireman will develop their strength to carry people out of burning houses. If you regularly have friends over, you might prepare comfortable places for them to relax; you offer them food and drink; etc. Going deeper, the way you perceive things actually changes them; they don't have any existence beyond your conceptualization of them. That is a harder idea for people steeped in materialism like many modern people are, to accept, but there are Buddhist discourses that can guide you through the analysis to at least understand it in a theoretical way and practices to directly understand. These same capacities of our mind that order this world also determine our future forms and circumstances.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
Natan
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Re: How does compassion and love lead to favorable rebirth?

Post by Natan »

PowerfulCrumbs wrote: Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:45 am I can see how compassion and love lead to my happiness in this life by transforming my mental state, but how does compassion and love create the physical circumstances I find myself in?

How does my thinking attract or create the type of body and life I am born into?

Thank you :smile:
There's aspiration Bodhicitta as well as action Bodhicitta. In terms of love and compassion, these are worldly and Buddha called them brahma abodes. They are an entrance into samadhi which creates the karmic body of a brahma deva
PowerfulCrumbs
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Re: How does compassion and love lead to favorable rebirth?

Post by PowerfulCrumbs »

Thank you both for the helpful replies.

I do definitely struggle with understanding and accepting how much my mind determines my physical body and environment. It is an aspect of buddhism that seems to directly contradict what I have been culturally conditioned to believe as a westerner and it is very challenging for me.

If I could just throw a few things out there to check my understanding on this...

Queequeg, when you say the distinction between mind and body is illusory, is this similar to saying that physical space and awareness are the same thing?

And just thinking out loud here trying to reiterate some of what you are saying in my own words: mind and body/physical world are a single continuum and the causal power of thinking affects all of the phenomena within the whole continuum. Is this correct?
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PadmaVonSamba
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Re: How does compassion and love lead to favorable rebirth?

Post by PadmaVonSamba »

In terms of physiology, when we mentally experience panic or fear, this signals the endocrine system to inject a molecule into the bloodstream which causes our neck and arm hair to stand up, makes the heart beat faster, makes us sweat.
Interestingly, the experience of anger produces an almost identical molecule.
Conversely, when we experience happiness, we fill up with with a different molecule.

A thought isn’t just a passing thing that you have. It’s something that you practice. Just as someone who uses drugs or alcohol excessively eventually experiences long term physical side effects, a person who practices anger is essentially “shooting up the anger molecule” over and over again, and this will have physical effects as well.

Furthermore, the individual starts to identify with this state of mind, they see themselves as a certain type of person, emotionally. Then it’s a habit that becomes difficult to break. They rely on anger (or whatever) to get them through all the situations of the day.
EMPTIFUL.
An inward outlook produces outward insight.
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Queequeg
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Re: How does compassion and love lead to favorable rebirth?

Post by Queequeg »

PowerfulCrumbs wrote: Sun Sep 26, 2021 9:55 pm Thank you both for the helpful replies.

I do definitely struggle with understanding and accepting how much my mind determines my physical body and environment. It is an aspect of buddhism that seems to directly contradict what I have been culturally conditioned to believe as a westerner and it is very challenging for me.

If I could just throw a few things out there to check my understanding on this...

Queequeg, when you say the distinction between mind and body is illusory, is this similar to saying that physical space and awareness are the same thing?

And just thinking out loud here trying to reiterate some of what you are saying in my own words: mind and body/physical world are a single continuum and the causal power of thinking affects all of the phenomena within the whole continuum. Is this correct?
We understand concepts better when we are able to put them into our own language, and that's good because it enables us to engage with the ideas, but at some point, when we use our own terms, we actually become limited to our own terms and concepts - essentially, we are limited to what we already think. That is to preface my suggestion that understanding Buddhist terms and concepts ought to be understood on their own terms.

There are some teachings that posit mind and space as the same "thing", but I'm not sure this helps to illuminate how mind and matter are generally understood in Buddhist terms. To equate "physical space" and "awareness" itself seems to include assumptions. What do you mean by "space" and "awareness"? Why does "space" need to be qualified with "physical"? I don't know what you mean for sure, but these seem to be intentional designations so we can infer that they are meaningful. For the sake of argument, if we proceed with these categories and we posit that space and mind are not separate, what would that mean for the "physical" nature of space? What would it mean that "mind" has physical characteristics?

In one of the basic teachings of Buddhism, the 12 Linked Chain of Causation, we are told that all of this we call life (and death, and everything in between) arises out of ignorance as to the true aspect of reality. At a fundamental level, we misapprehend reality, leading to the cycle of birth and death.

Where does this misapprehension occur?

We say, ignorance causes mental formations, which in turn cause consciousness, which in turn cause name and form, which in turn cause the six sense bases, which cause contact, which causes feeling, which causes craving, which causes clinging, which causes existence, which causes birth, which causes death, rinse and repeat.

If we look at the link between ignorance and mental formations we see the first element of our alienation; ignorantly we identify objects. This level of objectification is extremely subtle and doesn't yet rise to the level of developing ideas about what we apprehend - its really just a bare, elemental objectification. "Oh, there's a thing."

With the identification of objects, the other half of the equation quickly follows - the identification of the "I". With the I and Not I, we have elemental consciousness. The basis of the entire realm of conventions. Every idea, every thing, depends on this distinction of I and Not I.

From consciousness, name and form arises. Name refers to all of our ideation. Form refers to matter.

This link is what gets to the heart of the incompatibility with materialism.

On one level we are saying that it's consciousness that identifies matter as what we conceive as matter. However, if we leave it at that, we are still implicit materialists. Name and Form - we identify this compound category to emphasize that we view consciousness and matter as inseparable, effortlessly integrated from the beginning. Conciousness in our view permeates all matter. Matter, on the other hand permeates all Consciousness.

Its not that Buddhists deny most materialist ideas about matter - the periodic table, chemical reactions, physics, all of that is wholly acceptable, except for what is the subject of the so-called Hard Question in Western scientific circles. Buddhists definitively assert that consciousness is a property of matter, and inversely, that matter is a property of consciousness. They are the same thing. But more critically, are coextensive with each being's individual mind stream. This is a detail that I think the scientific mind has extreme trouble with.

Not withstanding, as pointed out above, consciousness is not fundamental. Consciousness is derivative of something deeper. Its an implication of objectification. Objectification is in turn due to a fundamental ignorance. The question then is, what is ignorance and what is ignorant? This is what Mahayana Buddhism is really about - ignorance and the nature of ignorance, and the elimination of ignorance. (Contrast with Hinayana which seeks to break the cycle of the 12 links at Craving.)
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
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