1st Class on Being(s)

Beyond fear.

Only Buddhas are beyond fear.

And the topic of fear is challenging because normally, ordinarily we do not like fear but we believe that we cannot survive without fear.

For us survival is most important.

The idea that is at the core of all the education we received is that our only interest is persisting to exist, survive, and as an outcome of that - reproduce.

The idea of survival as a primordial desire is in everything we do and our reproduction is a way of fighting our mortality. We believe that through our work, our ideas, and our off springs we continue to exist.

Such ideas are present and functioning somewhere in our psyche.

They inform how we view, understand our world, and they condition our intentions and our determinations and practices

When we then come to think of fear and who we are as a self/being/person/I

The modern view believes the I is

1. embodied - in the body and in the brain.
2. The I has no core but it is a construct of experiences memories
3. changing all the time

Our view on fear is:

1. Fear is necessary for survival - fear is beneficial
2. You cannot do much about fear

Normally we do not take the time to carfully think about our views. We need to be clear about the views that we have because in our study of Buddhism our views are the reasons we struggle with Buddhist practice.

Buddhist practice invite us to create our self in an entirely new and radically different way.

This will demand a lot of practice. We will find we have a lot of resistence to these practices. One reason why we shall have the resistence is not understanding the views which we where eductaed along and these views have actually shaped us.

We need to be able to know what has shaped us to be who we are and then to decide whether or not to drop these views.

Where Buddhist views completely differe from common accepted views is -

1. Buddhist do not accept objectively independently inherently existent reality - no phenomena exists on its own as a discrete
2. therefor everything depends on the mind
3. therefore everything exists as mere name or appearance.
4. Living being are - they have a nature of kindness and they want to be happy and free from suffering
5. When beings abide in the truth of their nature they are peaceful and therefore happy.

These things make the foundation of