Identifying Beliefs Flashcards
Stay with the question, the answer is in the question. Verify your assumptions underneath your questions. "Kill the Buddha" and "Makyo" terms. Identifying beliefs and dismantling and redefining them.
The answer is in the question.
Stay with the question. Stay with the question, don’t look for the answer. Dissolve the question by making it irrelevant, absurd. Verify your assumptions underneath your questions. What exactly is the question? Because the answer is there.
Try to rephrase and restructure the question in such a way that the question appears senseless to you.
First come with the right question.
The question itself can be the obstacle to progress, not the lack of an answer. The question is the key. Once we truly understand the question, we’ll have the desired answer.
The desired answer is always the removal of the obstruction a correct question represents.
Verify your assumptions underneath your questions.
Most questions sits atop various assumptions that haven’t first been verified. It presupposes other things to be accepted as true that can’t be accepted as true.
Stay with the question. Don’t worry about the answer, just get the question right. Examine your assumptions. Soon enough the question itself has been destroyed and, along with it, many layers of delusion.
The indispensable quality of being honest.
The most indispensable quality of the process of awakening is a courageous sincerity. Sincerity refers to the importance of being rooted in the qualities of honesty, authenticity, and genuineness.
If you want to be more true, then the way to do that is by becoming less false. Go inside yourself with the spotlight of discrimination, and illuminate what you are holding to be true.
The answer is a direct experience.
When inquiry is authentic, it brings you into the experience of here and now. The question, “What am I?” takes you right back into the mystery.
If your mind is honest, it knows it doesn’t have the answer. You ask, “What am I?” and instantly, there is silence. Your mind doesn’t know. And when it doesn’t know, there is an experience right here, right now, that is alive. You bump into nothingness inside—that no-thing, that absolute nothingness which your mind can’t know.
The answer does not come in the form of a description or phrase; it is a direct experience.
What is meant by “Kill the Buddha”
It means further. Get up! You’re not there yet, keep moving. You think you’re there but you’re not. Whoever it is, whatever it is -is just another projection of your own bullshit. Kill the thing and keep going. That’s what it means.
What is meant by the Zen term “Makyo”
During zazen meditation, the student can experience a sort of amazing experiences only to have the master splash him with cold water by calling it “makyo”.
When a Zen master uses the term makyo, he’s telling his student that the precious gem they’re stopping to pick up or the pretty flowers they are pausing to collect only have value or beauty in the world they’ve chosen to leave behind.
The Tao says “beware the flowery trappings because, in order to posses them or benefit from them, you must cease your journey and stay in the dream.”
Breaking free of delusion takes everything you have. The price of truth is everything. Everything. That’s the rule and it’s inviolable.
Identifying beliefs.
If you react in a negative way or you give something a negative thought, take a step back and say,
- What would I have to believe is true in order to react to this in this way?*
- What would I prefer to believe is true?* And then respond that way.
Dismantling beliefs.
Once a belief is identified, find out where it came from, find out where you first bought into that definition. Then ask yourselves,
“Is this what I prefer to believe?”
“Is there another belief I would prefer to have?
Find out if it serves you any longer, if it doesn’t there is no reason to keep carrying it because very often these beliefs are just baggage you are carrying that belongs to someone else… drop it.
Many times, the second you identify a belief, it’s gone. It’s gone, no other process is required. Many times, just turning on the light is what makes the shadow disappear.
Inheriting beliefs from our parents.
We mostly inherit a limiting belief system from our parents when we were growing up. What they believed to be true was spoon fed to us during our childhood.
We unconsciously accepted their beliefs in order to survive.
Lets recognize that they all did the best they could with the belief system and definitions they were spoon-fed. The idea is now to understand that you have a choice, you can break the chain.
Redefining beliefs and recreating yourself.
Everything stems from the present, you can thus re-create yourself quite literally into a new persona, a new being, and allow the reflection of reality to be presented to that new persona.
But you have to go about redefining all the things that you were taught to define, re-examining, looking at everything and saying, “Does this definition work for me or what would I prefer as a new definition of this situation, negative… positive… what do I prefer?”
