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buddhism
September 2009 
Mind Mirror [4] (compassion & selflessness)
Posted on Dec 12th, 2007
by 
gary
gary
... continuation /
If we stop to think about this further, we see that when we're engrossed in a movie our ability to exchange our self with others* reveals the basic insubstantiality of self. It's conditonal on the factors of the story. This is how a great actor such as Laurence Olivier could say, late in life, acting didn't teach him to "get in touch with himself" but, rather, it taught him how he'd no idea who he was, really, having realized his heart's potential for being so many different people. Drama teaches that, given the circumstances, we could change who we thought we were in a second. Like they say, there but for fortune go you or I.
Any permanent, substantial identity is a fiction. In ancient Greek theater, the actors wore big masks called persona. Thus what is a real person? In the Zen-influenced dance-theater called Noh, wooden masks even change expressions as the wearer shows them in different angles and shades of lighting.
But film can never duplicate what I see when I settle on my cushion and look into my own mind screen. This is particularly true in insight meditation, when visualization is personalized. And it's a key feature in Tibetan Buddhism, where visualization empowers us to realize our unity with sacred energies by identifying with pictorial images of deities embodying them and then recognizing their intrinsic emptiness (returning to the empty movie screen). And the cosmic implications of Pure Land devotions reveals realms that are inconceivable. Cinema's painting with light pales besides the recognition that we are bodies of light, interbeaming and intergleaming on the luminous mandala of Indra's infinite net of light.
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-=| excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to
Understanding Buddhism (second edition) by Gary Gach
(Alpha Books, 2004) used with permission of the publisher |=-
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-=| excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to
Understanding Buddhism (second edition) by Gary Gach
(Alpha Books, 2004) used with permission of the publisher |=-
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[cf. the Tibetan meditation tonglen: exchanging self for others]
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[cf. the Tibetan meditation tonglen: exchanging self for others]
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