ycIAW0M2-NQ.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          Buddha's farther is visited by an angel who tells him that his son is going to grow up to be the greatest temporal profane ruler of the world has ever seen or a great spiritual leader and his father. Being a pragmatic and conservative man decides that there's no possible way. I'm going to allow my son to take the ambivalent road of spiritual enlightenment. I'm going to allow him to fall completely in love with the world so that he will remain attached to his domain. So prior to Buddha's birth, his father constructs a great city with walls around it and inside that city he removes all signs of pain, frustration, and disappointment. Any sign of ugliness, the end aids, the only people that are allowed to exist within the city or those who are in perfect mental and physical health who are paragons of beauty and virtue.

Speaker 1:          00:56          And the idea that lurks behind that archetypal story is that when a father has a child, the his moral obligation is to shield the developing consciousness of that child from contact with any of the horrors of life that could provide the child with an experience too traumatic for that developing consciousness to apprehend so because it's an archetypal story, it relates to the development of all people, not just the redemptive savior, and that's the motif that the Buddhist story initially follows. A good father makes his child fall in love with life by enticing that child into a direct relationship with all that life has to offer. So Buddha grows up within this walled garden. It's unselfconscious paradise, but precisely because he's been shielded to this degree and allowed to mature. His consciousness continues to expand and the world outside the boundaries that his parents have established for him starts to attract his attention.

Speaker 1:          01:58          Now we know already that the forbidden fruit, right? The lawyer of what's outside the walls is something that human beings just can't keep their mangy little paws off. Right? We are absolutely uncontrollably curious and the best way to make sure that we investigate something is to lay down a stricture that says whatever you do under whatever circumstances, never look there, right, and then the automatic systems that underlie our orienting and that motivate our seeking experience are constantly pulling our attention precisely to that forbidden spot, compelling us to investigate exactly that which has been forbidden. So because Buddha is a consciousness developing in a healthy manner, he immediately becomes curious about what lies beyond the the limits that have been established with him and he makes a decision to go outside of Paradise. Right? Which seems a particularly ridiculous thing to do given that in principle he has everything he could possibly want inside the walls, but then again we have the troublesome notion of the original sin of Adam, right? Which is that if any of you were offered a forbidden fruit, again under circumstances mythologically equivalent to those that are obtained in the beginning, you'd immediately reach your hand out and take it. Because what we haven't got for human beings is always far more compelling than what we have got.

Speaker 1:          03:24          So Buddha goes outside the walls, but his father, who's a good father, although somewhat conservative, decides he's going to rig the game a little bit so it gets rid of everybody that's diseased or unhappy or uncomfortable or ugly rolled or anything that could possibly disturb the Buddha, any lines, the streets with flower waving women and puts pedals on the road and census, son out into gilded chariot. But the gods who are lurking around right, the troublemaking gods who represent chaos and disorder in the unknown decide to stand in front of Buddha. A sick man who hobbles unsteadily interview and Buddha asks, is his retainer precisely what this phenomena represent sound? His retainer says, well, you know, human beings like you, sincere human are subject to the deterioration of these physical powers in an arbitrary way. And this man is one person who's being so affected.

Speaker 1:          04:19          And so buddha is completely disenchanted by his exploratory move out into the terrible unknown and runs back into the castle walls and shuts the door and is perfectly happy to think of nothing for months. But then as his anxiety habituates and his curiosity grows, he can't stand the notion of never going outside the walls again and outside. He goes again and this time where after his father prepares the route ever so carefully, the godsend insight and old man who hobbles interview and mood, it looks at him in shock and horror and says to his retainer, just precisely what's going on here. And His retainer says, well, that's an old man and everybody gets old and you're going to get old too. And that's the way of all humanity. And that's the point at which voted. Self consciousness expands not to only include the possibility of degeneration, but to include the temporal horizon that's characteristic of life.

Speaker 1:          05:16          And he finds that so terribly shocking that he runs back into the castle and shuts the walls down and plays with his friends for another six months, maybe a year till his anxiety. Finally habituates. And he goes out one final time. And this time the godsend, a funeral parade for him and he sees his first dad body. And this is such a terrible shock to him that he can't even go back to the castle. So his father prepares for him a great party in the woods near the castle full of nude dancing. Women who are perfectly willing to flaunt themselves into offer themselves to him. But Buddha is so absolutely catastrophic, really shocked by this notion of emergent death, that he can't take any pleasure whatsoever and what's being offered to him. And he leaves the kingdom once and for all. And you think, well, that's exactly what happens to you when you grow up.

Speaker 1:          06:05          Right? If you're reasonably well socialized and properly looked after, then your curiosity gets the better of you and you keep going out into the world until what year parents have established for you is no longer sufficient for you. And as a consequence of that movement own into the world, you find out all sorts of things characteristic of your own life that not only your parents can't precisely explained to you, but even the broader formal structures of your culture have a very difficult time handling. And when you finally do encounter such realities and allow their effect on you to fully manifest itself well then you're finally independent and you no longer can return home, but from that point forward, you are also burdened as Adam is burdened when he loses his Paradise Hill unselfconscious snus with the full revelation of what it means to be limited and alive.

Speaker 1:          06:58          So what happens to Buddha as a consequence of this revelation, he becomes an apprentice and the chronicles of the Buddhist adventure are careful to say that he becomes the world's most proficient practitioner of Sam [inaudible], which was a philosophical precursor to yoga and then to yoga so he masters all the positions and the asanas until he's disciplined physically to an almost unlimited degree. And then he decides that he'll adopt a stance of world renunciation, which is also something he's a remarkably good at, and he starved himself until the chronic lewis say he resembles nothing so much as a pile of dust and then having exhausted all the disciplinary structures that his sophisticated culture has to offer him, but still not precisely finding the answer that he's looking for. He retreats into the forest, a place of the unknown and sits himself at the base of a tree underneath the tree.

Speaker 1:          07:55          He's visited by visions and temptations. The first vision is an essentially erotic one life itself, camps him back out of his self conscious state into the domain of pure physical pleasure, a perfectly reasonable temptation, right, and one that's powerful enough so that Hindu philosophers say, b, as their churches and cathedrals are covered with erotic drawings. If you can't get past the erotic drawings into the church, that's the domain that you should still inhabit, right in the dawning phases of life at least till middle age. That's the appropriate motive being to be enticed and seduced by the physical pleasures that life has to offer, but in the final analysis, those are not sufficient to solve the problem of emergent self consciousness and so the angel of death visits him and offered him the opportunity to exist permanently in a state of Nirvana. Very, very interesting twist on the story because you have to wonder, given the association saved between suicidality and the notion of paradise that exists underneath that.

Speaker 1:          08:58          If what Buddha isn't being offered by the angel of death is in fact death and the cessation of all the problems of being regardless, he rejects that attains enlightenment briefly and then decides to return to the world to share what he's discovered with all of suffering humanity. The idea being that the Buddha who is the awakened or enlightened one, is capable of attaining a transcendent state, but also knows fully that because human beings have a shared social aspect, it is not possible for any one person to attain redemption until all people attain redemption. The reason being that it's very difficult to be transcendent and enlightened when you see someone who's sick lying in a ditch.