2016-07 July Shinnyo Podcast Getting Enlightenment

Gotta Catch Them All
Living with Hungry Spirits
Losing My Marbles
Alternative Reality
The New Cycle Awakens

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Pokemon Go meme - Expectation vs. Reality — Courtesy of http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2015/09/19/pokemon-become-real-with-pokemon-go-in-2016-ios-android.htm/pokemon-pride-go

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. — Yoda

But there is more. Suffering leads to desire. Desire leads to attachment. Attachment leads to attainment. Attainment leads to loss. Loss leads to fear. And the cycle continues.

Augmented Reality has been around awhile, but until the little Nintendo game came up this week that shadows Foursquare’s original check-in GPS technology (leading to 4SQ points, badges and virtual hierarchies of achievement), with the connection to the popular collect-until-infinity game Pokemon, we didn’t see people walking distracted into moving traffic, getting mugged and robbed by wandering where they shouldn’t, nor putting themselves in the beyond-selfie dangerous places.

People’s desire for things they don’t have (yet) was described in the original Buddhist depiction of hungry spirits (jpn. Gakido or skt. Preta-gati) as the realm of existence that one finds a mere level above Hell itself. (Shinnyo et.al describes ten realms of existence – six lower ones are consumed by desire or earthly limits, and 4 realms of heavenly or getting closer to Nirvana existence.) The difference between a human and a hungry spirit is that a human has the ability or will to say “no” to desire (the spirit is kind of perpetually suffering from desire unless it transcends.)

But in my depiction of the odd cycle of fear described above, you might see how an incidence of any kind of violence, intentional or not, tends to lead oneself into the cycle, and has a relatively predictable outcome, despite rejecting the original emotion that triggered it. I remember this as a child when some other child took a marble from me (one of those “I know it was there a moment ago – Hey! Give that back! That’s mine!” moments.) While I didn’t fear losing that one marble, within six months I had started carrying around this 5lb (2kg) sack of marbles, which I’m sure provided great strength training, but was eminently impractical, especially for actually playing marble games. Maybe that was my own little sack of karma.

Marbles back then, human lives now. I was reflecting to my life in the 80’s when our President and his staff dealt with an amazing number of fear factors all during the decade – financial ruin, insider trading, junk bonds, deregulation, AIDS, the Cold War, Iran-Contra, technology boom, Yuppies. We responded by buying guns, putting on Walkman earphones, and going online. Maybe VR and AR are just a lead-in to realization of the world of Tommy (don’t hear, speak or see… happy, safe and secure)

But there are always those who, for whatever reason, decide to open their eyes, listen carefully, and speak up. Their fear is transformed into compassion. Compassion leading to caring. Caring leading to love. Love leading to enrichment. Enrichment leading to embracement. Embracement leading to freedom. Freedom leading to acceptance. And acceptance leading to enlightenment. And thus, a new infinite single-ended cycle begins.

[YouTube] 8th Grader Recites “White Boy Privilege” Poem! 8th Grader Recites “White Boy Privilege” Poem! — https://youtu.be/g4Q1jZ-LOT0

/* That’s it for this session. Thank you for listening. For more information feel free to e-mail me at jlui at jlui dot net, or twitter @jhlui1 With Gassho, James*/

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