I have noticed last few months that my dreams are very real. This I say because if I recall a memory from some dream that I remember, that memory is usually more clear and stronger than most everyday life memories. I remember that better, coz I seem to be more "alive" in the dream. If right now I think about dreaming from yesterday night, I **know** that during the dream I was more alive then I am right now. I know this might be related to lucid dreaming, but I am not lucid dreamer - I haven't had a lucid dream ever. What do you think could be going on here? Have you been in a similar situation?

Arahants have eliminated the conceit of, "better," amongst other aspects of conceit and other fetters. However, if they are perfected people, that would mean they are perfect. Other people are not perfect, by very virtue of not being arahants. How do we explain the fact that an arahant doesn't feel better than anyone, though in reality they are better, morally, spiritually, and emotionally? Doesn't an arahant also lack ignorance? It seems knowing what you are and where you stand is a lack of ignorance.

It appears at the top of two different thangkas in a gompa, one representing Sakyamuni and another one with Vajrasattva in yab yum, and I am unable to find what it means.please help me clarify what mantra is that?

It is confusing to me that what what the goal of zazen is (and is not), as proposed by various people with more or less authority on the subject, varies so greatly. Some say no goal, and others identify various goals. Rationally speaking, no goal makes sense. It is a form of non-dualism. If there is a goal, then there is an attachment to becoming something which one is not. But no goal is also nonsense. If there is no goal, then there is no goal to end suffering. The Four Noble Truths become descriptive, and the Eightfold Path is unimportant. This is as far as my thinking has gotten. I conclude with some verifiable examples of what the goal of zazen is said to be. **remove wrong perceptions** > the practice of meditation, the practice of looking deeply, has the purpose of removing wrong perceptions from us
—[“What is Nirvana and How Does It End Suffering?” by Thích Nhất Hạnh at *MeditationPlex*](http://www.meditationplex.com/zen-meditation/thich-nhat-hanh-nirvana-suffering/#sthash.ymYgRbuO.dpuf) **see ourselves** > Zazen deliberately tries to remove all entertainment and distractions from our minds so we can see ourselves as we really are
—[The Laughing Teabowl Sangha](https://sites.google.com/a/wildblue.net/laughingteabowl/Home/zazen) **there is no goal** > There is no starting point nor goal, nothing to attain
–[*Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind* by Shunryu Suzuki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner 's_Mind) **grasp enlightenment** > the only way to grasp enlightenment is through a calm and settled mind
—[Zen Guide](http://www.zenguide.com/practice/zazen_guide.pdf) **engage with reality (not to make your life better)** > The real practice of Zen is to engage directly with reality, not to use it as a method to improve your health or make your life better
—[“Zazen Posture” by Josho Pat Phelan at *Chapel Hill Zen Center*](http://www.chzc.org/posture.htm) **not to learn** > Don’t think of practice in terms of “eventually”
—[“Zazen is not step-by-step learning meditation” by Harada Sekkei Roshi at *Buddhism Now*](http://buddhismnow.com/2014/02/19/zazen-not-step-by-step-harada-roshi/) **compassion** > the purpose of zazen is compassion
—[“Beyond Thinking: Dogen’s Teachings on Zazen” by Norman Fischer at *Upaya Zen Center*](http://www.upaya.org/2013/10/norman-fischer-10-05-2013-beyond-thinking-dogens-teachings-on-zazen-part-4/)

Dear Friends in the Dharma, Over the years i have accumulated a large Buddhist reference library along with other associated topics. The collection together is far more valuable and useful than the individual volumes would be separately. Does anyone know of a stable situation that such a collection may be donated to? Sincerely, Mr Norman

Buddhism encourages people to get rid of certain negative qualities like anger, hatred, jealousy, selfishness. But, considering an evolutionary perspective we couldn't completely tell what role they might be playing at a deeper level for the advancement of species as a whole even if they do appear bad on the first look. So how can we be sure that a world without those negative qualities would be a better one.

This applies to all superstitious people in general, but especially to someone very close. My mom is extremely ignorant and superstitious. She comes from an uneducated village background from a third world country. Due to ignorance of facts and lack of experience, she falls for any hearsay and produces strong emotions based on them, chiefly fear and worry. Example, she would read in the newspaper that somewhere in the Western world there was a homicide of someone from our country and she would get worried for me. she doesn't understand I am thousands of miles away from the place she has read about. The way she would spin stories out of what is actually written is truly fascinating. For example, 'A homicide of our countryman in the West' becomes 'the people in the West kill our countrymen and throw them out on the streets!' She also, unconsciously, tries to nudge me and manipulate me into seeing the bad aspects of the western world - when in fact the "bad" aspects she tries to tell me are due to her lack of understanding of facts and they are unfounded in reality. An example, she would tell semi-fabricated stories like that to me over call like the homicide one above. I have pointed out this mechanism to her multiple times to make her conscious of the fact-manipulation etc. even with examples. But I am now thinking she doesn't have the awareness to grasp this kind of "theoretical" understanding. Anyways, usually I just point out the falsehoods and switch topics. But last call I was dumbfounded by the extent of this and in order to really make her aware of this I may have said some words which were true but may be hurtful. Something like "you are acting like a 5 yo child who doesn't understand the basic knowledge and gets scared like that". I remember persisting on it a little because I wanted her to see the mistake there, and I feel pity towards her for suffering constantly on these untrue things. Now she is hurt from me because of this incident. I feel guilty and sad to hurt her with words and I have been crying. But at the same time I feel sorry for her for tormenting herself day after day and year after year due to ignorance of basic understanding of science and world. What should be done in this case? Should I ignore her manipulating and let her suffer although that doesn't seem right..? But I can't either try to show her truth for that either is ineffective or it involves hurt. Have you been in similar situation before?

I am new to Buddhism and wanted to ask a question that's been brimming on my mind for a while now. As a warning, I will touch upon a number of concepts that I am a complete layman in and so I am sure this post will be rife with fundamental misunderstandings and false equivalences: I thoroughly welcome any corrections of my ignorance. This post will get a bit long-winded, so I will briefly summarize my high level question: As I learn more about Buddhism and its central philosophy around desire, karma and the perpetuation of suffering, I an reminded of the thermodynamic concept of entropy: the similar idea that actions (or thermodynamic interactions) have consequences, and that consequence is consuming usable energy and permanently increasing the level of chaos disorder in the system. If this connection is legitimate (and I hope to substantiate it further in this post), I can't help but wonder if the ultimate "goal" of reaching nirvana - the cessation of karmic output - is futile in the face of the [2nd Law of Thermodynamics that entropy is nondecreasing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics) (and is de facto increasing), and an empirical observation of the accelerating trajectory of today's society toward disorder? The connection between karma and entropy further is most evident in terms of their human interface: human desires and actions. My understanding is that in Buddhism, our desires and our karmic actions based on those desires have direct cause-and-effect consequences - ultimately perpetuating the cycle of suffering. Meanwhile, our desires increase entropy output on both a thermodynamic level of disorder (in order to exist, we are entropic engines that consume energy and produce waste), and on a conceptual level of disorder: our ego needs take from the systems around us and perpetuate existing feedback loops of increasing chaos. In feeding our hunger to exist we kill, disrupting both lives and ecosystems, in feeding our desire to build we exhaust nonrenewable natural resources, in feeding our egos we perpetuate escalating cycles of conflict and violence. All the while we produce waste: biological waste, material waste, emotional waste, which impact the systems around us. Entropy increases, and so does suffering. In fact, a [recent up and coming theory of the evolution of life](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/) posits that life itself evolves directly as a consequence of the law of increasing entropy: our desires are outwards projections of the universe's unyielding creep towards efficient energy consumption. Here we can see a potential direct relationship between entropy, karma and samsara: in both Buddhism and the material world, we exist because of (and in order to) desire, and our desires produce entropy and karma that perpetuate suffering. On a societal level we can see that this creep toward efficiency has outgrown us individually: our collective desires feed into the insatiable organisms of capitalism and technological growth which efficiently and exponentially march forward toward profit and progress, often if not always at the cost of individual happiness. Again the karmic/entropic consequences of growth are self evident: at the cost of our collective egos we plunder our planet for resources, we efficiently fry our dopamine receptors (and increase desire) with decreasing time frames of gratification, we experience rapidly increasing political polarization in social media echo chambers and wage wars that escalate toward nuclear destruction. [At certain science-fiction scales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) , even the Sun itself is no longer a renewable resource in civilization's journey towards consumption. As accelerating growth and technology increase consumption and suffering, it directly disrupts the human condition and proportionately increases the difficulty of achieving presence (a sentiment shared in the infamous but prescient [Unabomber's Manifesto: Industrial Society and its Future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future)) . A really fascinating case study of the relationship between technology, exponential growth, and samsara is that of recent developments in artificial intelligence. Regardless of one's specific opinion on the timeline toward AGI or sentient AI, [the general consensus among experts](https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines#:~:text=At%20the%20time%20of%20writing,than%2020%20years%20from%20now.) ([reinforced by tremendous growth over the past year](https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/18pqd58/a_look_at_midjourneys_journey/)) seems to be that this is a question of not if, but when we will develop AI with human-level capabilities. Suppose at some time T in the future we have an AI that has the ability to progress and self-replicate exponentially. The underlying mechanism of growth for this AI is that of innate desire and suffering - they exist solely to efficiently chase some reward function, not unlike ourselves. As thus, it appears that the AI would be subject to the cycle of samsara: the idea of karmic feedback loops are clearly manifest in the self-tuning of parameters towards efficiency (and greater suffering). As the AI performs actions or do work based on these desires, their karmic actions [consume vast amounts of energy](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/climate/ai-could-soon-need-as-much-electricity-as-an-entire-country.html) and produce consequences not unlike those of our own desires. To sum this all up: we have a sentient system (or at the very least a suffering system subject to desires and samsara) that multiplies exponentially, thereby exponentially increasing (a) # of sentient beings trapped in samsara and (b) karmic output, entropy production, and resulting suffering. To wrap up the science fiction(?) and bring this back to the original question: if there is a connection between the concepts of karma, suffering, and entropy, is the Buddhist path toward individual and collective enlightenment possible in the face of the iron law of thermodynamics that entropy is nondecreasing? To be clear, this is not a comment on the validity of the Buddhist message: its truth and wisdom are clearly self evident and have brought enormous benefit to me as an individual and all of us collectively. Rather, this is a question of its feasibility in the grand scheme of things, in the same way that we can acknowledge that late stage metastatic cancer is less than ideal while admitting that fighting it is futile. Projecting current trends into the future, all feedback loops toward disorder appear to be accelerating, and it feels unlikely if not thermodynamically impossible to ever turn back the entropic clock. Is enlightenment feasible if each subsequent rebirth lands you in a reality exponentially more chaotic than the previous one? Is achieving the Bodhisattva vow to achieve enlightenment for all sentient beings feasible in the light of the exponentially increasing number of sentient beings, themselves exponentially growing towards more efficient suffering? Thank you for reading my rant / question and I wholeheartedly look forward to all discussion, critiques, corrections, and resources!

from my experience aum-mantra meditation and physical yoga have altered my mental/spiritual state quicker and it's been sustained for longer in between practice sessions than just focusing on my breathing. The former have brought me much stronger states too.

Whenever I have read any book or article on Buddhism, one of the biggest takeaways of Buddhism seems to be its indifference to pursuit of 'Metaphysical' questions like origin of the Universe (which in those times belonged to the realm of Philosophy) and the fundamental nature of reality, etc. Buddha was non-theistic, that is, he kept mum on the existence and nature of God. Buddhism seems to teach us not to bother with these questions and focus on ethical living. But Science and Engineering IS the reason why we have everything we have now. Many of the sufferings like death from polio or tetanus has been eradicated thanks to Science, famine has become a thing of the past due to Science, and so on. And all this has happened because of metaphysical questions which later evolved into the subject of Science (and still guides Scientific progress). For example, NASA's missions like James Webb help us unravel the mysteries of the Universe but at the same time, it also helps us push the boundaries of technology and reduce our sufferings. It seems to me that Buddhism seems to discourage us asking questions like these that has lead to Humanity's progress and sideline Science and Philosophy. Is my thinking correct? Would Buddha, if he would have lived today, discouraged us from pursuing Science and Philosophy and try to make us go to monasteries and live ethical life of meditation? By this rule, does it mean that physicists should abandon Physics and Cosmology?

“liberated both ways” can you tell me what does it mean? I will find the discourse later

I was born a layman. I tried to have a loving life, but my partner wanted me to convert to her religion (Islam) to marry. I was ready to do so. When she left me, I realised how silly I was. Now I'm completely distracted from life. I don't feel having family and I don't think a girl who knew about my past would accept my love. She would know I was ready to leave Buddhism. She did ask me, "Don't you think this is wrong ?" I want to apologize her and promise "I'll spent my whole life as a Buddhist". How do I get rid of my state of mind?

I feel like going on retreat has in a way allowed me to see outside "the matrix" and now I cant unsee it. This makes normal life dealing with completely unawakened people quite insufferable sometimes. Yes sure everyone suffers so on one level I empathise but most the time I just don't want to be around people at all. It feels quite lonely. Also I have lost interest in most things I used to be interested in because I don't see the point of them anymore. Is this disenchantment normal as far as Buddhism goes or is it wrong view?

I am a beginner in meditation practice (have been meditating for about a week now). Sometimes when I meditate the following occurs: once I am able to keep focus on my breath for some time (some minutes perhaps), I notice that sometimes I slowly begin to go into this state where I am aware that I am breathing but I am not aware of being aware of my breath (if that makes sense). It is as if my mind slows down and calms down, and I begin to be aware of not only my breath but of many other things such as my body, my environment, etc. Is this ok? Or is this some kind of "daydreaming" that should be noted and then I should bring my attention back to only focus on the breath.

When I'm practising I've noticed that a thought arises but I am noticing this after the fact. With a sensation or sound I can notice it in that moment but thought seems to always be in the past. What is the correct way to be mindful of this? Do I label the thought for what it was such as imagining, planning, worrying etc or do I notice that I'm remembering a past event and label what is happening as remembering?

A couple years back I was successfully working in my company (which at that point was the 12th successive year in my career), when I started to all of a sudden get symptoms of delusional and paranoid disorder, where I thought the police were out to get me and that there were people/ cameras monitoring me everywhere. I ended up quitting my job voluntarily and pretty much stayed locked up in my parents house for the next 2 years due to fear and the continuing delusions. (I ended up being hospitalized during this time in which the doctors diagnosed me with this disorder otherwise by myself I was refusing to go to the doctor and was denying my disease). I was lucky enough to recover from the disease and am back to a completely normal mental state, but now I need to get a job again in my same field to support myself and my family (after such an extensive gap of 2 years). I tried saying the truth on my resume that I had to take a break due to a severe illness - that didn’t work with any employer- reality is no one wants to hire anybody who was out of work whatever their personal reason must be. Theres probably too much competition, no one wants to risk this, and there’s just a negative viewpoint that employers in general carry about people who are out of work (especially due to mental illness), which I think is unfair. Since I didn’t want to lie on my actual resume/experience, I tried a bunch of other alternatives – 1) I took some time out to take care of a sick family member, 2) said I had to take over family business, 3) took a sabbatical, 4) took some time out for learning and development, 5) did some advisory/consulting work in between- all these didn’t work with employers either (I know, not good, these are still all lies). There is no possibility of me returning to my old company also. So now I’m left with a tough decision - I don’t see any other way except to lie on my actual resume and experience to save my career. If I don’t lie, I have to start a new career which would cost lots of money (for college/certifications/training) which I don’t have (or that my family doesn’t have). Or I’ll have to work an odd job, which would mean trouble for me and my family surviving financially and I couldn’t properly support everyone. I also thought of other options like starting a business with low or zero cost or even another career field where they would provide the training for free but, there is nothing that sticks out to me and nothing near the level of financial support/stability I need for my family. Asking for opinions and help here: Would lying in this situation be acceptable as per dharma because : 1) I internally regret it constantly , 2) because my intention is not to hurt anyone, 3) because I am in a desperate situation to survive financially, and 4) because of the stigma people have of people who have had mental illnesses? Elsewhere in life, I strictly follow the precept of never telling a lie and living a life based on truth. Due to this, I am being torn apart inside right now because I really don’t want to lie.

I've read a fair bit about the 7 factors of awakening but I'm really struggling with how I actually cultivate them. In particular dhamma vicaya or investigation of dhammas. Can somebody give me a practical real world example of this? Nothing I have read is really sinking in. I need it explained to me like a 5 year old. Thank you 🙏

I have read some books and web resources that deal with reaching access concentration and from there the first Jhana. They all used *mindfulness of breathing* and mentioned but never described 'other methods'.
Methods I have found mentioned were *body scanning* and *metta/loving-kindness meditation*. Now for the question: What other methods are there? And even more important: How to practice them?

How is one supposed to develop rapture? It doesn't seem like something you can just decide to attain. Any states that or may not have been rapture that Ive ever experienced happened during retreat when meditating all day everyday and even then it seemed to have happened by itself not because I was trying to make it happen.

Originally thought it was among some of the list of downfalls but couldn't find it there. I remember hearing somewhere in the suttas perhaps the unskillfulness of believing there are no sages who can see beyond the physical world. Ring any bells? (Oops on the vagueness)