@insanezenmistress Excellent! now we can talk about something important - took nearly a year but I’m glad we’re here. It’s really not my place to tell you how to live, but since you asked for the opinion of an entire mountain, get ready for a hike 🥾
your realization is step one, not the finish line - and all you have now is a compass which, honestly, needs calibration if you’re to lead others to safety;
the tree says “ouch,” but the pleasure should be all yours. Go to the symphony and say “I loved it so much I cried” and MEAN IT! Are you a living Buddha or a stone one? Otherwise you run the risk of going to a funeral and saying “Nobody died!” THAT kind of person is a danger to society - how much more so if they know their own death isn’t final?
Bursting into tears isn’t a failure “as a Buddhist,” it’s just that sometimes the Buddha cries. Wouldn’t be a real human if not.
It should be “because hunger is an illusion, I make you food to eat;” not “I see you are in pain, let me explain why that’s stupid.” Buddhism is about easing suffering, yeah? The only way you can help anyone at all is by getting your non-existent self in shape first.
Then: as for your friend - since schizophrenia can be defined as the inability to distinguish dream from reality - and since in practice we come to conclude that really reality IS no more than a gossamer thin dream - how can any of us reason our way to peace? Your friend is just having a more visceral experience of the same problem you are.
Nevertheless, I am reminded of a passage from the Surangama Sutra when the Buddha asked each of his disciples to explain how they attained liberation - which reads as follows;
“.....Then Suddhipanthaka rose from his seat and bowing down to the Lord Buddha said-Blessed Lord; before I met thee I had never recited scripture or put their teaching into practice because my memory was very poor. After I met my Lord Buddha, I listened to his teaching and became converted. I tried to remember the teaching, even a single verse of it, by repeating it over and over for a hundred days and failed.
If I succeeded in remembering the first part, I would forget the last part, and if I remembered the last part, I would forget the first part.
My lord took pity on me and taught me to sit quietly with empty and tranquil mind simply trying to regulate my in and out breathing. Since then I have always concentrated my mind on my breathing which has gradually become more and more gentle and peaceful.
At the same time the defilements of my mind caused by conceptions of re-birth, continuance, change and death gradually disappeared and my mind became enlightened.
In time I acquired entire freedom from all attachments and contaminant, so that I attained the degree of Arahat.
I have since then become permanently tranquil under the influence of my lord Buddha, who later confirmed my attainment of perfect emancipation. In reply to my Lords inquiry, I witness that my approach to the unification of the eighteen spheres of mentation was by concentration of mind upon mÿ in and out breathing, by reason of which I attained to perfect emptiness of thinking. “
End quote.
We’ve already established that schizophrenia and enlightenment are as different as “you say potato, I say poTahto.” Now I should be hit, but I think you get the point.
