Jim Smith:
Jacob:
...
I have heard some people say that enlightenment is simply a stepping stone, where to? I guess for the Buddhas, how does an Arhat reach the next step? Is there a next step?
Many blessings
For a next step, you could volunteer at a soup kitchen, work with underprivileged or handicapped children, volunteer at a hospital. Something like that. What is the point of becoming liberated if you don't do something useful with your freedom?
aloha jim,
If one is liberated, one has no need to do anything useful. Being underpriveleged is an asset if not a prerequisite to liberation.
Consider the whole idea of "use." What we use are tools. We use tools to accomplish the ends of desire. The ends of desire are so important to us that virtually everything a normal urban dweller sees is a tool that was/is/will be used for some useful purpose. To the hardened tool user even surf and sun are tools which malfunction.
We are the tool-using animal. Teeth to bite and claws to snatch are not enough, we outrage fortune with slings and arrows, and newer missiles of greater potency, titans that rival the stars. We handle tools and accomplish purposes all day every day, a treadmill worn smooth with use.
We talk about the macro effects, loss of biodiversity, climate change, rampant disease; the toxic effects of fouling our own nests as a species (monkeys never were very good with their feces,). But it is the micro effects I am concerned with here, in relation to liberation and usefulness.
Tool-using being the implementaion of desire, it also implements dukkha, dissatisfaction. We want something, say, oatmeal. We use tools to fix it. Tools were used to put the ingredients in our pantry, and will be used to remove the waste. Roads are tools, buildings are tools, books, cushions, what have you. One has to look deeply or away to find a landscape wherein tools are not the featured objects, at hand and in use. We forget we are using tools - like this complicated computer - when they perform their functions as expected. Thus our consciousness, obsessed with desire and tool-using to accomplish its ends, mainly finds itself dissatisfied amid malfunctioning tools. It must be recognized that our obsession with results leads us to treat sentient beings as tools, even humans, as in the "human resources" subject to "attrition." We are regarded as "unemployed, "consumers," even "retired." Useless mouths, suitable for shaming.
So we meditate, go on retreats, view the beauty and order in animals, children, the sky, the ocean, plants. Even ordinary men and women in their urban settings are like deer in the woods when they forget themselves. One can read poetry on the subway. Or scrape derelicts up off the sidewalk and provide them a meal and some comfort. Not as something useful to do but as an expression of (divine) compassion.
Liberation from self interest gives us the ability to regard broken tools as tools for liberation. Broken and discarded people are more accessible, that's why god loves them best. Dukkha itself becomes the dharma. Samsara is nirvana. Half misery, half compassion. Sun face buddha, moon face buddha. A foot of water and a foot of wave.
So we are useful, if it is our dharma/karma, not because it is useful to be useful, but because it is liberating. All around us all beings are self-liberating; liberation, not usefulness, is what is really going on. God says, "I was a hidden treasure and I yearned to be known. Then I created creatures in order to be known by them." All beings are in their essence, love: beauty, justice, mercy and truth. All beings are singing the praises of god in these terms. Being part and whole of this harmony is liberation, in Words.
Not actually disagreeing with you, jim, if you mean by being "useful" doing unselfish things for the good of all sentient beings, in accordance with one's conscience.
with a nod to heidegger,
terry
from wired online article: "your computer is really a part of you"
full article here:
https://www.wired.com/2010/03/heidegger-tools/An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.
The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn't superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.
"The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they're just one thing," said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. "The tool isn't separate from you. It's part of you."
Chemero's experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger's fundamental concepts: that people don't notice familiar, functional tools, but instead "see through" them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn't think of one's fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.
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