Hey Chandrayan, I agree that overcoming trauma is a long game. If you look closely at our traumas, they all lead back to a point where love was not returned usually in childhood, a divorce, a break-up, or a death. They are all attachment issues or crises when you get right down 2-it. We desperately recreate that moment hoping the arrow or the axe will point in another direction than ourselves. Rather than arms, we get marching orders or simply ignored that we exist. The emptiness of an embrace unreturned is crushing at any age and is the weapon of choice without any known defenses for all of us. At that moment is a choice from subject & Object. At that moment when the arrow comes back and we see its arms bearing down on us is the moment of liberation when we choose to surrender, fight or be.
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This thousand-year-old Sutra has been my refuge, rope & refuse along with Love & Jesus. Still, wave after wave of bodhisattvas, messiahs &saviors come and go, but still, we have no clue of the simple things they teach. We shot M.L.K. just like Jews to Jesus though we are all brothers, sisters & children. Even the following words echo emptily in our Post-Truth world while a pandemic rages and Global Warming burn our forests out of our ignorance of this prayer thousands of years ago:
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The Heart Sutra --as recited at Plum Village
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The Bodhisattva Avolokita,
While moving in the deep course of perfect understanding,
Shed light on the five skandas
And found them equally empty.
After this penetration he overcame ill-being.
(Bell)
Listen, Shariputra,
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Form is not other than emptiness;
Emptiness is not other than form.
The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness.
(Bell)
Here, Shariputra,
All dharmas are marked with emptiness.
They are neither produced nor destroyed.
Neither defiled nor immaculate.
Neither increasing nor decreasing.
Therefore, in emptiness there is neither
form, nor feeling,
nor perceptions.
No mental formations,
no consciousness.
No eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind.
No form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no objects of mind.
No realms of elements from eyes to mind consciousness.
No interdependent origins and no extinction of them.
(From ignorance to death and decay)
No ill-being, no cause of ill-being, no end of ill-being, and no path.
No understanding, no attainment.
(Bell)
Because there is no attainment,
The Bodhisattvas, grounded in perfect understanding,
Find no obstacles for their minds.
Having no obstacles, they overcome fear,
Liberating themselves forever from illusion
and
realizing perfect nirvana.
All Buddhas in the past, present, and future,
thanks to this perfect understanding,
Arrive at full, right, and universal enlightenment.
(Bell)
Therefore one should know that perfect understanding
Is the highest mantra,
The unequalled mantra,
The destroyer of ill-being
The incorruptible truth.
A mantra of prajnaparamita should therefore be
proclaimed.
This is the mantra:
Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svahA!
Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate,
bodhi, svAHA!!
Gate, gate,
paragate, parasamgate,
bodhi,
sVAHA!!!