Mosh Pit Meditation, Part 2 (video)

(VOID) "My Rules" - I'm not the hand of their tools. I'm going to live by... Why should I listen to?

 

First samadhi then insight meditation

And this intuition is where the "meditation" (bhavana, zen/jhana, kammatthana, samadhi, padhana) comes in.

In Buddhism the historical Buddha, Siddhartha "Shakyamuni" Gautama, pointed toward a path of calm and insight. Meditation is calming and persisting and experiencing bliss and boredom and many things before it become a systematic practice of contemplation for liberating insight.

There will be no insight (wisdom, prajna/paññā, vipassana) until the purification of right-samadhi has cleansed the heart.

The Dharma/Dhamma is all around to see. All is on fire, teaching us the three universal marks of existence -- that all things are marked with emptiness (are impersonal), unsatisfactory (are disappointing and incapable of fulfilling), and in flux (radically impermanent, hurtling toward destruction).

It all sounds very punk rock, very nihilistic, a swirl of yin and yang, but that's not quite right. The similarities are more apparent than actual.

At the Uptones' Skanking Fools Dance Contest, ska reigns supreme (East Bay Express)

The impersonal nature of things was realized

For one thing, it really is impersonal, not ego. What we cling to as "self" is misleading. There is no self (soul, ego, personality), but who can say that without profound insight beyond mere book learning (suta)? Clever jokesters who are showing off? That's true in an ultimate sense.

But in conventional terms, of course there's a self. We take that for granted. We speak in that way. Even the enlightened (arya) may suffer, in the initial stages, from something called "conceit" (mana).

Conceit (pride) is the persistent tendency to approach, construct, or speak of the world as if there were a self, which is exactly what enlightened beings realize from the stream enterer at the first stage to the arhat at the final stage of enlightenment now knows to be untrue. (See The Heart Sutra).

Slipknot fan dies in mosh pit (globalnews.ca)

When punks say F authority or are irreverent or say "Anarchy now!" or "No heroes!" that's all well and good but not in the way we usually take it. Hooray for some spiritual authorities that point out the way that we ourselves must confirm and realize. Things are not true because someone says so. They are true because that's the way it is, and that truth is liberating when we realize it for ourselves, not when we pay it lip service, develop blind faith, or act obediently. (See The Kalama Sutra).

Decline of Western Civilization

There will come a time when we will have no need of heroes and heroines. When is that? When we (as "noble learners" or sekhas in the Three Trainings) realize the Truth for ourselves. For then we go beyond the need of any teacher to say what is true or untrue. The "adept" (asekha) has gone beyond the  need of training or a teacher.

When the pit is the teacher, success means survival and failure means death -- or a bloody nose, or a bone crushing mob steamrolling you. So look alive. Remain aware. Stay away, and don't panic. In other words, meditate. CONTINUED

• Mirror: Science: Heavy metal fans follow strict etiquette
• Who are the noble ones, enlightened, aryans (palikanon.com)