Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast.

This is episode number 158.

I am your host Noah Rasheda, and today I'm going to talk a little bit about MARA.

Keep in mind, you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist.

You can use what you learn to simply be a better whatever you already are.

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So today's episode, I wanted to share some of my thoughts around the character in Buddhism,

whose name is MARA.

Who is MARA?

Well, MARA is a character in traditional Buddhism that has several metaphorical forms.

There's MARA as the embodiment of all and skillfully motions, such as greed, hatred, and delusion.

There is also MARA as a metaphor for death, MARA as a metaphor for all conditioned existence.

In other words, the conditioned mind that is blinded by ignorance and delusion.

And there is MARA as the character that tried to prevent the Buddha from attaining liberation

while he was meditating under the Bodhi tree.

And this is the story that I want to share with you and to extract out of that story,

...