Feelings are what we are conditioned to allow to be evoked by circumstances
Allowing for less compulsive, more nuanced, more inclusive feelings of acceptance and joy is the purpose of spiritual work.
A common culture is a shared sacred. No sacred: no culture.
Changing diet is changing a pattern is challenging energetic structures. Fasting and dieting are Kum Nye.
The ego is what exists in the past. the future and in daydreams. We have a body that needs sleep and food and shelter. We have emotions, and we want the “good” ones and avoid the “bad” ones. All this requires thought and planning.
A life lived in fear is someone elses life.
I think we have a set point for most aspects of our life. For example, we have an anxiety range. We keep it at least at a certain level but no more than another. Weight is very much in the mind.
I think the feeling of emotional and mental strength is very close to the feeling of happiness. Feeling strong is feeling confident is feeling unafraid, open and engaged. Much spiritual work, arguably, is designed to increase emotional strength.
At root Capitalism is about the transition of ideas into realities. Communism is about the translation of ideas into lies.
Rage feels better than fear. This is why fearful people are often angry people.
Chronic fear erodes the capacity for nuance, balance and proportionality. And many Americans are chronically fearful.
Question: dost thou still keep the ancient faith?
I carry horrors within me God never asked me to carry.
Seeing with the mind in general is seeing the absent, both what should be there and is not, and what is implied by what is there. Blinding yourself with the mind is assuming that what your mind posits to be there is in fact there, rather than trusting the evidence of the senses.
Acceptance is our true wealth.
Humans, in an infinite ocean, can make each other large enough to matter.
“When in doubt, eat” has got to have survival value evolutionarily. Obesity then would depend on WHAT is eaten, how active someone is, and how much DOUBT there is.
Nausea and disgust are more or less equal to the feeling of rejection and aversion.
I think the inability to self sooth brought on by helicopter/immature/enmeshed parents plays a major role in peoples eagerness to get attention and pity by playing the victim. Self evidently the political uses of this dynamic have not gone unnoticed. I think it plays into this incapacity for nuance also, such that millimeter becomes a mile. The emotions run wild and dont stop.
Freedom is not in resisting or allowing the continual swirl of desire and aversion. It consists in shrinking the reactive surface so they are monsters who can no longer see or find you.
A good prayer/salute to a spiritual master might be “I salute in you a beauty my future self is capable of but BETTER.”
I like this.
Namarupa is really what changes and we cannot help. For me, losing chronic fear is a tangible change. it feels strange, unfamiliar. This sort of change is best when we are not particularly paying attention to it. Every time we take a “snapshot” it stops. It “becomes” or congeals into an IS, and stops being a flow. So addiction to Namarupa is an addiction to stasis, not flow. We are feeling, sensing creatures. Even thoughts flow from feelings. I thinkfeel even logic flows from a feeling, that of fit and appropriateness.
I wonder if decadence might usefully be equated with radical non-acceptance.
I think it can be stipulated that any human activity that can be done better by a robot is not and cannot be a core purpose of human life.
The unfortunate reality is that worry is adaptive. Things that can go wrong often do. But I think it would be an EXCELLENT practice to dedicate one day a week to completely forgetting all worries. Over time this would make worry more reversible and thus tending to a greater degree of appropriateness and proportion.
I wonder if gray is so popular because people see too much color on the screens they are addicted to. And is dullness not a nearly invariant outcome of continual overindulgence, and thus gray an accurate outer reflection of an inner state?
Dissociation is cauterizing an emotional wound to prevent further bleeding.
Orderliness and the disgust associated with it correlate well with Freud “anality.”. And to be sure, shit is a vector for many diseases so it should be viewed with disgust. This is healthy within limits.
Our whole culture is structured to create a bridge over troubled waters. Chronic stress and anxiety and distraction cause us not to feel. Then feelings are provided by our media, by actors, and consumed second hand. Everything exists to make spontaneous authenticity almost impossible for most, so we live hectic lives filled both with other peoples thoughts and feelings. Latent awareness of this creates more frustration, which it is very tempting to blame on someone else. This is one element in the truly manic and pathological political and social divisions we are seeing.
Our body is a monster that keeps us from sliding into hell, particularly. It is the only true safeguard for the evil, but of course even a much more durable body cannot avoid dissolution indefinitely. All rays must in the end turn to the light, and the greater the distance the greater the pain.
Breathing calmly consists in perfect allowing. It is a great example of allowing things to take their course. Fear is perhaps the ultimate DISallowing, which makes calm breath an antidote to fear.
Russia is EastAsia and Trump Goldberg
I had the thought “I am finally in the mailroom.”
Faith and allowing are the same thing. And allowing is the only sustainable path to personal growth. We are stones in a river. If we simply wait through all the turbulence we become smooth in time.This is why breathing consciously—aware but allowing—is so important. I may want to hang “Mustard Seeding” on my wall somewhere.
I think functionally maturity equals acceptance. Where life plus openness plus acceptance happens, wisdom and maturity happen.
Book: Growing Up
I think crime dramas focus and heighten a latent sense of shame and guilt in people, so that they are always relieved to find they are not the killer. It might be interesting incorporating the viewer by breaking the 4th wall and interviewing them as suspects.
PMo: power/potential equals motivation times opportunity.
I think most of the most childish Left think of ordinary Americans as orcs. Its like when you become a zombie all non-zombies become loathsome enemies, as in the cartoon in I am Legend.
I think our rich find themselves asking “is that all there is”? They are on a line defined in part by culture and in part biology. The ethos is “if it feels good, do it if you can afford it.” It is a line ending in despair, and survival means managing this and finding alternatives, like work, to provide distractions and thus relative solace. BUT OTHER LINES ARE ALWAYS POSSIBLE, but not when living in the snapshot of Namarupa. You are stuck then. So changing to a line where more is indefinitely better—and spirituality might be defined as the only line where this is true—requires letting go of the snapshot, the known relations, the habitual patterns. Of stupidity.
And I think when we die we willbe struck by the stupidity of others, but also of ourselves, and perhaps most strikingly in seeing all the opportunities we were given and too stupid to see and accept.
Self calming equals acceptance equals maturity equals wisdom over time.
No matter how much time you’ve wasted, crying over it now wastes more.
The wealthy want to “do” spirituality within the namarupa of wealth. This is impossible. You have to renounce to learn acceptance. You cannot protect and leave at the same time.
Is a complex a conditioned complex response?
Meaning of life really works out to “what is the value of X, where X equals Life?”. Its a stupid question. There is no mathematical value to insert. This is what Adams satirized with 42. Its latent in the question.
I feel the point of life is learning to calm oneself. This creates acceptance maturity and wisdom. And the best METHOD for doing this is learning to connect with the Life within ourselves, which is God. Every religion, in some sense, teaches peace and place, ultimately, by connection with Life as embodied in a God or Gods, Goddess or goddesses, or spirit or pantheon.
Heres a word: Antidepersonalizationism
All of us have the power to learn to enjoy or at least value, some forms of pain.
I wonder if we remember all our dreams too in the life review.
I feel like in our culture if you seem busy you are assumed to be important. So looking busy—running around everywhere—is a simple way to raise your apparent social status.