Ask Yourself These Seven Empowering Questions to Help You Break Through Resentment and Get On with Your Life
Ask Yourself These Seven Empowering Questions to Help You Break Through Resentment and Get On with Your Life |
- Ask Yourself These Seven Empowering Questions to Help You Break Through Resentment and Get On with Your Life
- The Futility of Comparing Yourself to Others
- Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 6/17/2013
- There’s more right with you than wrong with you
- Off his rocker
- White's "The Science Delusion" is deluded about science
| Posted: 17 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT  Are you holding onto resentment that you just can't shake? Sometimes it's on the surface; other times it's buried deep. But you can always feel it, gnawing away at you. Resentment can stem from something another person said or did. Or from a life situation that's outside your control. But whatever the source, the resulting sense of unease can fester for months or even years. And however hard you try to ignore or just let go of resentment, it stubbornly imprisons you in its grip, triggering all sorts of uncomfortable emotions at unexpected times. Any number of things can spark resentful feelings, just a few examples being…  Read More @ Source |
| The Futility of Comparing Yourself to Others Posted: 17 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT By Leo BabautaOne of the biggest reasons we're not content with ourselves and our lives is that we compare ourselves to other people. Picture it: you see photos of what someone else is doing on Facebook and think your life isn't exciting enough. You see someone else who has a cool job and think you're not doing that great in your career. You see someone with a hotter body, and feel bad about yours. You see someone who has created an awesome business, and think you're not doing enough. You read about people who are traveling the world, learning languages, going to exotic resorts and restaurants, and wonder why you're not. Of course, you're comparing your reality to an ideal, a fantasy. It's not a comparison that makes sense. You can't compare apples to apples when you compare yourself to anyone else. Which means it's a dumb comparison — why would you compare how tangy an orange is compared to a beach? They're not similar things. Let's take an example: I'm out running in the park, and I see someone running past me. Obviously he's a faster runner, and better than me! Oh, that makes me feel horrible about myself as a runner! Except I can't compare myself to that faster runner, because I don't have all the information. I don't know:
Given these and a bunch of other factors I don't know anything about, why would I compare my speed at this moment with the speed of another runner? They're irrelevant to each other. We just happen to be both running on the same path at the same time, but that's coincidence, and nothing else is the same. And even if everything else were exactly the same (would never happen), how would the comparison be useful? It would be meaningless even then. The only thing I should focus on, as a runner, is myself. Enjoy the run. Learn about myself as I run. Keep going, and in doing so, I'll get better — compared to myself. And that's the only thing we should focus on in life — enjoy the walk, learn about ourselves, keep taking steps and drop the comparisons. You'll love the journey even more. Read More @ Source |
| Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 6/17/2013 Posted: 17 Jun 2013 05:00 AM PDT  "To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance." ~The Buddha      Read More @ Source |
| There’s more right with you than wrong with you Posted: 16 Jun 2013 11:00 PM PDT
From the moment you are conceived, right up until the moment you take your last breath, there is more right with you than wrong with you. It's very easy to lose sight of this. When something good happens to us, we often don't celebrate much and so don't take it in. And when we do celebrate it's often almost momentary. And yet we obsess about things that bother us. Imagine a friend has said an unkind word to you. Often you'll call that event to mind over and over. Sometimes you'll elaborate the fantasy by imagining retaliations on your part. By sheer repetition, and by vividly imagining the scene over and over again, you carve pathways associated with the emotions of anger and resentment into your mind. But when a friend says something complimentary to you, you may just experience a lift in your mood for a few minutes. Unless you're a very unusual person you probably don't find yourself, months later, thinking about the compliment you were paid, the same way you would with an insult. Similarly, we tend to obsess over things that we think are wrong with us. We think over and over about the habits we want to change, and mentally beat ourselves up over them, whether it's that we think we drink too much, or we think we're lazy, or cowardly, or too unkind. But we ignore all our good habits. When we're surfing the net late at night we castigate ourselves for our lack of willpower, but when we're brushing our teeth for the second time that day or having our daily shower we don't spend our time in the bathroom celebrating how wonderful it is that we take care of ourselves. Instead, we let the mind drift. And what does it drift to? Half the time we're probably giving ourselves a hard time about our faults! (This reminds me of a saying of the Buddha, where he's describing the thoughts an ethical person has regarding others: ime sattā averā abyāpajjhā anīghā sukhi attānaṃ pariharantū'ti. This is usually translated as something like "'May these beings be free from animosity, free from oppression, free from trouble, and may they look after themselves with ease." But the word "ease" here is "sukha," or joy, so the last part could just as easily be "May they look after themselves joyfully," implying that we should rejoice and appreciate the good habits we have that involve taking care of ourselves.) When we're ill, we obsess about what's going wrong in the body. We don't think about the fact that since we're alive virtually everything in the body is going right! And when we're healthy, how often do we celebrate our good health? Hardly ever, for most of us.  If you benefit from this work, please consider supporting Wildmind. Click here to make a one-time or recurring donation. So I'm going to suggest that you devote more mental space to celebrating and rejoicing in the ordinary things that are going right, and that you're doing right, in your life.
We really need to make an effort to celebrate, because of the mind's inherent negativity bias. We need to consciously celebrate in order to carve pathways associated with joy and love into the fabric of our brains. And when we do celebrate, life becomes joyful. There's more right with us than wrong with us. And that in itself is something to be grateful for. PS. You can see all of our 100 Days of Lovingkindness posts here. Read More @ Source |
| Posted: 16 Jun 2013 10:00 PM PDT Does Buddhism teach non-ego or even ego? The short answer is absolutely not. The terms non-ego and ego are strictly Western terms that have been introduced into Buddhism which have no parallels in the actual discourses of the Buddha. Ego is a calque. It nowhere comes close to the range of meanings that the Sanskrit word âtman or Pali attâ contain. There is so much variance between the terms, ego and âtman/attâ that it is astonishing that the term ego would be used in a translation (in fact, it is not which means translators have recognized its inadequacy). Let's take an accepted Pali translation and for the word 'self' (attâ), substitute 'ego'.
Notice how this translation is not in favor of the non-ego but actually strikes against non-ego. We can see that the Buddha understood the non-ego, namely, the Five Aggregates, to not be his ego. In other words, the Buddha is upholding his ego against the non-ego! A brief aside, taking into consideration that the Five Aggregates also belong to Mara, who is the Buddhist devil , it is rather odd that the world of evil is non-ego—never ego. The case grows against the strategy of using the specialized Western terms, non-ego and ego, as adequate equivalents of anâtman/anattâ and âtman/attâ. Once more, substituting 'ego' for self (attâ) in an accepted Pali translation, we discover this oddity: "Radha, you should abandon desire for whatever is non-ego" (S. iv. 49). Here is one more example using the same kind of substitution.
Rather than go into the many different meanings of 'ego' that have evolved, beginning with Freud, it suffices to say that any Buddhist who drags in the terms ego and non-ego as adequate substitutions for self (âtman/attâ) and no-self (anâtman/anattâ), is off his rocker. |
| White's "The Science Delusion" is deluded about science Posted: 16 Jun 2013 09:00 PM PDT I admit it. I haven't read Curtis White's "The Science Delusion." But I've read reviews of the book. I considered buying it to see what a skeptic about science has to say. However, White seems so off-base in his claim that science is determined to supplant the humanities as well as religion, I figured it would be a waste of money. Slate has a fairly favorable review. Some comments on the review make a lot more sense to me, though.
No scientist is saying that physics or chemistry or biology can explain a Dylan song or Dickinson poem. But science can explain the world around us. If you want to get at what the universe is and what we are, science is the only method to get answers. Why? Because it requires experiment and hypothesis testing. That doesn't mean the arts are useless. Art allows people to tell their own personal experience. Science can't and doesn't try to do that. Biology can explain that we evolved as social creatures and have brains fine tuned to pick up social information from friends, family, and strangers. But it of course doesn't truly explain the joy of winning your town's Little League world series when you were 12, or the joy and sadness of your relationship of your estranged best friend from college. Only art can do that. The two don't do the same thing. But if we want to know what the world is and how we work, science is the only means. The arts can explain our experiences in the world but it can't tell us how the world works at a fundamental level. ---------------------------------- "In spite of its obsession with Jews"--that was not a minor feature of Nazism, wouldn't you say, Mr. White? These anti-science guys will try to tar science with anything, not even refraining from conforming to Godwin's Law. Yes, indeed: science (like atheism, in many people's minds) did in fact cause the Holocaust. All scientists should immediately fall on their knees, repent, and swear never to commit the crime of scientific research again. Yes, indeed (and without the sarcasm now), scientific discoveries can be used for harm, but--believe it or not--so can religion, and just about everything else humans come up with. What White is missing is Feynman's crucial principle, discussed in his Cal Tech commencement talk about "cargo cult science," that if you want to discover anything about reality, you have to use a method that will keep you from fooling yourself. And that, in the long run, is the method science uses. Poets and artists can give us insight into a lot of things, but how do we know that the insights they offer are in fact true? That's what science is for. Certainly neuroscience has a very long road ahead of it, given the enormous complexity of the human brain. And the little knowledge it has produced so far has been hugely oversold, especially in the popular news media. But that's a reason for getting a better understanding of just what science is and how it works, which is a difficult intellectual task. Unfortunately, something that the popular news media is just not up to. I completed the course requirements for a Ph.D. in Systems Science (sort of the "science of sciences"). I've known a lot of scientifically-minded people, including some professional scientists. I've read many books about scientific subjects, some by the supposedly anti-humanities people White cites in his book: Daniel Dennett, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens. What the heck is White so offended about? I've seen no evidence that any of these guys, nor any other scientist, for that matter, denigrates poetry, philosophy, literature, music, art, or any other pursuit included under the term "humanities." Science and the humanities are different ways of knowing and of experiencing life. I love science, and I love philosophy. I love facts, and I love feelings. I love the scientific method and I love intuitive aha's (which, of course, are a big part of the scientific method). I love thinking and I love not-thinking. I love non-fiction books and I love literary novels. Here's the last part of a New York Times review of "The Science Delusion." It made me feel good about my decision to not buy the book. But where "The Science Delusion" is long on invective, it is short on argument. White attempts to make a case for a rediscovery of Romanticism and the edgy danger of art as an antidote to a faith in science, but his approach is so scattershot and his tone so grouchy — Camille Paglia meets Andy Rooney — that he never succeeds in convincing the reader that science indeed operates as a matter of faith. (And for all his complaints about the lack of interest in contemporary philosophy among scientists, his own preference for the early-19th-century German idealist philosophy of Friedrich Schelling, to which he devotes a far-too-slight section, doesn't exactly give you much confidence that they are missing much.) I don't know how "easy" the answers are to the "big questions" raised in "The Science Delusion," but I am sure that they're a lot more daunting than anything White has to offer. |
In Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn writes, "As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong, no matter how ill or how hopeless you may feel."| You are subscribed to email updates from BuddhaRocks ☸ To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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