Stand Up For Yourself. Grow From Conflict and Learn When Being Nice Just Isn't Cutting it.
Stand Up For Yourself. Grow From Conflict and Learn When Being Nice Just Isn't Cutting it. |
- Stand Up For Yourself. Grow From Conflict and Learn When Being Nice Just Isn't Cutting it.
- Early Morning Meditation Inspiration - 6/19/2013
- Not overestimating one's ability
- Sam Harris on dangers of religious ecstasy
- Looking deeper for the good qualities of others
| Stand Up For Yourself. Grow From Conflict and Learn When Being Nice Just Isn't Cutting it. Posted: 19 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT
Nice guys finish last. That is, until they learn what I'm about to tell you. A little background. I am a full time police officer in a department where the daily population goes up to about 100,000 people. In my career, I deal with more difficult situations in one month than most people will deal with in their lifetime. It isn't easy, and it isn't for everyone, but working as a policeman gives me unique learning opportunities that aren't available any other way. This lesson was hard learned, and I want to share the fruits of my labor with you.  Read More @ Source |
| Early Morning Meditation Inspiration - 6/19/2013 Posted: 19 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  "Some people live as though they are already dead. There are people moving around us who are consumed by their past, terrified of their future, and stuck in their anger and jealousy. They are not alive; they are just walking corpses." ~Thich Nhat Hanh      Read More @ Source |
| Not overestimating one's ability Posted: 19 Jun 2013 12:00 AM PDT I think anyone new to Buddhism more than often ends up overestimating their ability to grasp the core teaching of Buddhism. Indeed, one can easily delude oneself into believing they can grasp the real message of the Buddha in only a few years. However, it takes a lot longer because as a religion, Buddhism is by far the most profound. This profundity is only appreciated when one has gone back to the drawing board a lot of times trying to figure out the real message of the Buddha. I speak from experience. Still, one never gives up the search. In fact, their appetite should grow for wanting to see what Siddhartha saw when he became awakened. Failure—not success—is generally what happens to the enthusiast who believes he or she can master Buddhism in a few years. Stephen Batchelor, I hasten to add, is a good example. He was the quintessential enthusiast but as time went on, he failed at comprehending the message of the Buddha. To save face, he invented his own brand of Buddhism. Many Western teachers, to my mind, are more failure than success. All have failed in their quest to see what Siddhartha saw. Buddhism contains within it itself its own process of bringing to fruition awakening or bodhi. In a manner of speaking, it largely depends upon having a spiritual nose being able to follow the faint scent of Dharma. Speaking of my own journey, when I read Yunmen's three gates which are: 1) What contains and includes the universe? 2) What stops the flow of reincarnation? 3) What is the state of one wave following another? I knew Buddhism was no ordinary path or a religion like Christianity. The more familiar I became with Zen literature the more it became apparent to me that I had to have some sort of profound realization or epiphany. Nothing short of this would work. Instinctively, I knew that this realization or satori would be instrumental in putting the Stress Reduction puzzle back together again in addition to revealing how koans worked. Buddhists, on the whole, have been unsuccessful in putting the Stress Reduction puzzle back together including understanding how koans work. Buddhism still lies in pieces—the original picture all but lost. To repeat myself. somewhat, this is due in large part to a kind of subtle hubris by which one overestimates their ability to comprehend what Buddhism is really about. Someone suffering from this generally finds it easier to follow a particular doctrine than investigate, on their own, what the Buddha actually said. They don't realize that various Stress Reduction doctrines like the Theravada doctrine of No-Self might well be completely wrong as might be Nagarjuna's Shunyavada. |
| Sam Harris on dangers of religious ecstasy Posted: 18 Jun 2013 11:00 PM PDT Reading "Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy" by Sam Harris brought back some memories. I wouldn't call them exactly religiously ecstatic, but they were damn close. The first time I went to India, for two weeks in 1977, I was able to experience one of the large "bhandaras" held at the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in the Punjab. This is a photo I took, showing just a portion of the gigantic crowd that had come to hear and see the RSSB guru. (I wrote in "God's here, but I've got to go" about the decidedly non-ecstatic experience of desperately having to pee while the guru was giving a lengthy discourse and everyone was sitting spellbound.) Since Radha Soami Satsang Beas is an offshoot of the Sikh tradition, before the guru would appear chanters sang, if that's the right word, passages from the Adi Granth. This was deeply moving to me, even though I couldn't understand what was being said. Believing is powerful. Most of the tens of thousands at the bhandara believed that the guru was God in human form, a modern-day Jesus. I did also, though likely not as fervently -- having a more skeptical Western mind. The atmosphere at a religious gathering like this is almost impossible to describe to someone who hasn't been devoted to an other-worldly belief system. It isn't like being at a football ("soccer," as we Americans say) match where 70,000 people are cheering for their team. There's some resemblance to the empassioned communal frenzy of a sports event, but religious ecstasy flows in much deeper waters. After all, we're talking eternal salvation here, not a temporary win-loss record. Sam Harris speaks eloquently of the appeal that such religious experiences have. First, by way of putting my own empathy on my sleeve, let me say a few things that will most likely surprise many of my readers. Despite my antipathy for the doctrine of Islam, I think the Muslim call to prayer is one of the most beautiful sounds on earth. ...I find this ritual deeply moving—and I am prepared to say that if you don't, you are missing something. At a minimum, you are failing to understand how devout Muslims feel when they hear this. I think everything about the call to prayer is glorious—apart from the fact that, judging by the contents of the Koran, the God we are being asked to supplicate is evil and almost surely fictional. Nevertheless, if this same mode of worship were directed at the beauty of the cosmos and the mystery of consciousness, few things would please me more than a minaret at dawn. However, there are dangers in religious ecstasy -- particularly, for Harris, the Muslim variety.
This video has everything: the power of ritual and the power of the crowd; tears of devotion and a lust for vengeance. How many of the people in that mosque are jihadists? I have no idea—perhaps none. But their spiritual aspirations and deepest positive emotions—love, devotion, compassion, bliss, awe—are being focused through the lens of sectarian hatred and humiliation. Read every word of the translation so that you understand what these devout people are weeping over. Their ecstasy is inseparable from the desire to see nonbelievers punished in hellfire. Is this some weird distortion of the true teachings of Islam? No. This is a recitation from the Koran articulating itscentral message. The video has over 2 million views on YouTube. It was posted by someone who promised his fellow Muslims that they, too, would weep tears of devotion upon seeing it. The reciter is Sheikh Mishary bin Rashid Alafasy of Kuwait. He has as many Twitter followers as Jerry Seinfeld and J.K. Rowling (2 million). In doctrinal terms, this is not the fringe of Islam. It is the center. I only watched the first four minutes or so of the eight minute video. That was enough to get the "infidels will burn in hellfire" message. And to be reminded of how beautiful chanting of sacred scripture can be. I hadn't realized how much Islamic chanting sounds like Sikh chanting. As Harris reminds us, though, there is an ugly message being carried by the beautiful sound. Islam marries religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred in a way that other religions do not. Secular liberals who worry more about "Islamophobia" than about the actual doctrine of Islam are guilty of a failure of empathy. They fail not just with respect to the experience of innocent Muslims who are treated like slaves and criminals by this religion, but with respect to the inner lives of its true believers. Most secular people cannot begin to imagine what a (truly) devout Muslim feels. They are blind to the range of experiences that would cause an otherwise intelligent and psychologically healthy person to say, "I will happily die for this." Unless you have tasted religious ecstasy, you cannot understand the danger of its being pointed in the wrong direction. |
| Looking deeper for the good qualities of others Posted: 18 Jun 2013 10:00 PM PDT
Well, one approach to this is just to bear in mind that your neutral person is certain to have good qualities, by which we mean ethically skillful qualities that lead to the arising of peace and joy. These include qualities like patience, kindness, courage, ordinary life wisdom, mindfulness, generosity, gratitude, humor, admiration, and curiosity. All of these qualities are the basis for the arising of happiness and peace. Now I think it's safe to assume that your neutral person has all of those qualities to at least some extent, and they may even have some of them well developed. So you can just bear in mind that this person has some of the qualities, and wish that those qualities grow and develop, and that the happiness and peace that arise from those qualities grow and develop too. But you might actually have a clearer impression of the neutral person than you think. Research shows that we automatically form impressions of people within the first tenth of a second or so of seeing them. As soon as we glance at someone we make evaluations about their social status, their personality, their friendliness, approachability, their trustworthiness, etc. Those impressions aren't always very accurate, but the fact is that we make them, so you have some impression of your neutral person. Probably, in fact, you've had repeated opportunities to see your neutral person in action, and so there's a lot of information stored in your mental data banks to draw on. These memories are a resource that you can tap into. One of the reasons why our neutral people are neutral is that we simply haven't taken the time to think about them. Often we see them as having a role — the person who swipes my groceries over the scanner, the person who takes my checks and gives me cash at the bank, the person who drives the bus. We take them for granted because we don't think of them much beyond what they do for us. But when we pay attention to our experience of these so-called neutral people, or to our memories of them, we have an opportunity to pay more attention to their good qualities — good qualities that that we've been taking for granted. So you might notice that the woman who serves you at the post office is cheerful, or is engaged and energetic in her work. Perhaps there's a sense of this person being honest, of having a good sense of humor, or being patient, or of being able to cope with difficult circumstances.  If you like my articles, and want to support my work, please click here to purchase my books, guided meditation CDs, and MP3s. If you don't have much of a sense of the people you call to mind in the neutral person stage of the practice, it may be that you just need to practice! I've noticed that I'm not particularly good at noticing the skillful in people. I'm often impressed when other people remark on a positive quality or skillful action they've noticed in someone else. My thought is usually, "Oh yeah, why didn't I see that?" and I really appreciate these little lessons on mudita. So you can just practice allowing the positive in when you meet this person. Often I think I don't notice other people because I'm already thinking about the next thing I'm going to do. I don't take my encounter with them seriously, and see it as an interruption to real life. So I'll be busy thinking about something else. I find if I drop those thoughts, be mindful of my breathing, and allow myself to really see the other person, I can start to notice good qualities that I'd missed. There's a sense of the heart opening, and of the other person coming to life, although of course they've been fully alive the whole time — it's just that I haven't been paying attention. So in this way we can let in the good. But if all else fails, just go on the assumption that your neutral person does in fact have many of the good qualities I've mentioned above to at least some extent. You don't have to wait until someone has perfected a good quality before you rejoice in it! You can assume that they have at least a little patience, kindness, courage, wisdom, etc., — and then your joyful appreciation practice becomes wishing that those qualities grow, so that the person you're wishing well will experience the peace and joy that comes from them. PS. You can see all of our 100 Days of Lovingkindness posts here. Read More @ Source |
At first glance, and maybe at the second or third glances as well, it might seem odd that in the mudita bhavana meditation, where we're developing joyful appreciation, we're asked to rejoice in the good qualities of a "neutral person," who is usually someone we don't really know. Mostly my neutral people are people who work in shops or post offices, so I have very limited contact with them and don't know them personally. Yours may have similar roles in your life. So how can we rejoice in qualities when we don't know the person and may not know what their good qualities are?| 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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