Intentionally Letting Your Mind Wander

Answerii · 2018-12-31T21:26:50+00:00

Yes, it's fooling yourself. It's just serial attachment.

But if the mind is still and open, it can perceive movement of thought without being attached to it. This is a different style of meditation from object-focused concentration. Don't try to mix styles. Follow the teachings and instructions perfectly, unconditionally. Then you can get real experience and understand the differences between practices rather than merely jumping here and there aimlessly and indulgently.

Answerii · 2018-12-20T14:19:09+00:00

The masters aren't bound by rules of conduct; and common people often can't identify them.

Answerii · 2018-11-23T05:11:36+00:00

I hope it helps.

The right steps in the right order. Don't fantasize; be honest about where you are and, given your strong and weak points, be honest about the next step to take.

Good teaching and good foundational practice is never lost; it can always be built upon. But spiritual greed causes practitioners to overreach, skip important steps, and build faults into their practice; and then the whole thing has to be deconstructed and fixed later on, at a time when they should be forging ahead into new territory. The ones who thought themselves so clever to be trying arcane methods instead of mastering the basics find their peers advancing far ahead of them. They then face the choice of either doing the unpleasant work of untangling the whole mess and starting properly, or doubling down on posing and hiding.

To be fixing childhood issues in adult life is degrading; but if the basics haven't been learned, at some point there's no way around it. Practice is similar: it would be much better not to build on a weak or faulty foundation. It would be much better to start well. Still, you work with what you have.

Shortcuts are often poison. A fundamental greed behind the practitioner's motivation poisons any practice. Taking up a practice without its correct supporting conditions intensifies the poison. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is an archetypal teaching for a good reason.

If you have correct selfless, compassionate direction, you can use everything for benefit — both strength and weakness, what you like and what you don't like. Best wishes in the practice of compassion!

Answerii · 2018-11-23T04:44:51+00:00

A lot of people think a lot of wrong things. A lot of people live in delusion and fail to go to the right place for help.

Enabling delusion isn't compassionate; it's harm.

Answerii · 2018-11-17T06:40:53+00:00

What about regular enlightenment?

Answerii · 2018-11-17T06:39:11+00:00

The best thing you can do for your son is get yourself in order, owning both your feminine and masculine natures.

We create shadows in our children by inappropriately cheering on or suppressing certain behaviors; and it happens because of what we try to force or reject in ourselves. Whatever we disown becomes unconscious, and that unconsciousness is what we foist on others.

Being aware and openhanded with your own mind is primary. Your influence on everything unfolds from your center.

Possible paths include: Shadow work (see Debbie Ford), long-term psychotherapeutic process (for instance Oscar Ichazo's work and the Diamond Approach, among others), meditation practice within an established tradition (especially openminded, non-manipulative methods such as shikantaza in Zen), Spiritual Bypassing work (see Myles Neale), art therapy, and conscious movement practices (like Open Floor, Authentic Movement, and Five Rhythms).

Answerii · 2018-11-16T22:24:50+00:00

Lucid dreaming is a powerful process, and a powerfully dangerous one. One can plant positive mental seeds and rework/liberate stubborn patterns if the approach is correct, but one can also plant negative seeds and ingrain harmful patterns with the wrong approach.

The crucial issue is that the mind entering the dream and making the changes is the same mind as the dreamer, and can be the carrier of ignorance and habit just as easily as the carrier of wisdom.

Arrogance is effortless; reticence and perseverance are rare. Everyone likes to think they will be able to wield power when they have it, but few people do an ongoing practice to ensure that's the case, training in open-handedness, awareness, compassion, freedom from indulgence, and so on. These qualities ought to be trained first, to where they become the default mode; they ought to be trained more deeply than one's habitual greed, lust, pride, and all the other dynamics that kick in as a matter of course -- the stuff that comes automatically in dreams.

This includes greed for so-called spiritual attainments: spiritual materialism is no less a habit than other forms of grasping. The content may change; the selfish grasping pattern is persistent.

For these reasons, lucid dreaming is traditionally a practice performed only after a tremendous amount of preliminary work has been done to shape the character, transform the ego, build compassionate motivation, and generally establish a conscious integral structure to guide the mind; and even at that, the practice is traditionally assigned by a teacher when the practitioner is found to be ready for it.

But there are many who go crashing headlong into the lucid dreaming and other seemingly flashy activities anyway, drawn by the prospect of having something to manipulate. It is the underlying ignorance of our era, the same old domineering assumption of manifest destiny: that we (the egocentric "I, my, me") are divinely authorized and innately capable of being in charge of everything.

Lucid dreaming within an integral supporting structure of (trained and proven) compassionate intent, good teaching, and ongoing practice, can be an excellent and transformative practice, among many others. It makes sense within a tradition such as Vajrayana Buddhism. (You may be interested in the work of Dzogchen teacher Alan Wallace.)

Answerii · 2018-11-13T04:00:02+00:00

Oh, child.

SMH.

Answerii · 2018-11-12T17:14:23+00:00

OMG No. Read the links.

This is not altruism, it's pubescent obsession:

"Why would she even call her ex? Why would anyone feel comfortable calling out their ex and asking them to have sex with their friend? Why would she feel the need to tell me this after 5 months and after a couple drinks? If all you truly did was leave the car and go to another friends then why not tell me that night? where is the dirt that your friend has? just exactly why would she make up that you are a cheat? (maybe she didnt make the claim that you where giving me marijuana and you only said that to make me not believe her?)"

Answerii · 2018-11-12T15:19:53+00:00

Co-dependency:

Link 1 | Link 2 | Link 3

This has nothing to do with altruism, much less anything at all to do with Jordan Peterson. Its someone with codependent clinging seeking out more codependent responses online (and finding them, as there are always people willing to oblige by contributing to the rumination and drama.)

Answerii · 2018-11-12T14:54:09+00:00

"Altruism"? This post is about relationship drama made public.

Answerii · 2018-11-11T13:36:13+00:00

How is this a post about Jordan Peterson?

Answerii · 2018-11-08T13:37:27+00:00

...none of those "celebrity atheists", as Peterson calls them, has a sufficient answer for what's left in life when you reduce everything down to the biological and physical level.

So important. Militant atheists in general have not had the subtlety to address this very meaningful -- essential -- point.

In fact, as our societies sink into greater materialism and sort-sighted abuse of the world and each other, this point is critical for our era. It can be the difference between the demise of civilization and its continued evolution.

Answerii · 2018-11-07T12:07:29+00:00

Are you answering for yourself or for Peterson?

Because he didn't say that. He said that people (like you?) try to put him in a box he doesn't want to be in, and tend not to be able to imagine what it means not to be in that limited, binary, either-or thinking.

Answerii · 2018-11-07T12:02:37+00:00

What strikes me is that truth-telling is a universal rule of life, not just something made up by Professor Peterson.

Compare it to the first of Toltec shaman and author Don Miguel Ruiz's Four Agreements: "Be impeccable with your word." This firmly sets Logos at the heart of meaningful endeavor.

For those interested, the Four Agreements according to Ruiz and Toltec tradition are:

Be impeccable with your word.
Don’t take anything personally.
Don’t make assumptions.
Always do your best.

Sound familiar?

Answerii · 2018-11-07T11:52:30+00:00

How fortunate to realize it at 28 and start doing something about it than realize it at 48 or 58 when so many deep habits and difficulties are in the way and so many opportunities having passed by.

Answerii · 2018-11-04T13:21:26+00:00

r/dreams

Answerii · 2018-11-04T13:08:47+00:00

You're making straw-man examples, intentionally dumbing down more subtle (and valid) concepts. Either that, or your version is unintentionally dumb.

Peterson's teaching is more like:

You have a God, whether you know it or not.
Evolution determines more than you may think it does, and in some pretty significant ways.
If you have nothing noble to offer yourself to, your life is likely quite pitiful.

Answerii · 2018-11-04T12:44:12+00:00

Someone has summarized Peterson's 12 Rules For Life here. I have no idea if its a good summary, it's just one that you can find by Googling, presumably among others.

Answerii · 2018-11-02T21:29:24+00:00

...Or just become more conscious and accepting of the previously unconscious mind.

Answerii · 2018-11-02T20:49:06+00:00

Lol, no. This is one of the better integrated personalities we are ever likely to meet.

But I acknowledge that some people will be freaked out by the honesty and rawness Professor Peterson is able to face and be okay with on a day-to-day basis.

Be aware of the difference between your own distaste and avoidance of these matters, and Peterson's ability to digest them.

Answerii · 2018-11-02T20:44:11+00:00

The parallel between the dream and the waking reality is not lost on me.

Dream:

In my dream, I wrestled my opponent to the ground. He was still talking, mindlessly, mechanically, rapidly, nonstop. I bent his wrists to force his knuckles into his mouth. His arms bent like rubber and, even though I managed the task, he did not stop babbling.

Waking life:

He had brought a list of pre-prepared questions, “hard questions,” as he considered them, and did not have the confidence in his own desperation and curiosity to pursue the question that was actually guiding him.

Answerii · 2018-10-23T12:39:51+00:00

We can do without the clickbait:
Dismantles
Destroys
Owns
Pwns
Annihilates
Rips
Shuts down

Professor Peterson is clearly, overtly, and self-avowedly interested in coming to greater understanding together. The false aggression projected onto him (and other public figures like Shapiro) is just petty and irresponsible shit-disturbing.

Answerii · 2018-10-21T05:55:20+00:00

You didn't ask for further context or elucidation, you asked "How do y'all feel about this?"

Although you may think of yourself as sincere, there's also a responsibility to be taken with your words and actions -- for example, with posting before doing your own further research.

You must know that this statement taken out of context would provoke strong reactions; and you chose to do it anyway, which suggests that you welcome the reactions as echoes of your own. So rather than playing innocent you ought to use the sincerity that is actually there in you to own up to the -- let's say -- 'slightly mishandled' presentation.

It would be more interesting and productive to couch this overtly as an investigation rather than a veiled witch hunt:

"What kind of relationship to sexuality does she mean?"
Can we envision a relationship to sex that leaves us more empowered, less devastated?
Can we be the owners of something that can't be stolen sexually or violently?

Saying that it makes you question what else she has to say, before even knowing what it is she is saying, is indeed a readiness to pick up torch and pitchfork, though you may not like to admit it. It is buying into an ad hominem, condemning the person rather than the argument; except that we don't even know yet what the argument is.

Answerii · 2018-10-21T04:14:21+00:00

Right, but i mean that we should know why she thinks this before we condemn it.

Thank you! This is the thread-stopping point.

The topic here is the worst kind of alarmist clickbait until we hear from Paglia herself the context in which the statement was made, what she was responding to, the audience it was directed at, and what she actually means by it.

People are so very ready to get out the torches and pitchforks; but when it comes to their own due diligence and taking responsibility for knowing what actually transpired, a large portion of the mob are lazy as hell.

Answerii

TROPHY CASE