Attachments can mean a number of things and any halfway-decent human life must serve values; if persisting on those is an attachment, then there is no way to get around it.
Fear, however, is subdued, once the values are more precious than one's own life.
Also, there is a more pragmatic way to avoid living in fear: evaluate it after experiencing it.
The last two years may have been enough for some people to realize that living in fear is worse than death, so being afraid of dying loses its power over them.
You see, I am trying not to be preachy, but I still sound like I am. In the meanwhile, I intend to describe cognitive patterns and processes that everyone can fill up with whatever they believe in. Sorry about sounding detached or even flippant, but I want to leave the power of decision to everybody without trying to be manipulative. After all, there is only One Truth at every moment, and it doesn't depend on me; I am the one depending on it.
One thing is certain: once people start taking responsibility for their own decisions and actions, they cannot blame anyone else for their failures, the kind of failures all humans are prone to accept and move on. In this process, there is no "we": everybody has to be responsible in person... "We," however, tended to stand silently by, while our worlds were under attack and being destroyed. Can they be re-built?
During these days of controlled demolition of physical, mental, and cultural traditions, only the most persistent might make it, "those who endure until the end..."
Rebuilding is what we do. Not all decisions are good, so we learn from mistakes, make corrections, and try again. Some do it better than others and can serve as models for others.
Defending against oppression is a different process, yet still requires decisions of the best ways to prevent oppression. Better decisions minimize the oppressions. We've been slow to respond recently, but we'll catch up. And rebuild.
Hello AGAIN David. I wish we dared to post our email addresses, here. I know I don't. But I'd be curious to know your experience with Zazen. I have meditated for 52 years, enjoyed guided meditations for 20 of those years, switched to the Small Circulation (taught in Tien Tao Chi Kung), hated TM, and found Zen ten years ago. I've been very happy with it. But my Rosicrucian studies conflict with the writings of Shunryu Suzuki and Eithei Dogen. I hate being conflicted.
I had a cardiologist who was senior in TM bureaucracy. He didn't recommend it to avoid legalities, but we discussed it and I checked it out. Too rigid for my taste. Read several books years ago and found techniques by Marshall Glickman very effective, and followed that for years. He discusses Buddhist background, but his methods don't require any spiritual basis. More recently I've been practicing a method called the Warriors Meditation by Richard Haight, an American trained in Samuari arts, who developed an awareness based meditation that can be entered quickly, enhancing combat, without the ceremonial solitude used in more traditional forms. Meditation is just a self control method, and learning self discipline is sufficient to achieve the desired mental states. The ceremonial aspects facilitate it for some, but any conflicts are internal, and not relevant to the physiological objective. The more interesting part is not how to achieve meditative state, but how it works, biologically. I'm amused by my fitbit watch sleep tracker getting totally fooled when I meditate.
Attachments can mean a number of things and any halfway-decent human life must serve values; if persisting on those is an attachment, then there is no way to get around it.
Fear, however, is subdued, once the values are more precious than one's own life.
Also, there is a more pragmatic way to avoid living in fear: evaluate it after experiencing it.
The last two years may have been enough for some people to realize that living in fear is worse than death, so being afraid of dying loses its power over them.
We've done a lot to degrade our values in recent decades, and it seems to be accelerating. At some point, we'll find them again.
You see, I am trying not to be preachy, but I still sound like I am. In the meanwhile, I intend to describe cognitive patterns and processes that everyone can fill up with whatever they believe in. Sorry about sounding detached or even flippant, but I want to leave the power of decision to everybody without trying to be manipulative. After all, there is only One Truth at every moment, and it doesn't depend on me; I am the one depending on it.
One thing is certain: once people start taking responsibility for their own decisions and actions, they cannot blame anyone else for their failures, the kind of failures all humans are prone to accept and move on. In this process, there is no "we": everybody has to be responsible in person... "We," however, tended to stand silently by, while our worlds were under attack and being destroyed. Can they be re-built?
During these days of controlled demolition of physical, mental, and cultural traditions, only the most persistent might make it, "those who endure until the end..."
Rebuilding is what we do. Not all decisions are good, so we learn from mistakes, make corrections, and try again. Some do it better than others and can serve as models for others.
Defending against oppression is a different process, yet still requires decisions of the best ways to prevent oppression. Better decisions minimize the oppressions. We've been slow to respond recently, but we'll catch up. And rebuild.
Hello AGAIN David. I wish we dared to post our email addresses, here. I know I don't. But I'd be curious to know your experience with Zazen. I have meditated for 52 years, enjoyed guided meditations for 20 of those years, switched to the Small Circulation (taught in Tien Tao Chi Kung), hated TM, and found Zen ten years ago. I've been very happy with it. But my Rosicrucian studies conflict with the writings of Shunryu Suzuki and Eithei Dogen. I hate being conflicted.
I had a cardiologist who was senior in TM bureaucracy. He didn't recommend it to avoid legalities, but we discussed it and I checked it out. Too rigid for my taste. Read several books years ago and found techniques by Marshall Glickman very effective, and followed that for years. He discusses Buddhist background, but his methods don't require any spiritual basis. More recently I've been practicing a method called the Warriors Meditation by Richard Haight, an American trained in Samuari arts, who developed an awareness based meditation that can be entered quickly, enhancing combat, without the ceremonial solitude used in more traditional forms. Meditation is just a self control method, and learning self discipline is sufficient to achieve the desired mental states. The ceremonial aspects facilitate it for some, but any conflicts are internal, and not relevant to the physiological objective. The more interesting part is not how to achieve meditative state, but how it works, biologically. I'm amused by my fitbit watch sleep tracker getting totally fooled when I meditate.
You can email me at awareness@socal.rr.com
I will be leaning the Warriors Meditation within minutes! I practiced Qi Gong and Wushu for years before being clobbered by a semi truck in 2002.