Best Of

He will be in a freezer soon enough. So to speak.
The important thing is to knock oneself (if unfortunate enough to have any worth mentioning) off any constructed pedestals...

I dunz this!

@Lionduck said:
Guilt is embedded in the Western culture, primarily through the various Christians sects,
where one must always atone for one's sins.
Buddhism is embedded in the culture of compassion, empathy, self-reflection and mercy.
Of course this is a generalization. As this is not intended to be a comparative religion discussion, I will leave it as is.

Peace to all

This rings true to me and I had to reflect on what it is about this contrast. I think in the past several years my path has been more in the western Buddhist scene. I've heard a few times about the attempt to distinguish guilt from shame and I think it is a valuable distinction for a western mind embedded in that way of thinking.

But yeah, within the Asian communities I spent time among earlier there is less a feeling of bad for oneself and more a concern of well being for the other.

As an addendum to Western guilt, I listened to a podcast today about changing one's mind and part of it was about the role shaming plays. Like you said earlier about religion it compels people to comply. It works on the fear people have of social isolation, a sort of death that is often greater than the fear of physical death. They added that it only works on members of that group though. When applied to outsiders it only serves to turn the shamer into an enemy that needs to be fought and resisted.

I have to say, there was an article in the paper here about Wim Hof’s personal life, and that was pretty shocking. It seems he was violent towards his second wife and son, there was a court case which he lost, he was given a restraining order, she and the son both suffer from PTSD now, and his first wife committed suicide. Turns out Wim Hof is not a nice guy.

But it is true that to do these things, swimming under the ice and walking a half marathon on bare feet in the polar circle and going up high mountains in freezing cold dressed only in shorts, requires a pretty extreme personality. He is a bit crazy.

Does how we feel about Wim Hof as a human being impact how we feel about the benefit of cold immersion?

King Ashoka of India was a powerful war king. However, upon adopting Buddhism, realized that war did nothing but inflict pain and suffering. He ceased his conquests and even returned land to previously conquered nations. Not out of shame or guilt, but out of compassion. He established many reforms aimed at improving the quality of life for the common people, including religious freedom. He became know as a great Buddhist Sovereign.
Guilt is embedded in the Western culture, primarily through the various Christians sects,
where one must always atone for one's sins.
Buddhism is embedded in the culture of compassion, empathy, self-reflection and mercy.
Of course this is a generalization. As this is not intended to be a comparative religion discussion, I will leave it as is.

Peace to all

@Vastmind said:
How long is the present moment? When does it start and when does it end?

If I am to be in the present and not live in the past or in the future…how do I measure that?.. If it is continuous moments…how would I be in just one?

Thus have I heard. (that is, brought to my attention_..._

Every moment is a moment of events and no moment passes by without an event.
One can not notice a moment without noticing events taking place in that moment. Therefore, the moment one tries to pay bare attention to is the present moment.

Undivided attention is a gift we often give to others, but habitually forget to offer to ourselves. True self-awareness and being fully present in the continually flowing moment are key to cultivating harmony and a sense of well being.

Your question is actually good! @Vastmind

A practice of being present is sometimes experienced in Buddhist circles as a balanced serpentine wander along the upright edge of a razor blade. The blade edge represents being present with either side of that edge possibly being the past or the future. Our measurement of success at being present can be described as how quickly we turn our wandering back over that blade edge each time one finds oneself off it. Where one person might only occasionally pass perpendicularly across that blade, a meditative adept spends more & more of their time upon that edge as they balance back and forth across it in the constantly correcting wiggle of a tightrope walker. As the practice of being present progresses, those corrections become less erratic and more instinctive. The time one might of spent in measuring such things, simply gets diverted into a quicker course correction. Here no mentality need hinders its actuality.

Some less severe views of a practice of being present, and one of my favorites, counter warn the meditator, to not end up becoming like a cat watching a mousehole.
In my meditative practice of being present, just not actively supporting deliberate thought has been one of the best helps for me.