Best Of
Arriving at clarity
This morning I was listening to Samaneri Jayasera’s YouTube channel, she has a number of guided meditations from material from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s books which I wanted to visit now that I have finished reading ‘I Am That’ which was his first book. I enjoyed this reading, because it seemed to me this time as if it was helping me clear out more unnecessary things.
Reading spiritual literature can lead you into all kinds of spaces, of revelations small and large and pleasure and joy that comes with that. But it is only when you really look, when you go deeper that you find that these pleasures are also things you chase, that at a certain point you need to let go of pleasure because otherwise it conditions you. This time Nisargadatta’s words were helping me to come to the essentials and reach a clarity, a letting go of older pleasures.
Last night I did a little reading in one of Papaji’s books, and though he was poetic and truthful, at the same time he spoke to my imagination and I did not feel as if it was the right path for me. Imagination can be distracting, leading the mind into many side alleys, and not to stillness, so it is worth avoiding triggers to the imagination.
Jeroen
Re: The Other Elephant In The Room
Thanks for posting @person,...
I watch the video a couple of weeks ago and watched it again just now....
The ability for both groups to show some empathy for both view points is the key point of the 'middle ground' video...
Something which both the Israeli government and Hamas seem to be in short supply of ...
Empathy vs compassion: A Buddhist perspective
Empathy is what happens when we experience another person’s emotions as if they were our own. When they feel relief, joy or elation, we do too. When they feel depressed, ditto. Neuroscientists tell us that, with empathy, the same parts of our brain are activated as if we were going through the same thing as the other person. Their feelings become ours.
Is it any surprise that if we’re surrounded by the chronically miserable, desperate, or anxious, as empaths we are going to suffer from their torment? But in so doing, we face exhaustion, maybe the impulse to flee, and ultimately perhaps even to lash out at the source of our vicariously induced distress.
Compassion, by contrast, comes from a very different place. Our wish to help the other person is motivated by love, which in Buddhism is defined as the wish to give happiness to others. We understand their suffering because we have suffered too. And based on that empathetic foundation, our wish is to help them get out of their pit, to whatever extent that may be possible. We are not taking on their pain as our own. In fact our experience of reality is ideally one of boundless peace and wellbeing.
As benevolent and calmly objective carers, we can offer far more than if we are caught up in empathetic emotion. Interestingly, this is something that seems to come with medical training. I have no doubt that the medics and psychs who come to our Buddhist centre are compassionate people, but I also know from observation over the years that, in a crisis, they keep their heads. The ability of someone to emote is quite different from their ability to take compassionate action. Emoting may very well be an obstacle!
Neuroscience shows that very different networks of the brain are activated when we focus on the wish to benefit someone else, versus empathising with their suffering. Ground-breaking work by Dr. Richard J. Davison of the University of Wisconsin-Madison using an fMRI machine, showed that when we focus our compassionate attention on the wellbeing of others, we ourselves are likely to experience a state of profound wellbeing.
Two caring people, in other words, may be working in similar circumstances helping others, and while one of them faces despair and exhaustion, the other thrives. The difference could be empathy versus compassion.
Shoshin1
Re: Space - the final frontier
On the topic of supernovae...
Betelgeuse is considered by astronomers to be one of the stars that will go supernova very soon in cosmic time, maybe even during our lifetimes.
Betelgeuse is the upper-left bright star in Orion and is one of the brightest stars in the sky. It is also called Alpha Orionis, which means it is the brightest (Alpha) star in the constellation Orion.
My previous readings said it would explode within 1000 years, or 100,000 years, but this article says it might be even sooner, within 300 years.
What will that look like? This article says:
_Life on Earth will be unharmed. But that doesn’t mean it will go unnoticed. Goldberg and Bauer found that when Betelgeuse explodes, it will shine as bright as the half-Moon — nine times fainter than the full Moon — for more than three months.
“All this brightness would be concentrated into one point,” Howell says. “So it would be this incredibly intense beacon in the sky that would cast shadows at night, and that you could see during the daytime. Everyone all over the world would be curious about it, because it would be unavoidable.”
_
marcitko
Re: The Other Elephant In The Room
I watched the whole docu in the end, but found the incessant repetition of violent images from history to be hard to sit through. The images used over the actual talking points are more a history of the media coverage, so there’s a fair share of bodies and blood.
It makes me wonder why I have to know about a 1982 massacre in Israeli-occupied Lebanon and watch the images of that atrocity in order to understand that the Israelis in the US embarked on a program to control the media.
But the other thing to note is the basic bankruptcy of people’s ethics. Both the media, the marketing, the people who do the lobbying, the politicians, they are all motivated by money and not by honesty and truth. The days of the freedom of the press are long gone.
Jeroen
Re: Everyone sees the world through cultural glasses
@person said:
I believe either now or in your past you were either an immigrant in America or are now an immigrant in the Netherlands.
I was an immigrant in the States, and have my experiences being part of a group in the communes where I grew up. I reckon I’m probably a bit too alternative to be considered a “solid citizen”, which is fine by me.
And, children in the experimental classroom rated themselves as significantly happier.
This is interesting to me. Maybe human beings are happier being part of a tribe.
Jeroen
Re: Two minutes of meditation?
@Ren_in_black said:
It's funny, I read all of these responses and it gets me excited about meditating.Then when the moment arrives, I don't want to.
Ah yes the two minutes of, “I don't want to be doing this”
Some people spend ages trying to work out if this is a meditation. It is.
lobster
It's That Time Of Year Again
Season's greetings...
Remember to deck the halls and not your family this year...
Shoshin1
