Best Of
Re: The Other Elephant In The Room
@Jeroen said:
What it comes down to is that somewhere there are bitter old men entrusted with the work of government who have the gall to command enthusiastic young men to go fight when they should know better. In fact what they should be doing is seeking therapy, and both the Hamas and Israeli commanders are of this type.There is a good case to be made that anyone wielding political power should be subjected to rigorous psychiatric examinations at regular intervals. The system should be doing a better job of removing psychopaths from public office.
I appreciate the sentiment that we want wise, stable leaders. I think this solution isn't a very good one. At one level I think its undemocratic to have an individual or panel tell citizens who their leader can or can't be. I also worry about the politicization, and thus ruination, of psychology. For example, the personality trait of openness to experience is correlated with progressives and the personality trait of conscientiousness with conservatives. A politicized psychology might pathologize close mindedness or carelessness according to whoever has the power to do so.
person
Re: WTF ...and she calls herself a Buddhist too...Wow
Yes WTF...
The so called Israeli Zen teacher reminds me of what was going around a few years back "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance......."
However it would seem that this teacher's disturbing message is "Zen and the art of killing without a conscience "
Shoshin1
Re: Just for fun: the random, useless announcements thread!
I think any mental health professional needs their minds examined...!
federica
Re: Just for fun: the random, useless announcements thread!
Random question: is it against Buddhist precepts to become part of the military but to work as the force's psychologist?
An alcoholic can work in a bar, a gambler in a Casino , a vegan in an abattoir, an advocate for harmlessness in the military.
All are capable of doing good in such circumstances but if you find the keeping of the precepts in daily life to be a challenge today, imagine how much harder it might be within a field of endeavor that pays no attention to such precepts.
how
Re: Buddhism, women and the goddess
If a religious movement doesn't treat people fairly, stop empowering them with your participation. Stop supporting meditation teachers of either gender who have continued to hobble their own practices with cultural prejudices.
If you need a teacher, keep searching for one that practices in a way that you'd feel comfortable emulating.
If you have to choose between a teacher or a school that is popular and a teacher or a school that broadly manifests compassion, tenderness, sympathy, loving kindness, empathy, benevolence & wisdom, choose the latter.
how
Re: Buddhism, women and the goddess
I have yet to have gender personally arise in my meditation as something specifically limiting.
The human condition expresses itself throughout the ages as our pandering of one polarity over another whereas spiritual adulthood offers a transcendence of such habituated limitations. This is a puddle of muddy water that no amount of stirring will clear. Its solution, like any component of suffering's cause, simply lies in a transcendence of whatever we cling to, reject, or ignore so that our interactions with any phenomena are met without those previously limiting preconditions.
We can either stir this muddy puddle or allow our self-made sediments to settle along their obscurations.
Why slumber in past & future questions when only this present moment offers the solution?
how
Re: Joseph Campbell and mythology
@Jeroen said:
I find it interesting that people find a kind of security in the patterns of society around them.
Security, in many forms, is what societies and other cultural components (clans, tribes, etc) are for.
You may have heard the term "ostracize". To be ostracized, in more elementary cultures than ours, is literally a death sentence. If you were ostracized, you died, bing cut off from your group. One of the reasons we have the social ills we have is we've departed from those kinds of things.
Buddhism, women and the goddess
During my reading into Campbell I came across some very interesting areas of mythology to do with the goddess, birth and creation myths. It seems that in early societies it was probably matriarchal, only the mother of a child was known, and as women gave birth to the children so the goddess gave birth to creation. So it seems that women had a very key role in early spirituality, and may also have been the inventors of language, which makes sense because gathering is a much more language-intensive area than hunting which the men would be doing.
That these early tribes had a spiritual life is illustrated by the presence of grave goods, items for the buried person to use in the afterlife. This practice happened as early as two hundred thousand years ago, and it was extended also to the animals that were hunted. There have been found burials of skulls of early mammals, caught in the hunt, in ritualistic arrangements.
When the Buddha came along 2500 years ago there had already been a long period of patriarchy and agricultural settlement. That he allowed women into his sangha was already forward thinking for the time, but he was wrong in thinking that it would have halved the time his movement would last. There are still men and women practicing the Dhamma today.
But in a way I think this idea of the goddess will come again, that somehow in the future there will be an expression of spirituality going back to the early days of the Mother Goddess which will also contain shades of the Dhamma.
Jeroen