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Re: Experience of mantra practice
I didn't know that there are mantras from centuries ago that have been dropped. I think when you personalise your spirituality, it goes deeper.
Tavs
Re: Experience of mantra practice
@Tavs said:
Is anyone is an experienced mantra practitioner? If so, how has your practice changed over time or your relationship with your practice?
I use it everyday. It has changed from group aloud and gradually become silent internal. Some mantra over the centuries have been dropped. They are not effective. I also have modified mantra and make a great deal of use of a personalised mantra.
lobster
Re: What do you think of modern movies?
I think part of what made it interesting was that it wasn’t a superhero movie, and also hadn’t fallen prey to the ‘Marvel syndrome’ of interchangeable hero’s all with quips and jokes and monologues to camera and poses. It was a heartfelt story told with sincerity, good acting and moments of real tension.
It was really interesting watching Tom’s video about the Marvel syndrome, especially the section about corporate passion and real passion as embodied by the Lord of the Rings films and everyone who had worked on them. I don’t think there has been anything to match the craft and detail as shown by the appendices to those films since then.
In a way, all the TV series that were trying to be the next Game of Thrones were suffering from following in its footsteps and having one eye on potentially huge success and then not honouring their source material. Rings of Power, House of the Dragon, Foundation, Sandman, none of them really blew up to a must-see phenomenon.
Jeroen
Re: Poem for the day
This poem was first published around 1914
Henry Dupre LaBouchere, 'Where Is The Flag Of England?'
Where Is The Flag Of England?
Let the winds of the world make answer!
North, South, East, West,
Wherever there is wealth to covet
Or land to be possessed:
Wherever the savage nations
To coddle, coerce or scare,
You may look for the vaunted emblem
For the Flag of England is there!
Aye, it waves over the blazing hovels
Whence its African victims fly
To be shot by explosive bullets
Or wretchedly starve and die:
Or where the beachcomber hammers
The isles of the southern sea -
From the peak of his hellish vessel
The English flag flies free!
The Maori, full of hate, curses
With his fleeting, dying breath.
And the Arab hath hissed his hatred
As he spat at its folds in death.
The hapless fellah hath feared it
On Tel el Kebir's parched plain.
And the blood of the Zulu hath stained it,
With a deep indelible stain.
It has floated over scenes of pillage
And flaunted over deeds of shame.
It has waved o'er the fell marauder
As he ravished with Sword and flame:
It has looked on ruthless slaughter
And assassination dire and grim.
And has heard the shrieks of its victims
Drown even the jingo hymn.
Where is the flag of England?
Seek the land where the natives rot
And decay, and assured extinction
Must soon be the people's lot.
Go to the once fair island
Where disease and death are rife
And the greed of colossal commerce
Now fattens on human life.
Where is the flag of England?
Go sail where the rich galleons come
With their shoddy and wasted cotton,
And beer and Bibles and rum.
Seek the land where brute force hath triumphed
And hypocrisy hath its lair.
And your question will thus be answered
For the flag of England is there!
Shoshin1
Re: Games that are spiritual
Games that are spiritual
Life is the ultimate spiritual game, unfolding in cycles rather than straight lines. It moves through the ups and downs , attachment and loss, joy and sorrow, each moment passing as it arrives. There are no winners and no losers, only lessons. We all have to play until the very end, and if we do not get it right the first time, we replay it again and again.. Life becomes a teacher, returning us to familiar paths until we learn to walk them with awareness.
Life is like a game of dice...you never know what will come up....
So roll the dice and spice up your life ...
![]
Shoshin1
Re: Experience of mantra practice
I’ve experimented with it, very casually. It struck me as being a kind of hypnotic technique, which is not at all a bad thing.
Jeroen
Re: Experience of mantra practice
I hear in dharma talks often chanting before and after. Like an example people might have heard in the heart sutra "gate, gate, paragete, parasamgati,,,bodhisvaha". There is a meaning to that mantra. Sometimes I find myself spontaneously thinking of a mantra during my ordinary day
Jeffrey
Re: Rebirth as an animal
Seems to me the greater the capacity for abstract thought, the more different ways there are to suffer. With humans, the problem has grown to be so extreme that they have had to invent religion to help counteract the stress.
It has been reported that Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will sometimes - when the rains go on and on without letup and become very stressful - will conduct a sort of circle dance that resembles a kind of ritual. This is rarely observed, but one is tempted to wonder if this is a nascent form of religion.
The farther down the evolutionary ladder you go, the fewer the potential causes of stress and suffering. Perhaps flies cannot become enlightened because they have no need to do so - they can easily survive and reproduce without it.
But do fewer stressors mean more happiness? It only takes one, in my experience, to toss you off the tracks, but the more of them there are, the harder it is to get back on.
Fosdick
Re: Waking Up and Growing Up
You know, someone once told me that the best place to be a child in is the countryside, the best place to spend one's teenage and young adult years is the city and where one should grow old is about in the middle: in a small town. I think, to some length, that has some spiritual message too. From the peaceful, quiet transitioning to the loud, exciting world of today and perhaps as a fruit of disillusionment, but not with hate, to settle down between the extremes.
RobinH
Re: Games that are spiritual
I can’t think of any… a friend of mine worked on the environmentalist game Fate of the World in which you could see which decisions had a noticeable impact on climate change and the planetary environment.
Jeroen