anger as a reason to avoid meditation
anger as a reason to avoid meditation
Please forgive me if this is not a proper space to discuss the long journey from starting point (no meditation) to desired goal (daily meditation 80% or more of days) for someone living in an individualist and undisciplined culture;
Like many others in such a situation I suspect, I go thru spells where I don't meditate. I'm still trying to understand why, in order that I can eventually stop doing so. Even right now I'm playing a game of some sort with myself by making this post, but that's actually beside the point.
I finally noticed one correlation: the spells line up (sometimes) with periods where I'm "angry at the world" in some sense ... feel bitter disappointment at dreams which didn't come to pass for some unjust or unaccepted reason, etc etc etc. This turns into sullen (or hot & fiery, depending) resistance, and then I don't meditate for a while until I get over it. But sometimes this takes months, and anyway, it's the exact opposite of what I need to be doing in such a situation. So ideally I could come to understand this and dispense with the whole pointless resistance part.
Anyway. Just posting to paint myself into a corner so that I have to stop skipping, but, I am curious if there is anyone else out there who has noticed this.
It is important to learn to meditate not based on your moods. There are important things to learn and skills to develop while meditating with difficult feelings present.
You've noticed that there is a kind of tidal ebb/flow to your ability to meditate...
Notice, simultaneously, that if you meditate when you can, persistently, that the portion-of-the-tidal-cycle in-which you can meditate, increases...
Had you never bothered meditating, your ability wouldn't increase or become more-normal, would it?
Persistent-right-direction is the root competence, in evolving oneself.
Please read Daniel Kahneman's brilliant "Thinking Fast & Slow":
Instinct, addiction, prejudice, and trained-expertise, are all what he calls System-1 mind.
System-2 mind is considered-reasoning.
Becoming addicted-to-meditating is possible, and productive/useful, at your & my level.
if one's mind is in terrible shape, and I'm saying that as a braindamaged 7+-years-homeless-person, then it can take decades to get addicted to meditating, but Combined Arms, the use of ALL available-dimensions of leverage, helps
( e.g. a special meditation-space, use of habit/ritual, incense, high-quality-light, calendar/alarms to block-out time, comfy clothes, a good yoga-mat for asanas, fitness-practice one LOVES doing, whichever that one is, getting the sunshine one needs, no distractions allowed, EVERYthing, all combined, to gradually force the System-1 habit into improving, see? )
For meditation to be able to break the cycle of uncontrolled-reincarnations, it needs to be continuous.
As-in asleep, awake, ALWAYS.
Maintaining it through even Delta-brainwave sleep prepares one's mind for maintaining it through the 7th phase of life, the stage after the stage after the "white light" of the death-process.
( probably Holecek's books are the best for that stuff, for you modern buddhists )
Always keep in mind 2 things, re prying one's continuum from its unconsciousness:
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if one doesn't face-into karma enough, earn new learnings & understandings enough, one has discarded/lost one's finite life-opportunity to have those earnings, and the ocean-of-samsara is infinite ( endless stream-of-Universes ), but human-category-lives definitely are not anywhere-near the majority of life-conceptions for a continuum to get caught-in...
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pushing-too-hard creates either breakage ( damage or/and aversion ) or a kind of "bulimia" cycle, so pushing-too-hard isn't productive.
These 2 limits mean that the most strategic way of working, is to gently & relentlessly continue pushing oneself to face-into karma & to improve one's training...
IOW, Kaizen is the most-strategic religion there is, and I find an old style of Vajrayana, nobody bothers with it nowadays, to be the sanest cosmology there is for me.
You need to understand what variation-of-The-Middle-Way is your right-Way.
Are you a moderate-path-person?
If so, then use moderate-path-person means of realizing.
Are you a soul who cannot tolerate any more of samsara's abuse, and you need out now??
If so, then use the steep-path-person means of realizing.
Do not, however, use the antidotes-style of the other category of people.
Alexandra David-Neel rightly identified that using wrong-category of antidotes is "deadly poison", in her book "The Secret Oral Teachings of Tibetan Buddhist Sects", about a century ago.
All the people who take ordainment, then "cast off their robes" of ordainment, are doing the "bulimia" thing, and it isn't the wisest way.
They also are demonstrating the non-wisdom of taking a path at the wrong steepness-vector for one's unconscious mind, or one's character/nature.
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Gently relentless improving...
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ALWAYS keeping right-overall-direction orientation...
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Pragmatically using what works for you...
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Combined Arms: using ALL that works, stacked into the most effective leverage you can maintain...
Combine these into your means of earning your Realization.
It is rightfully-yours, right?
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Thank you so much for writing this! I read it all. I definitely do the combined arms thing, but need to devise more paths which lead back to it and more ways to smooth out the experience... I am a big believer in habit sculpting.
There is a book "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art" or something like that...
do that book, ok?
It is awesome Combined Arms leverage.
Find YOUR right kind of fitness,
find YOUR right kind of yoga,
find YOUR most-healing-friends ( as Elisabeth Haich pointed-out, in her profound book "Initiation", breaking anti-helpful "friendship" is one of the toughest lessons in human life )
Please read Elisabeth Haich's profoundest book in all of Psychology which, unfortunately, due to our materialist culture, is named "The Wisdom of the Tarot", and it is on the archetype-stages of human life.
I've found that the "Lightning-Struck Tower" life-state is always followed by the crab-dwelling-in-the-lake/digesting-memories/the-"wolf"(fears)-and-"dog"(attachments)-baying-at-one-to-get-one-OFF-one's-path archetype-state, e.g.
Her decrypting of the decision card/archetype-state is briliant...
She points-out that in the correct image, the Conscious Way is depicted as just touching one, and not pulling one, whereas the Unconscious Way is pulling one...
and that the clothes & posture both depict that the one trying to get deep-enough to earn the Decision is balancing themself as completely as they can...
https://www.tarot.com/tarot/decks/wirth
shows the archetype-illustrations she is using, in her book: the ebook version of that one doesn't have the archetype-illustrations in it, so you need these images from that website.
The "Oswald Wirth" tarot deck has apparently been changed, to prevent people from seeing the proper archetype-illustrations: the new replacement images are dumbed-down & aweful.
However, the physical version of that book of hers, does have the illustrations, if you want to have 'em on you, without being dependent on the website not deleting 'em...
Elisabeth Haich's books I consider the sanest "bible" in the world, for nearly-everybody.
There was 1 statement in "Initiation" which galled me, but years-later, I discovered that it was true, in spite of my prejudice: when Ptahotep told her original-human-life that the Earth's core is gas dominated .. and I "knew" that to be rotted bunk...
Turns out, however, that approximately 10% of the Earth's core is metallic-hydrogen.
The seismic-refractive-index doesn't work properly, otherwise.
Do you undersand just how light Hydrogen atoms are, compared with the nickel & iron that about 90% of the mass of that core is?
It means a stupendous amount of hydrogen is in there.
Which, of course, I'd contempted, due to presumption/prejudice.
lol
In short, there is NOTHING I've been able to directly-falsify, in any statement of Haich's, and I've tried.
One possible exception is her traditional description of the central & side channels, which Kelsang Gyatso describes differently.
Someday I'll be able to test that, but not this year.
Maybe not this life, actually.
What other leverage can I hand ya, hmm....
Halvorson's "The 8 Motivational Challenges"
Ah! Kegan & Lahey's "Immunity to Change", INVEST in reading that book: your library may have it, right?
It may not be what you need now, in your life, but unless you've already tried reading it, you cannot understand how important it is to be working-through that one, when one is ready!
John Truby's "The Anatomy of Genres", for tons of psychological leverage...
Enough.
Better to slightly clobber somebody with help, than to crush their life like grapes, under an avalanche of help, right?
( imagine Monty Python... : )
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, Hoomin!
Do well!
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