Ok - well at least I made it 2 days in a row ;-)
Chapter 2: Paradoxes in Meditation
WAIT... don't stop reading yet...
You know how they say that "the people that most need to read self-help books, are the ones who don't?"
Well in this chapter Robert Wright shares, "the problems that meditation can help you overcome often make it hard to meditate in the first place."
And, I think that is true... It is what makes life occasionally so frustrating... the things we sometimes most know we need are the hardest ones to embrace. That is actually our self-awareness battling our natural inclinations and behavior...
but, what I love about this chapter is that it opens up BIG QUESTIONS... and, it touches on the idea of being present... not "avoiding" but rather "experiencing" the moments.
"one thing I occasionally do when I'm feeling sad - and this is something you can experiment with even if you've never meditated - is sit down, close my eyes, and study the sadness: Accept its presence and just observe how it actually makes me feel. For example, it's kind of interesting that though I may not be close to actually crying, the feeling of sadness does have a strong presence right around the parts of my eyes that would get active if I did start crying. This careful observation of sadness, combined with a kind of acceptance of it, in my experience, does make it less unpleasant."
And, that is huge... making emotions and feelings "less unpleasant", or less scary or less uncomfortable, is what allows us to stay in those emotions and feelings - observe them, understand them and ultimately accept them or embrace them. They are not necessarily emotions we seek out or choose (though they may be)... but it's when we become rational about our emotions that I think we enter a whole new level of logic and rationality... and we become able, on a different level to transcend relationships.
To what level, it is asked, are these emotions an "illusion"?
This thinking applies "in principle, to all negative feelings; fears, anxieties, loathing, self-loathing, and more. Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point."
The chapter pushes on the concept of exploring the "scientific foundation" of Buddhism...
"I mean "scientific foundation" in the sense of using all of the tools of modern psychology to look at such questions as these:
Why, and in what particular ways, are human beings naturally deluded?
How exactly does the delusion work?
How does delusion make us suffer?
How does it make us us make other people suffer?"
What would it be like to see the world with perfect clarity?"
I LOVE that last question... it is why I called my site "ABSOLUTETRUTH"... Possibly the most powerful concept of harmony... the reason why it requires practice and skill is BECAUSE it requires and attempts to get better and better at seeing the TRUTH, the IS of our moments with greater and greater CLARITY and objectiveness.
I love the thoughts that end the chapter...
"it would be nice to know if the struggle for enduring peace is also the struggle for truth...
It would also be nice to think that when people pursue the path to liberation - use mediation (added by me: or the discipline of HARMONY ;-)" to try and see the world more clearly, and in the process reduce their suffering - they are helping humanity broadly, that the quest for individual salvation advances the quest for social salvation."
...
Harmony BEGETS harmony...
in it,
Nestor