Meditation - I Would Like People's Feedback

[cgh4444]

Some real garbage in this thread. “Satanic”? “Serotonin inducing”? Wtf are some of you on?

 

[cgh4444]

Tension causes meditation to be way more difficult than it needs to be. Releasing ingrained lifetime of muscle/tissue tension will not happpen in meditation but should be a pre requisite for entering deep states of mind. The conditioning of a sick twisted culture runs deep. The Body needs to be fully relaxed for it to work as intended.

people having bad effects from meditation likely have tons of surface and deeper “tensions” that meditation makes you more aware of but unable to do anything about. It isn’t the tool of meditation that’s the issue at all, but most especially in this culture would be better off by combining it with serious bodywork , otherwise it’s mostlly mental madturbation aka “corporate mindfulness”

 

[Ben.]

Some real garbage in this thread. “Satanic”? “Serotonin inducing”? Wtf are some of you on?

Yeah that satanic one confused me to. Serotonin being the scapegoat is not unusual here tho.

Tension causes meditation to be way more difficult than it needs to be. Releasing ingrained lifetime of muscle/tissue tension will not happpen in meditation but should be a pre requisite for entering deep states of mind. The conditioning of a sick twisted culture runs deep. The Body needs to be fully relaxed for it to work as intended.

people having bad effects from meditation likely have tons of surface and deeper “tensions” that meditation makes you more aware of but unable to do anything about. It isn’t the tool of meditation that’s the issue at all, but most especially in this culture would be better off by combining it with serious bodywork , otherwise it’s mostlly mental madturbation aka “corporate mindfulness”

I agree, bodywork should be done too. I often felt it is like interconnected. Like when doing stretches or breaking tensions up like triggerpoint work ... meditating, breathing towards it or feeling towards it, changing the ... mental response towards the "stretch/stressor" suddenly allows to break the tension alot easier.

I guess the way you mean it it could work too.
Come to think of it i can change my state of mind (certain states atleast) quite easily since ive done both... ?

 

[Androsclerosis]

Basicly doing nothing staring into space, watching the grass grow, birds sing, going into observation mode and the only thoughts are thoose of commenting what is observed in that moment and letting myself just "float" calmed me way down in times of stress almost instantly, inducing calmness and happiness. I realy should do it more often ...

This is basically how a child lives. Combined with the feeling of being able to let go of control/responsibilities.
It's hard to get into a state of "carelessness" and almost fully present, but once you got it, it's amazing, you get dopamine spikes just my watching people on the street, even more with children. When I don't have anything serious to do I tell myself that nothing serious/important I have to think of. I visualize my thoughts but I don't pay attention to them, this puts me into the state of "out of control" and flow.
This helped me become more present and interested in conversations and everyday activities.

 

[yerrag]

I think if you are very busy in the frantic and fast paced way, quietness and solitude can relieve you of stress. If you do something that is repetitive and you don't have to think because of that, your mind is relaxed. Just like with an image of inscribing on sand in Zen with a stick or in creating a Mandala. It is a lot easier than doing nothing and trying to empty your mind of thoughts.

I find that the routine of tending to my koi pond is like that. Or if you're a dairy farmer in a traditional way, your having to milk the cow daily.

My other nature though would see that as a waste of time. Or like being shackled to a prison. Thinking I am allowed to be free to travel elsewhere and be.

But I would also see that as a part of being grounded, and in that being one with the soil that I eventually return to. I have an identity that is so important to me. As the elephant who seeks to die in the place it was born in.

I had tried contemplation in the monastic sense for years. It was after I stopped though that I began to develop what I feel to be a much deeper consciousness and awareness.

I am not sure if that set the stage or it kept me from it. But I think being just busy with a purpose instead of busy like hens being chased keeps me from destructive stress.

 

[Whataboutbob]

“the Courage to be”......Paul Tillich 1952 he was forced out of University of Berlin Germany by the Nazi 1930s.
Was a must read in the 50s at universities & colleges...

VITALITY AND COURAGE

Anxiety and courage have a psychosomatic character.
They are biological as well as psychological. From the biological point of view one would say that fear and anxiety are the guardians, indicating the threat of nonbeing to a living being and producing movements of protection and resistance to this threat.
Fear and anxiety must be considered as expressions of what one could call: "self- affirmation on its guard." Without the anticipating fear and the compelling anxiety no finite being would be able to exist.
COURAGE in this view, is the readiness to take upon oneself negatives, anticipated by fear, for the sake of a fuller positivity. Biological self-affirmation implies the acceptance of want, toil, insecurity, pain, possible destruction. Without this self-affirmation life could not be preserved or increased. The more vital strength a being has the more it is able to affirm itself in spite of the dangers announced by fear and anxiety.
However, it would contradict their biological function if courage disregarded their warnings and prompted actions of a directly self destructive character.
This is the truth in Aristotle's [doctrine of courage] as the right mean between cowardice and temerity. Biological self-affirmation needs a balance between courage and fear. Such a balance is present in all living beings which are able to preserve and increase their being. If the warnings of fear no longer have an effect or if the dynamics of courage have lost their power, life vanishes. [The drive for security, perfection, and certitude to which we have referred is biologically necessary].

But it becomes biologically destructive if the risk of insecurity, imperfection, and uncertainty is avoided. Conversely, a risk which has a realistic foundation in our self and our world is biologically demanded, while it is self-destructive without such a foundation.

Life, in consequence, includes both fear and courage as elements of a life process in a changing but essentially established balance. As long as life has such a balance it is able to resist nonbeing. Unbalanced fear and unbalanced courage destroy the life whose preservation and increase are the function of the balance of fear and courage.

A life process which shows this balance and with it power of being has, in biological terms, vitality, i.e. life power. The right courage therefore must, like the right fear, be understood as the expression of perfect vitality.
The courage to be is a function of vitality. Diminishing vitality consequently entails diminishing courage. To strengthen vitality means to strengthen the courage to be.
Neurotic individuals and neurotic periods are lacking in vitality. Their biological substance has disintegrated. They have lost the power of [full self-affirmation, of the courage to be. ]
Whether this happens or not is the result of biological processes, it is biological fate. The periods of a diminished courage to be are periods of biological weakness in the [individual and in history].

The three main periods of unbalanced anxiety are periods of reduced vitality; they are ends of an era and could be overcome only by the rise of [vitally powerful groups that replaced the vitally disintegrated groups.]
Up to this point we have given the biological argument without criticism. We now must examine the validity of its different steps. The first question to be asked refers to the difference between fear and anxiety as developed earlier. There can be no doubt that fear which is directed toward a definite object has the biological function of announcing threats of nonbeing and provoking measures of protection and resistance. But one must ask: Is the same true of anxiety? Our biological argument has used the term fear predominantly, the term anxiety only excep+tionally. This was done intentionally. For, biologically speaking, anxiety is more destructive than protective. While fear can lead to measures that deal with the objects of fear, anxiety cannot do so because it has no objects. The fact, already referred to, that life tries to transform anxiety into fear shows that anxiety is biologically useless and cannot be explained in terms of life protection. It produces self-defying forms of behavior. Anxiety there- fore by its very nature transcends the biological argument.

The second point to be made concerns the concept of vitality. The meaning of vitality has become an important problem since fascism and nazism transferred the theoretical emphasis on vitality into political systems which in the name of vitality attacked most of the values of the Western world. In Plato's Laches the relation of courage and vitality is discussed in terms of whether animals have courage. Much can be said for an affirmative answer: the balance between fear and courage is well developed in the animal realm. Animals are warned by fear, but under special conditions they disregard their fear and risk pain and annihilation for the sake of those who are a part of their own self-affirmation, e.g., their descendants or their flock. But in spite of these obvious facts Plato rejects animal courage. Naturally so, for if courage is the knowl- edge of what to avoid and what to dare, courage cannot be separated from man as a rational being.

Vitality, power of life, is correlated to the kind of life to which it gives power. The power of man's life cannot be seen separately from what the medieval philosophers called [intentionality], the relation to meanings.
Man's vitality is as great as his intentionality; they are interdependent.

This makes man the most vital of all beings. He can transcend any given situation in any direction and this possibility drives him to create beyond himself.

Vitality is the power of creating beyond oneself without losing oneself. The more power of creating beyond itself a being has the more vitality it has. The world of technical creations is the most conspicuous expression of man's vitality and its infinite superiority over animal vitality. Only man has complete vitality because he alone has complete intentionality.
We have defined intentionality as "being directed toward meaningful contents."
Man lives "in" meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, ethically, religiously.

His subjectivity is impregnated with objectivity. In every encounter with reality the [structures of self and world are interdependently present.] The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it.

The most vital being is the being which has [the word] and is by [the word] liberated from bondage to the given. In every encounter with reality man is already beyond this encounter. He knows about it, he compares it, he is tempted by other possibilities, he anticipates the future as he remembers the past. This is his freedom, and in this freedom the power of his life consists. It is the source of his vitality.
If the correlation between vitality and intentionality is rightly understood one can accept the biological interpretations tation of courage within the limits of its validity. Certainly courage is a function of vitality, but vitality is not some- thing which can be separated from the totality of man's being, his language, his creativity, his spiritual life, his ultimate concern. One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word "spirit" was lost and replaced by mind or intel- lect, and that the element of vitality which is present in “spirit" was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality. The middle ground be- tween them, the spiritual soul in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped. At the end of this development it was easy for a reductive naturalism to derive self-affirmation and courage from a merely biological vitality. But in man nothing is "merely biological"as nothing is "merely spiritual." Every cell of his body participates in his freedom and spirituality, and every act of his spiritual creativity is nourished by his vital dynamics.

This unity was presupposed in the Greek word arete. It can be translated by virtue, but only if the moralistic connotations of "virtue" are removed. The Greek term combines strength and value, the power of being and the fulfillment of meaning. The aretes is the bearer of high values, and the ultimate test of his arete is his readiness to sacrifice himself for them. His courage expresses his intentionality as much as his vitality. It is spiritually formed vitality which makes him aretes. Behind this terminology stands the judgment of the ancient world that courage is noble. The pattern of the courageous man is not the self-wasting barbarian whose vitality is not fully human but the educated Greek who knows the anxiety of nonbeing because he knows the value of being. It may be added that the Latin word virtus and its derivatives, the Renaissance-Italian virtu and the Renaissance-English "virtue," have a meaning similar to arete. They desig- nate the quality of those who unite masculine strength (virtus) with moral nobility. Vitality and intentionality are united in this ideal of human perfection, which is equally removed from barbarism and from moralism. In the light of these considerations one the biologistic argument that it falls short of what classical antiquity had called courage. Vitalism in the sense of a separation of the vital from the intentional necessarily reestablishes the barbarian as the ideal of courage. Although this is done in the interest of science it expresses usually againstthewillofitsnaturalisticdefenders aprehumanist attitude and can, if used by demagogues, produce the barbaric ideal of courage as it appeared in fascism and nazism. "Pure" vitality in man is never pure but always distorted, because man's power of life is his freedom and,the spirituality in which vitality and intentionality are united.

There is, however, a third point on which the biological interpretation of courage demands evaluation. It is the answer biologism gives to the question of where the courage to be originates. The biological argument answers: in the vital power which is a natural gift, a matter of biological fate. This is very similar to the ancient and medieval answers in which a combination of biological and historical fate, the aristocratic situation, was considered the condition favorable for the growth of courage. In both cases courage is a possibility dependent not on will power or insight but on a gift which precedes action. The tragic view of the early Greeks and the deterministic view of modern naturalism agree in this point: the power of "self- affirmation in spite of," i.e. the courage to be, is a matter of fate. This does not prohibit a moral valuation but it prohibits a moralistic valuation of courage: one cannot command the courage to be and one cannot gain it by obeying a command. Religiously speaking, it is a matter of grace. As often happens in the history of thought, naturalism has paved the way to a new understanding of grace, while idealism has prevented such understanding. From this point of view the biological argument is very important and must be taken seriously, especially by ethics, in spite of the distortions of the concept of vitality in biological as well as in political vitalism. The truth of the vitalistic interpretation of ethics is grace. Courage as grace is a result and a question.