Myself and my Teacher are heading North this weekend to train with some his other students. In the coming hours until I leave, I've been instructed to contemplate what I have been learning. Turning over ideas in my mind, I figured I would share with you all, hoping to raise a few eyebrows or prompt a few nodding smiles.
The Troubled Mind
The first step to overcoming anxiety is to develope a proper perspective of our situation. Do not attribute a sole cause to a diverse range of effects.
Remembering the needs of others before our own, no matter how pressing our matters may be, gives way to an automatic rise in confidence. Worry and anxiety begin to diminish. Hopelessness, lonliness, and sadness lessen the moment we shift our focus to activities that benefit others before ourselves.
Positive action must be motivated by a genuine concern.
Recollection of good fortune can help lift a sense of powerlessness.
Religious belief absent of delusion is a source of comfort through truly hopeless times.
Transforming the Mind
Excess always undermines effort toward virtue, be it toward positive or negative intent. The principle purpose of virture is to offset the tendancy toward drastic mental and emotional reactions to that which causes us unavoidable suffering. Transforming the mind and heart to be condusive to spontaneously ethical acts of love and compassion is critical. Alternately, transforming the mind to become spontaneously ethical requires that we put love and compassion at heart of daily living.
Love, compassion, patience, humility, generosity and so on, are all complementary to eachother.
--> Cultivating generosity counteracts the tendancy to guard our posessions too closely.
--> Cultivating patience helpt counteract a clouded mind (anger clouds the mind).
--> Cultivating compassion helps counteract the tendancy to grasp at the ego.
--> Cultivating love helps counteract feelings of powerlessness and despair.
Wise Placement of Energy
To put our energy into generosity, patience, and humility is to cultivate compassion and love, which give rise to altruism, and finally peace of mind. To put our energy into pride and anger is to cultivate ignorance and intolerance, nurturing a sense of paranoia, and offering strength to the ego. So long as there is the ego, there will always be a gap between what we are and what we believe we are. The ego can only bring us suffering.
That which helps others helps ourselves. That which hurts others hurts ourselves.
The Joyful Path
The joyful path is the path between all opposite extremes.
Reflections on Patience
Patience with resolution and deliberation provides us with the strength to resist suffering and maintain compassion. Those who suffer the least are those who attain a high degree of resolute patience.
Cowardice arises when confidence is lost as a result of fear. Adversity should not be viewed as a threat to our peace of mind, rather as the very means by which the ethic of virtue is attained. Those who would harm us are teachers of patience, in one sense. They, and us all, offer opportunities to practice disciplined behaviour.
In harming others, ultimately we lose our peace of mind, thereby our own happiness. When harmed by others, we do best if we have compassion for them, especially since a simple wish to see them harmed can only harm ourselves.
When harmed by others, those who harm us also harm themselves. By wishing or acting to see the aggressor harmed, suffering is only amplified for both parties.
It is inconsistent to become angered with someone who shouts or verbally abuses us, as they would not be doing so if they held inner peace. If we react with anger toward the individual, we ignore their afflictive emotion and impose a moral supreriority on them.
Nuturing malice, it will not be long before the one who broods begins to suffer.
Even if it were true that it is an evil first nature of the one who is abusing us which is the cause of our pain, there is still no reasonable grounds for anger. If fire burns us, it is not rational to become angry with fire. It is the first nature of fire to burn.
The notion of inherent evil or hostility is erroneous. Under different circumstances, our adversary could be our very good friend.
Discipline
Ethical discipline is confirmed by restraint, and positive affirmation.
--------------------
 Dark Triangles - New Psychedelic Techno Single - Listen on Soundcloud
Gyroscope full album available SoundCloud or MySpace
|
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
Golden Teacher Liquid Culture For Sale 
Certified Organic All-In-One Grow Bags, Contam-Resistant All-In-One Grow Bags 
Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order
Ped 
adrug 
Edit 
Reply 
1 2 all )
Lion
CerebralFlower
eve69
Simulacra541
HagbardCeline
Moonshoe
Ped
Luke