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ExplosiveMango said:
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zenotter said: The term 'strengthen the mind" can mean so many, many things.
I studied martial arts and I did learn discipline and focus as well as alertness, mental quickness and agility, and mind-body connection. it was very good.
I also got a Master's Degree from a prestigous school. I learned even more discipline. I learned how to stay sharp and focused even when not having slept for days and under much stress. My memory improved to a great degree.
Later I took up regular mediation. I had to undo much of what I had previously learned. Meditation isn't about strengthening the mind, but about softening it; and that is not scemantics. Instead of building an iron will and learning to push through all adversity, while ignoring our pain adn feelings, in mediation we do just the opposite. We learn to be with our pain. We learn how to stop thinking not think more. We learn to flow with the energies of the universe rather than attempting to force them to obey our desires. We learn to resist nothing, and to accept all that is.
Meditation is a form of stength but it is strength in which rather than becoming so mentally strong that we are able to repell conflict, we instead connect with our vulnerability and become so fluid and transparant that conflict passes right through us without touching us. Rather than building a wall to seperate us from possible attack, we discover our oneness with everything and realize that attack is meaningless.
Of course there are different types of meditation, but generally they all take a person within themselves to connect with their own consciousness and to connect with the universe at some level.
I don't understand why you say meditation is not about strengthening the mind. I would say it grants the most powerful sort of internal strength.
I have only just begun meditating regularly, but I think it is possibly the hardest mental task I have confronted. I would say the amount of control you must excersize over yourself is even greater than the most strenuous of physical tasks, or the toughest of exams (about to finish my electrical engineering degree).
Until recently I have always gotten by with a very anti-meditative mind. Over active, and over stressed. However through my over exertion I have been extremely successful, called a genius by many (I disagree), and have an IQ just over 160. (I disagree with the idea of IQ as well, incidentally)
Even after living in the opposite end of the mental spectrum so long I have to say I think meditation requires the most strength.
Maybe just a different way of describing the same thing.
It is about allowing all that comes into ones awareness to just be and releasing the need to control our circumstances and our lives. It seeks the cessation of thoughts, or in the begining the allowing of thoughts with no attachment to those thoughts and giving no meaning to those thoughts. It is about ending judgement and accepting all that comes into our experience. It is about seeking inner harmony through the merging of body mind and spirit without forcing or controlling anything.
So, yes, it is extremely difficult. Maybe for me it doesn't feel like it is about strength at all, because much of what I do is the opposite of what I thought strengthening the mind was about. Maybe it depends on where you start mediation from, and what you bring to it when you start it, but for me it has always been about softening the rough edges and continually seeking comfort in a more gentle, vulnerable place in side. Most books on mediation will describe it as a softening of the mind as well.
But of course, great inner strength comes from this as a result.
-------------------- "An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." ~ Thomas Paine (1737-1809) American pamphleteer and Founding Father, 1775
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