Many spiritual disciplines teach you first how to focus yourself. Total concentration, total awareness, totally in the moment. Unless your are a 100% present - how can you work on 100% transcending yourself?
Unless you arrive in the here and now - you can’t enjoy and live in the here and now.
One of the greatest traps of meditation is to train your mind into thinking it is trained, while it simply stays the same, but tells you it is now well trained.
That is one reason why one should have a guru, trainer or master following your minds "progress" and check the condition it is in.
The modern Homo Officium needs some real thrills when he goes on vacation. Corporate life is boring and only real danger can make him feel alive.
That is why such places, bungee jumping and wild water rides are tourist attractions. Danger is the new drug for the mediocre masses to get out of their emotional caves and feel in touch with (a dangerous) reality …
*Thanks to Edosan for the image*
In the foreseeable future we will raise life expectancy further and further. It is now easy to replace many body parts and rejuvenate the body in many ways.
So maybe we can rebuild and regenerate our bodies for hundreds of years - but what about our minds?
Most people’s minds already go down the drain in their 40’s without physical “defects”. And when we live longer we need to constantly learn new stuff - you can’t play dumb grandpa if you live 200 or more years. You need to learn and adapt.
And what about the emotional strain of a long life? How much pain, idiocy and trivia can you take before you loose your will to live?
At the moment the VERY painful video of Eduardo da Silva’s accident is all the rage on YouTube - and is a big hit with the kids. One has really to wonder why watching such a painful video is all the rage?
Scientists have long proven that we empathize and re-live such experiences simply by watching other humans doing (stupid) stuff. So I can only extend this idea in this way: we watch pain porn to train ourselves for such moments and try to cope with it’s consequences - even when it isn’t happening to us.
YouTube is full of fight videos that concentrate only on knock outs and bloody scenes, you can also find tons of accident and crash videos that show only the nasty bits.
Do we simply need some blood and nasty stuff from time to time? By watching terrible stuff happen to other does that help us to enjoy our less painful life?
Emotions are often symbolized by water and we have many expressions that represent this analogy as well “drowning in sorrow”.
Especially when our psyche is flooded with too many emotions we should pull the plug - and drain the swamp. Don’t let the flood wash you away or put too much pressure on yourself.
Once the water sinks you can really see what’s buried beneath all the water, mud and murky currents. With less pressure your psyche can work better and find a solution. A little bit of pressure / stress can be stimulating - but an emotional storm or flood isn’t helpful at all.
But do you know where to pull the plug? Do you know how to let go off overwhelming emotions?
So maybe fight water with water - take a relaxing bath or go swimming. Or fight back with tears - crying is one of the best ways to release emotional stress. A few hours in a sauna or steam bath also works wonders.
But most of all use your mind and make an effort to let go - use mental images to see the flow of life and your emotions. Let them flow down your inner drain and regain control of that island called ‘You’ …
We are often prisoners of our own minds. Limited vision and limited imagination keep us from achieving often simple things. The simple thought “I can’t do that!” can stop you before you even tried.
Our minds can ‘think’ about reality and possibilities. To a certain extend we can envision the future and personal limits - but not everything our ‘common sense’ tells us is ‘real’ and the true limit of our abilities.
So free yourself and experiment with your limits. You can surprise yourself, you can grow and learn new stuff. Only false limits can really stop you more than anything!
Many great scientists and artists started their dreams and passions as kids - being inspired or challenged by their environments, families, teachers and toys.
Today’s digital gimmicks are killers - they kill the imagination of kids, because they create PERFECT fantasy worlds. Our minds needs a vacuum too fill it with our own ideas. If we get overwhelmed with ’stuff’ we stay lazy and just consume …
They say: The Mind is a Monkey - when it comes to meditation. Sure! It loves to play, shout, make noise and jump around. But you can tame your inner monkey - as you can see.
There are such things as reactions time, habits and a learning curve. Our minds are (sometimes) great to react quickly to something physical - but in social, political, personal, emotional or technical situations we are rather slow.
It takes for our psyche or so called egos VERY long to understand new situations, figure out new people in our life’s or even our own selfish desires.
Then we are blinded by our life’s - looking daft or simply continue to behave like nothing has changed. But we are often ‘behind’ our own situation - slowly adopting to change …
Don’t be startled. Don’t be ignorant. Don’t be a creature of habits.
Change is natural. Surprises are normal. Go deal with them. Go and experiment. It’s fun!
If you can believe in enlightened pink elephants - you can believe in anything. Spirituality starts in your mind - if you mind can cope with incredible thoughts it can’t cope with incredible truths either.
Open your mind, expand your mind, cultivate your ability to think and imagine new possibilities … maybe then you get enlightened or trampled by an elephant on the way …
With the Web and eMail revolution our life’s got suddenly flooded with bizarre, cute or funny pictures. Then we added broadband DSL a few years later and we got even more picture and additionally videos.
Weird and bizarre stuff was before that time pushed into the funny section of your newspaper or made it sometimes on the TV news when nothing else was important.
Today we seem flooded and addicted to the bizarre and weird moments on this planet. The more bizarre the better. YouTube and many image galleries are monuments to the stupidity and addiction of humanity to weird stuff.
I think we like to watch extreme stuff other do (to themselves) to reassure ourselves what is normal and that we ourselves are normal. Each bizarre image or video is a marker on the scale of human madness - and we constantly check where we stand on that range of weirdness.
So it all basically boils down to checking your own social conformity and some amusement. Would you do that? Did you laugh about that? No? Yes? Check your own weirdo factor …