sitting monkey is place where
david evans
writes about meditation, buddhism, and related topics.
my next blog post should be live on onecity later today, about a recent study released showing greatly increased media usage by kids under-18 in America.
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my plan for 2010 is to visualize that i’m dying, and that i have only one year left to live. this is a contemplative exercise, and an opportunity for me to work with fear more directly.
i may journal on this blog from time to time about it.
i’m not really dying. don’t worry. this is just an exercise, which i described first here:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/onecity/2010/01/a-year-to-live.html
i’ll take care of myself in this process, and only engage with it insofar as it feels like a spiritual practice and growth process. if you’d like to be involved in this with me though please let me know. i’m inviting you to involve yourself if you’d like; if you think it would be valuable to you too. we could make it a group practice and compare notes, or i can just tell you more about how it unfolds.
i’m still writing semi-regularly for one city. i posted something for new years here:
and some earlier posts:
Every Buddhist household needs one
Enlightenment without retreat?
Letterman. Mitterand. What about your guru?
from an Omega Institute program. She’s referring to a well quoted Shantideva passage, to cover your feet in leather instead of covering the whole world in leather. She has such a charming way of saying things.
i just posted a short note about sex and dharma on the Interdependence Project and BeliefNet’s OneCity blog.
yes, this means i’m contributing to rupert murdoch’s empire…
Iaido is the way of drawing the sword, in the Japanese contemplative warrior tradition.
The Asian Art Museum just posted a youtube video explaining and demonstrating the art form. Really beautiful short description.
UPDATED: with corrected Romaji. Thanks!
From: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 21 August 2009
Misperceptions about the Acceptability and Attractiveness of Aggression
by Joseph Vandello, Sean Ransom, Vanessa Hettinger, and Kevin Askew University of South Florida and Tulane University Medical Center
Abstract:
Norms about aggression may be perpetuated in part by the belief that aggression is more expected or socially desirable than it really is. This paper explores the accuracy of people’s beliefs about the acceptability of aggression by examining men’s perceptions of descriptive (what their peers do) and injunctive norms (what their peers approve of or desire). Study 1 found that men (but not women) overestimated the aggressiveness of their peers. Study 2 demonstrated that men (but not women) overestimated peer approval of aggression and disapproval when an affront was not responded to aggressively. Study 3 found that men overestimate how attractive aggression is to women. Study 4 found that greater perceived discrepancies in aggression between self and peers was related to lower self-esteem, a weaker gender identification, and greater feelings of social marginalization, suggesting that men’s misperceptions about aggression norms have negative consequences for self-perceptions.
this sequence from the film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring has been on my mind recently.
if you haven’t seen the film, i recommend it highly. but perhaps don’t watch this clip because it’s from the end.
up until this point, our character has lived a life of ignorance, passion, and aggression in various life stages. and here, the futility of those things is finally clear and he begins a path with clear devotion. perhaps this is similar to our journey, we dabble in some kind of spiritual practice in the midst of our many worldly concerns. shifting our allegiance for what brings happiness is a process. we may even hedge our bets with meditation but secretly still hope that arranging our life just so will pay off. at a certain point, if we’re fortunate so they’re saying, we realize there is serious work to do. we have to engage in a practice in earnest.