hey, let’s party

If you're new here, thanks for visiting! Please subscribe to my RSS feed and consider visiting my design-related blog and my personal blog.

this lousy world

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.

would you sleep with your guru?

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

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!

the art of meditation

as taught briefly by alan watts

aggression

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.

engaging in earnest

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.

philosophy is dangerous

bbc four published a documentary about mathematicians and philosophers who went mad, with the implication that exploring the nature of reality can lead one to madness. maths are dangerous!

it’s a question for me really how much madhyamaka, and the philosophic tradition of medieval India, really ponders ontological truth. but to the degree that people might use it as such, i can see how such questions might undermine one’s ground to such a degree or embraces nihilism to such a degree that it leads to madness.

the point of the Buddhist studies I think was less to find an underlying basis, such as with physics, but more to undermine the clinging to one’s constructed self-image. perhaps that alone is enough to risk mental illness? so much of our culture takes as a foregone conclusion that one’s self-image is of critical importance. undermining that assumption might be alienating alone.

i suspect the Buddhist question is not really asking if one’s self-image is valid or invalid, but rather asking if we cling to its validity as a kind of security; which is not a great security upon analysis. but the contemplative tradition of madhyamaka seems quite nihilistic and destructive, tearing down our assumptions about self-image as solid and trustworthy. i think they do that to undermine the clinging, not it’s total usefulness. perhaps it is important not to go too far with that, since the point is to see self-image as a tool of communication worth keeping - just not ontological and worth clinging to for safety. if one were to go too far with that, then surely nihilism and madness would result.

meditation as medicine

from the vajra regent osel tendzin:

“The practice of mindfulness is in no way medicinal. If we approach mindfulness with the view of either trying to cure or prevent disease, we will subtly pervert the practice. What is needed is to recognize our basic state of being as intrinsically pure. Generally speaking, we have a sense of separation: me and my body, me and my world, me and my environment, me and my problem, me and my disease. We feel that something foreign, something alien is happening to us. If there is something alien it follows that we need to get rid of it and get back to being pure. This is a universal concept of disease: whether we look at disease as a physical, religious, political, or scientific phenomenon, it is always pervaded by that need.”

i don’t know, it seems a subtle point whether we view the things we don’t like about our life, about ourselves, and then the approach to work with those not as a cure or medicinal. i see the point: better to identify with the aspect of ourselves that is open, flexible, receptive, and capable and then separate from that the habits that are less helpful. otherwise, thinking of ourselves as fundamentally broken — as fallen from grace — and needing prophylaxis is both less accurate and less effective. but is there really that much of a difference in that viewpoint? seems more subtle to me.

khenpo gawang in a lecture i attended once suggested that the buddhist schools in the middle period held more a view that one’s open mind was a mere kernel that had to be cultivated and nurtured to grow, and then the later view held by vajrayana schools was that the open, flexible mind was fully formed in each of us and merely obscured by bad habits and the approach was more to sweep away the strong hold of the habits. if that’s true, then this shift in view about medicine and cure might be a later innovation in buddhist approach. if that’s true, then it’s a refinement in method more so than fundamentally necessary.

avoid growing angry and bitter

white supremacist james von brunn walked into the holocaust museum and started shooting people, according to news reports.

how does someone get to that place? how do they become so angry and violent? i’ve heard many say that a gift of old age is that one does not have to care what others think anymore. i don’t think they were going as far as shooting people in that viewpoint.

i’m assuming few start off that way. are five year old children ever so angry and violent? maybe there is some genetic basis or mental illness that comes to play, and some people hide it better than others or are more passable or functional. but really to grow older and become as angry and fixed in our views in our final years as von brunn, that has to be cultivated which raises the question, how do we avoid ourselves evolving toward an extreme state of being as we age?

i guess this extreme example could be dementia. if our brain starts to dissolve, then anything is possible and i only hope that someone realizes if i start to go crazy as i get old, and puts me somewhere safe. may i be so lucky if i lose it completely.

but it sounds like in von brunn’s case that he just reinforced his anger and viewpoints over and over and over again until he was completely out of touch with an ethical viewpoint. so in the same way, do we as a society have a responsibility to catch extreme views early – in the same way that we would protect a dementia patient from hurting self and others – or is that against our sense of freedom?

i suspect meditation is an excellent approach to avoid getting more angry and disgruntled as one gets older, and to see one’s solidified viewpoints. but that only helps oneself not society in general, unless we make it more acceptable and hip to do… going to yoga is hip. going to the gym is recommended. i think going to a meditation class after work is just as useful, but it is certainly not hip.