Ode To The Militant Wing

[daka]

You pay me a noble compliment

It was intended as neither a compliment, nor an insult.
It was simply a comment
On what I tried to present as a
Subjective observation
Which came from
A place of compassion

do you see a clear and happy world?

Depends on the day, and the moment, Adam.

I have noticed that I enjoy some dreary, drizzly days.
I hate others.
What is different?
My mind.

A man in the morning
breaks his fast
with a goddess
by day's end
he has plunged a knife
deep into the heart
of a demoness.
What is different?
His mind.

Alice Miller was essential!
Ernesto Spinelli was also essential!

He wrote "The Interpreted World"

Spinelli shows how much responsibility we need to take for our appearing reality. He is not a Buddhist, as far as I know. He is another Psychologist who is teaching about Phenomenological Psychology.

AGT

Sean

PS You said nothing about my gift

I read Fromm too, he was OK

"Man's Search For Meaning" by Viktor Frankl impacted me more. He was a Jewish Psychiatrist who survived (emotionally) Auschwitz (I think) and who commented well on the different responses of different people to that oven of cruelty. He looks at those who fragmented and those who maintained their thread of humanity, examining what the differences were in those two groups, in his humble opinion. He wasn't a Buddhist either to my knowledge.

"The City Of Joy" blew me away. I read it when I was feeling really sorry for myself (only a few years ago), when I was building my too-luxurious cave and things were getting me down. It was written by a very wealthy American Jewish fellow who went off and lived in deep poverty in the slums of Calcutta for quite a while. He wasn't a Buddhist either. His book shows too that even in the most horrid of circumstances, the most unfortunate of the most unfortunate can find joy (a crack).

I am off to see a sad and angry friend/neighbor
who invited me for lunch

PPS You suggested that I was rude?

rude

If I was rude in one of my previous postings, please accept my apology. If you could point it out to me I would appreciate this as perhaps I can try to avoid being rude again in that particular way.

[Manna]

Hi Adam.
Do you think there's anything nice in the world? Anything beautiful?

[Sideways]

As I reflected, I realized that your world seems to me to be cloudy, foggy, rainy, dismal,

You pay me a noble compliment. You see I believe I am in tune with this fucked up world. It is foggy and rainy, dismal with its weapons, its wars, its weaknesses. I swim in the filth of money – that which supplies all of us rich people power and privilege over the poor and the hungry, Sean, while we consider psychology and Buddhism. This wonderful world full of greenhouse gas and noxious minds leading us all astray. Yes, I am cloudy. But I am not false like many. I see with clarity the feeble attempts of men to garner attention or importance because they can't find it in themselves. I see grown men throwing themselves into alcohol and drugs because their fathers never hugged them. And I see the ‘happy’ secretly cursing their wives and God for this unquenchable misery that lurks each morning when they get on the train. I see the dirt, mate. And often it is transparent as the water in my cup. I like my dismal position – I need not pretend that I’m not fucked up. Tell me holy monk, do you see a clear and happy world? Dare I intimate but is your world so ‘together’? Can a jobless, broken wretch like me dare intrude on your pretentious existence? Your rude pretentious existence. I think I can.

typical happy-clappy Christian attitude,

Sue

[Steven]

Hi Boss,

If anyone reads this thread and is encouraged to make things better, it would
be a good thing . You didn't rile me, healing does happen all the time. Someone
cuts a finger, and it usually heals just right. When it comes to emotionally charged
stuff, people respond individually, some, when dealing with the same content,
handle it just fine. Others can cycle down. And there is no way to know, how
someone will handle the heavy stuff that can arise. That's one reason that I said this
isn't self-remedy stuff. People don't know what pitfalls can lie in front of them and
a qualified professional can guide them around them.

[Boss]

Sean, Manna and Steven, this is for you:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=L4eOIS9DFm4

And Sue you get this:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9JTmoJXcpyA

Goodbye to you all

[Minna]

.

[Manna]

My daughter illustrates a way to handle anger:

Last night with dinner, we were having some toast. There were a few different kinds, one of which had some cheese on it. Reyna, my 5-yr-old daughter, wanted all of the pieces of toast that had the cheese on it. But Daddy & I also wanted some that had cheese. We made it known to her that we should all share it.

She stomped off to her room (we didn't tell her to go to her room, she just went), yelling, "Fine! Then I won't have any dinner ever again!" At the end of her sentence, her voice broke into a cry. She stomped around in her room for a while. She spent about three minutes there, then came back to the table, happy and cheerful and ready to share.

~.~

It's kind of like fear. The same physiological things happen - heart rate increases, metabolism increases, you might yell. When a tiger is chasing you, you can hardly help but have some fear. And when you're safe from the tiger, there is relief from the fear. You may carry around a memory, and you may even say, "I am afraid of tigers." But you don't continue to hang on to it so much that your heart rate and your metabolism remain elevated. You can let it go, or you can hang on to it - it is a choice.

[Minna]

.

[daka]

Hello Manna and Minna ....(sisters?)

I know what Manna means, and Manna lives up to her name (most days.... she did drink too much Bourbon one night a while back !). What does Minna mean?

There are children
men and women
and holy beings

They all handle anger differently.

I remember listening to Leonard recently talking about his response to the discovery that he had been fleeced by 'what's-her-name'... Lynch. He said that he was mostly astonished by the extent of the fleecing, the thoroughness. He certainly didn't sound at all angry and he didn't describe an angry response to this news. I suspect, although I don't know for sure, that Leonard never got angry. I have a really hard time imagining Leonard angry about anything.

Many people who I know well and have known for years, and lived with, and watched very closely in intense situations, never get angry (I do not place myself in this group). Are they repressed, neurotic control freaks? I think not.

I think that our civilization has a number of problems with anger. In my opinion and the opinion of a significant number of people, though not the majority, it is a toxic mind, a delusion, that only causes suffering to the person who experiences it and others. So it is a problem because it has negative effects and no benefits. Our big problem as a civilization is that we seem to value anger greatly, we sell it, we watch it, we vicariously indulge and cultivate it watching sports events, and watching world events. Consider the Hollywood tendency to sell anger in movies; all the violent aggressive, self-righteous justice-meting bullshit that the children (and the adults) are exposed to. Rambo, Clint, Arnold et al. Look at the addiction that is developing to angry aggressive computer games, punching, kicking, punishing, killing. The horrible message here is that anger is OK and justifiable, and manly, and human, and appropriate, and that it cannot be avoided. All this nonsense in our culture is OUR responsibility (NOT 'THEIRS') it is simply a collective manifestation from the ordinary minds of the ordinary average people. 'They' don't do anything to us; we are doing it to ourselves. We value anger; we grasp on to the idea that the occasional justifiable self-righteous anger is necessary and healthy, and this mistaken exception leaves the door open for the pervasive anger in our civilization, because everybody can justify their position through rationalization and selfishness.

Some people say that anger is 'natural', 'normal' 'human' and they are right. BUT being natural, normal and human is not OK! I think most people realize that we sometimes set our sights a lot higher. We place certain evolved or enlightened people on a pedestal and occasionally emulate them, and value their qualities. Martin Luther King, Jesus, Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul, etc. etc. If we come into this world normal, natural and human and don't overcome some of that normalness, naturalness, humanness, we have accomplished the same thing that any animal can accomplish; survival, food, shelter, sex, offspring.

Enough on Anger
I think I should go back to Emptiness for a while

AGT

Sean

[Minna]

.

[Manna]

And no, we are not sisters.

oh, stop it. We are too.

[Minna]

.

[daka]

No Minna, you understood me correctly the first time, I was asking the meaning of your name!

Thanks. It is a lovely name. It's too bad that all that is floating to the surface these days in the Middle East is the righteous rage.

Sean

[Minna]

.

[Diane]

This thread has expanded quite a bit since I was last here! Please parenthesise this post and mentally stick it back up where it belongs.

Hi Sean,

...I have never made anyone so happy in my life as my dad on this day. This was a 'liberation' for him.

Wow !

This is only a 'technicality' but a very important one, in my view. One is not able to experience the anger that one experienced in the past; it is remembered; the actual term that applies, I believe is that it is a 're-cognizer' or put more simply, a memory. of the anger.

Well, I can't know anyone else's experience, only my own. I experienced anger, and a lot more sorrow, for the first time, about some things, during the course of my therapy. I wouldn't really conceptualise it as replaying a memory, more as releasing blocked/repressed emotional energy. But then getting tied up in semantics doesn't seem to be that worthwhile; what was important was that what was 'stuck' was 'released'.

Now that memory can ignite new anger and this, I think, is what Alice Miller was getting at. Of course it is good to remember the past, including the anger, and it is not good to hide or suppress it. What she and I take issue with is the generation of new anger in response to those memories. This is what she regrets encouraging in her first edition of the book, the cultivation of new anger as an appropriate response to abuse.

I agree that this can be a problem. There's no point staying angry and blaming forever. People who behave badly have suffered a great deal themselves, in their turn. It's good to let it go, but really it only becomes easy to do that once you have worked through the grief.

--------------

How can we be angry when we are music? Here is a nice little video, dedicated to everyone in this thread, and everyone not in this thread:

http://www.neticons.net/music_life/