flemmings | (no subject)

xsmoonshine has gifted me with an lj snail. It is indeed a cute snail. Thank you, qwerty!

Have been reading books on meditation by Thich Nhat Hanh. Randomly flipping through the one on guided meditations, I came to this passage from the Letting Go exercise:

Contemplating my desire for a cat, I breathe in.
Seeing the impermanent nature of a cat, I breathe out.

Ohhh. No little Fluffy for me. How can all those Buddhist monks be so happy? Mh well, possibly because the word is actually 'car' which presbyopic me only realized when I looked it up to type this.

Then there's this one:

Seeing the dead body of the one who makes me suffer, I breathe in.
Smiling to the dead body of the one who makes me suffer I breathe out.

Seeing the dead body, grey in colour, of the one who makes me suffer, I breathe in.
Smiling to the dead body, grey in colour, of the one who makes me suffer, I breathe out.

Seeing the bloated dead body of the one who makes me suffer, I breathe in
Smiling to the bloated dead body of the one who makes me suffer, I breathe out.

Seeing the dead body of the one who makes me suffer infested with worms and flies, I breathe in.
Smiling to the dead body of the one who makes me suffer infested with worms and flies, I breathe out

and so on until the guy is reduced to dust in the wind. While I can get behind the exercise big time, I'm not sure what the Buddhist point is. The instructions say 'We meditate to see the frailty and impermanence of those who hurt us. This meditation will dissolve our anger and foster love and compassion for someone we hate.' Mh. If you say so.

Otherwise have been rereading a lot of 100 Demons. DWJ indeed. Things get clearer on the thirteenth iteration. Sometimes. This time I noticed the psychic guy in glasses' remark to Akira about her maternal instincts, and then-- mhh oh yes. Explains a lot about Akira's relations to people and youkai. Also classic misleading in the Many Pieces of Aoarashi story. One keeps seeing a little youkai running about and assumes it's the one Kai lost, usually because it's Ritsu on the phone to Kai at the time. And of course it's the piece of Aoarashi that runs about the house and eventually gets into the haunted kimono and eventually gets back to Aoarashi. There are still five pieces that I can count, not four-- and even the pictures show more little pieces than four.

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Wow, that's pretty morbid. And really, I wouldn't be breathing in and out with that body reducing in front of me, enemy or not...

uhmmmm ohhh-kay! just no. *shudders*

Yeesh. That's like that thing I read recently online where someone states that it can be helpful to intensely fantasize about shooting/beating the crap out of/killing someone who's annoyed you, and that tripped my law-of-three detector so hard it made my skin crawl (and many people who commented on the story evidently felt the same).

I prefer "cat" to "car" in the meditation. Your subconscious got that quite right.

I can't see myself performing the decaying body meditation with any sort of detachment.

Oh, it gets better. You're supposed to visualize the body of your loved one decaying, and your own body. Detachment is what it's all about. And, well, they're quite right about the inevitability of it all. Ignoring the inevitability is how most of us get through life, but Buddhists do it differently.

Enlightenment is not for everyone...

Law of three? Have come across mentions of it recently but never got a handle on what was meant.

In fact the meditation starts with first visualizing the one who does you harm in all their strength, and then realizing that they're as mortal and ephemeral as yourself and will come to the same end in the end. Which is less revenge and more empathy, or so I assume.

I thought it was a little odd, tucked between riches and houses like that. Just figured the Buddhists knew what things people really do want. Cars, pfui. But cats-- well, yes.

Full Catastrophe Living doesn't rub me the wrong way quite as much as the Cognitive Therapy guy. (Too much American hard-sell for my tastes even if the method works.) I found The Miracle of Mindfulness both helpful and soothing, even if breathing meditation is the most difficult kind for me. I've only managed it consistently in the bath (hot water to keep the chest loose, lots of steam to keep the nose clear and fight that instinctive 'I can't breathe!!' reaction when I become aware of my breathing.)

Mindfulness is probably helpful for chronic pain and I hope for anxiety too, but it's certainly work at the start.

I should love to come see the impermanent menagerie in your impermanent abode whenever you feel up to a visit.

The sensation of not being able to breathe, or not breathe deep enough, is really unpleasant. I'm glad you found a way around it.

Weekends are best for me. This is dry-eye season, meaning cataract eye is even more glarey and unfocussed than usual, so I'm not really comfortable biking after dark.

Law of three--essentially, everything you do comes back to you three times. Everything you do to deliberately harm someone comes back on you ten times. In my darker moments, I think of it as "the pagan version of Catholic guilt."

It's only natural to wish ill of those who do you wrong--heaven knows I've done it myself and will no doubt continue to do so--but I try very hard (and don't always succeed) to say to myself, "Well, karma will see to it that they get what they deserve," rather than visualize myself beating the snot out of them. The problem with karma is that it can move very, very slowly--but I have seen it catch up with people, and it was not pretty when it did.

Hmm, not sure that's what S was doing when he was meditating. Seemed more like watching oneself kind of stuff.

Which volume of 100 demon is that? I don't remember the psychic guy in glasses. Maybe I should do a reread too.

Watching oneself is pretty much how mindfulness in action works. Be in the moment doing whatever you're doing. But awareness of breathing seems an integral part of Thich Nhat Hanh's system, at least.

My bad. The guy doesn't have glasses except when he's sitting at his fortune-telling table outside. He's in the last story in vol 16, assistant to the fortune-telling woman with the sister in a case upstairs, and then in 17 in the 'deadly cherry tree that you mustn't turn around to look back at' story, which is where you see him fortune telling outdoors. Probably more, but I haven't reread that far. Ritsu keeps calling him a fake; I'm not so sure that he is.

Ohh goody, theological debate time! I'm always happy to question whether thoughts are the same as deeds. (The Catholic church thinks thought can be an occasion of sin, but the church and I no longer see eye to eye on many things.) I may fantasize beating the crap out of someone who's harmed me, purely for the incandescent catharsis, but what harm have I actually done them by my fantasies? Arguably the only person I've harmed is myself.

I think the orthodox line is that karma catches up with you in the next life, so if ill befalls someone, it's not because of anything they did to you in this one. Which is cold comfort, especially since Eeyore here is more inclined to follow the biblical line that the evil flourish as the green bay packers uh tree. Or do in my experience.

Oh, okay, you're right, I think karma gets you the next time around. I guess it was the law of three catching up with those folks, then...

Thought can be a powerful thing. Prayer is thought. Thought can influence the outcome of things. Thought is the basis of spellcasting. Thought and intention is the basis of a lot of the "success seminars" that you see a lot of these days ("if you BELIEVE you are a success, you WILL BE a success" and etc.). So, by some ways of looking at it, powerfully directed thoughts of beating the crap out of someone specific--a specific, real person--that's not good, and you have to be careful with it. This is why the "let's all pray that Barack Obama dies" thing makes me cringe to my shoelaces. Wishing ill on someone specific--not so much grumbling "Geeze, I wish the Democrats would get their ducks in a row already" but "I hope so-and-so gets cancer and suffers horribly and dies"--is a thing that, to my mind, is best avoided.

I'm sure that's not what the Buddhist masters meant here; it could be that I'm just oversensitive to that way of regarding things. I was raised Catholic, but haven't considered myself one since I was about 14.

"The impermanent cat" makes me think of that song "The Cat Came Back," for some reason...

When I catch myself going into Revenge Fantasy mode, which I do, the first thing I do is to stop myself. Notice. Yes, I have just had an over-the-top anger reaction. Next, is to take a deep breath and apologize (mentally) to the person I have been angry at. The ideal next step would be to work out a way I can express my anger at this person and explain why I am angry, to see if we can work out a solution, but this is where I have problems.