Being socially rejected massively reduces a person’s effective IQ, research finds.
People told, “you will end up alone in life” experienced drops in analytical reasoning skills of 30 percent.
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CWG
COMPASSN WSDM GRATTDE
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If you are not in the mood for humor, nothing will make you laugh.
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YOU LYF ARE BEING LIVED
BOB: Put your hands over your ears, block your ears off and see what sounds you can hear with the thought. You'll realise you can't hear anything with the thought “I hear”. So the thought “I hear” can't actually hear.
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K: But hearing is undeniably present. If not the ear, if not the thought-up entity called "I", who or what is hearing?
Does it have to be anyone or anything doing it? Can it just be like for example in the case of raining? Nobody does it, we can't separate water from raining, can't separate falling down, it wouldn't make sense in our language.
We do not perform the heartbeat either and yet it is happening. Nobody moves the stars. So perhaps there is nobody 'doing' the functioning. It is simply happening. You (Life) are being lived.
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RAM LINE - REDUCTIONISM AND MYSTICISM
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WAVE IN MATTER OR CONSCIOUSNESS
WIMOC
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THE POWER OF LAUGHTER: Robin Dunbar has calculated that the average laughter group size—the number of people laughing at the same time as each other and paying attention to each other—is about three. This means, he writes, that laughter is “nearly three times more efficient than grooming in terms of the number of individuals in whom endorphins can be upregulated during a given interaction.”
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"A group of monks were once going to head out to an outlying area of India, and so they went to pay their respects to Ven. Sariputta. He asked them, “The people there are intelligent. If they ask you what your teacher teaches, what are you going to say?"
Now remember, Sariputta himself once asked that question of Ven. Assaji and he got that famous teaching: “All things that arise from a cause: their cause and their cessation — that’s the teaching of the Tathagata, the great contemplative.” That was enough for Sariputta to gain the Dhamma eye and see the deathless.
But the answer that he recommended the monks give to the people in that outlying district was different. He said to tell them as the very first thing: “Our teacher teaches dispassion.”
Now a lot of people would stop right there because dispassion sounds very negative. It sounds like disillusionment, resignation: You’ve looked around and seen that the things of the world don’t come up to your expectations for them, so you give up having expectations. That’s what it sounds like, but that’s not what dispassion means. We get it confused with samvega, and it’s important to clear up the confusion so that we can understand the difference between the two.
Samvega is when you see how disillusioned you are in life and you also have a sense of being trapped. You want something better than this but you can’t see any way out. That’s because there are still things there in the world that you’re feeding on or that you’d like to feed on, in terms of relationships, in terms of power, whatever: the things we emotionally feed on in terms of other people, other things. The reason we feel trapped is because part of us is still in there and we can’t let it go.
It’s like that famous monkey trap where they put a hole in a coconut and then into the coconut they put a little bit of fruit that the monkey wants. It can reach its hand in through the hole, but once it has its hand wrapped around the fruit, it can’t get its hand out. It’s trapped by its own greed. That’s samvega.
You look around and there’s nowhere in the world that you can see any way out. Everybody’s fighting over what little bit of food there is, emotional or physical. The Buddha’s image was of fish fighting over that last gulp of water in a dwindling puddle before they’re all going to die. And it’s terrifying.
That’s what samvega literally means: terror. It’s sometimes translated as dismay, sometimes as urgency, but the word originally comes from a sense of terror. You’re trapped. You need a way out.
That’s what pasada provides — the sense of confidence, that, yes, there is a way out. This confidence takes some of the heaviness away from that sense of terror, and turns it into a motivation to practice, because you realize that aside from the path, there’s really nothing. This allows you to put all your energy and pay all your attention to following the path.
Now one thing that can get in the way, though, is when we confuse samvega with dispassion. We’re developing this path all the way to what? Dispassion? The mind asks that and it recoils a little bit, because it keeps confusing the idea of dispassion with samvega.
But dispassion is something different. Dispassion is when you no longer need to feed on these things, the things of the world. It comes from disenchantment, nibbida, and nibbida basically relates to this image of feeding. You’ve had enough of the food offered by the world and you don’t want any more. You don’t feel a need anymore to feed off these things, and that allows you to stop creating all the fabrications you’ve been creating around the things of the world in an effort to dress them up as food.
What follows is dispassion, and that’s not a negative thing. You’re dispassionate toward all that fabrication you’ve been doing, and so you allow it to stop. That opens you up to something much bigger."
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Samvega vs. Dispassion"
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