phyruxus's Journal: Sometimes you smile

Don't read the journal entry below titled "No end, just death". It's depressing. Last night someone I like told me to write my feelings down, that's where that entry came from. I have more to add to it but not here.

The perceptual condition or consciousness is the jewel of humanity. We have a capacity to turn hate into love and fear into courage. This is not mysticism. I have done "metta bhavana" (cultivating loving kindness) which is an exercize from buddhism:
0) Relax. Clear your mind.
1) Feel something good (love, etc) towards yourself.
2) Feel that good thing towards someone besides yourself, whom you like (spouse, child, parent, close friend, etc).
3) Feel that good thing towards someone you neither like nor dislike (eg. a stranger or marginal acquaintance).
4) Feel that good thing towards someone you dislike strongly or even hate. (eg, someone who hurt you in the past)

In the book where I read about metta bhavana it said that (paraphrasing) "The energy we experience as hate or as love is the same energy. We can turn our hate into love." I have discovered of myself that this is true. It seemed like a betrayal of myself at first, to love someone who attacked me, but after doing the practice I don't feel that way. I haven't done metta a lot (and I don't meditate nearly enough) but these things (metta, meditation) work. What they do, well, they clear the mind. Actually what they do is not describable and you have to do it to know, but anyone can do it, even children. And as for meditation: Meditation is what we call it when one brings one's self/mind to a stillness. If you do it right you'll experience .. yourself. Some thoughts may pop up, disturbing the stillness. That's ok. With practice your meditation will become a deep stillness. Beyond the everyday personal benefits of meditation, there is another realm which 99.999% of people don't acheive (I haven't either). A man named Gopi Krishna had a trancendental experience during meditation. I won't describe it here, you can look up Gopi Krishna on google or at the bookstore if you want to.

Also check out PD Ouspensky. I have to leave the computer now but may post more sometime...

To make a broad, unsupported conjecture: The thing called "God" in most western churches is either a circuit in the brain, and/or the collective being of conscious beings (perhaps the total life-force field). I know this sounds like mumbo jumbo; the field I'm talking about is not "the force" from star wars; besides the energy seen in Kirlian photography, I posit that a human mind keeps a map of many signals which we are not aware of; like when we listen to one person in a noisy room of conversations, we hear everything but only focus on the person we're talking to; I think that the ignored information also affects our thinking process. I'll go into this more tomorrow. I expect most people to either presume that I'm totally nuts, or to equate what I say to something religious. I'd rather be considered insane than religious. I don't believe in "God" as defined by churches. However I do believe that the collective being of humans has a being of its own, in a similar way that our bodies are made of cells or our brains of neurons, each discrete but comprising a larger whole. Nutty, huh? I'll phrase this better tomorrow.

Also, I feel that spiritualism needs to be separated from the supernatural. I think our drive to be optimistic is a natural part of our psyche which owes nothing to a supernatural creator, ghosts or an afterlife. I believe karma can be described in naturalistic and logical terms.

I'm going home to sleep now.