You spend enough time in meditation, you will realize that you never genuinely feel feelings in the first place
it is all just cause and effect response
and a lot of the time the specificity of that response is ascribed to how societal expectations dictate one should be effected by a particular cause
loss-->sadness
gain-->joy
Are we essentially just brainwashed by society and nothing more than puppets in our lives or is there more than that? — Darkneos
But if you are being affected or influenced by something else then it's not genuine, you're being controlled. — Darkneos
You spend enough time in meditation, you will realize that you never genuinely feel feelings in the first place it is all just cause and effect response
Are we essentially just brainwashed by society and nothing more than puppets in our lives or is there more than that? — Darkneos
Are we essentially just brainwashed by society and nothing more than puppets in our lives or is there more than that? When I ask other people no one seems to think that just because emotions are cause and effect that it means they aren't genuine. But if you are being affected or influenced by something else then it's not genuine, you're being controlled. — Darkneos
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. — political advertising
Meditation may offer a "spaciousness" where there's more room to not react mindlessly. — praxis
It's what Vulcans do to control their otherwise volatile emotions. Social conditioning is aimed at the same thing: to keep a rein on feelings that could prompt destructive actions. Language gives us a way to communicate emotion without the threatening or provocative behaviours that could disrupt the social order. — Vera Mont
Maybe Friday-night brawlers should be sentenced to a course of meditation instead of a weekend in jail. — Vera Mont
Actually you tend to feel things more deeply because you’re more attuned to bodily sensations than wrapped up in what Buddhists call ‘monkey mind’. — praxis
Are we essentially just brainwashed by society and nothing more than puppets in our lives or is there more than that? — Darkneos
When I ask other people no one seems to think that just because emotions are cause and effect that it means they aren't genuine. But if you are being affected or influenced by something else then it's not genuine, you're being controlled. Though no one agrees, not even Buddhists who I ask. — Darkneos
Propaganda is much more crude than that. It's flashy -- often times it can be reduced to a command: "AVOID" "FEAR" "BUY" "VOTE". And it's crude because it doesn't need to be sophisticated: it works on emotions that are already there. It's not brainwashing as much as calling attention. — Moliere
That's interesting. What 'things' do you feel when meditating that are different from the things you feel when connected to the outside world? And how does feeling deeply affect behaviour differently from the presumably shallow feeling we normally experience.
I can't always follow what other people mean by feelings (which i think of as response to sensation and other stimuli) and emotions (which i think of as either primal or sentimental.) We have more precise language available, of which most of us rarely make use. — Vera Mont
When in regular meditation practice I notice being generally more sentimental. Hearing a touching story, for instance, makes eyes water when ordinarily they would not. That sort of thing. — praxis
So, it makes you more sensitive to others, more empathic? Those are frontal lobe functions, abstract thought, symbol-making functions, far from the primal drives. Seems to me that's more connected to the thinking world, rather than the physical one. — Vera Mont
What 'things' do you feel when meditating that are different from the things you feel when connected to the outside world? — Vera Mont
If you want to shrink something,
you must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something,
you must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something,
you must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception
of the way things are. — Tao Te Ching, Verse 36 - Stephen Mitchell Translation
Try unenlightened's advertisement meditation: whenever you see an advert, analyse it carefully and you will find in every case that it will first seek to provoke in you a negative feeling, and then offer you a solution to make you feel better. — unenlightened
So I feel empathy for Darkneos's thoughts. There's a sense in which it can feel like you're being controlled, that there is no escape, and that the people around you don't even acknowledge the propaganda around them.
But that's actually because the best propaganda doesn't look like propaganda to its target audience -- the crudity of propaganda is only apparent upon being perceived as propaganda, upon being able to reduce it to a command. And if you're just putting the glasses on for the first time, it can seem like nobody else has "figured it out" -- but the truth is, just enough people have "figured it out" that it's still effective. (And, as the movie more or less preaches to us, those alien persons who see the field of desire as a machine to be manipulated for their own ends -- They Live! :D) — Moliere
not quite what I'm getting at here. — Darkneos
Quiet contemplation can help us experience our negative emotions without resistance. If we allow ourselves to feel our grief, sadness, anger, shame, or guilt fully and without trying to avoid them, they lose their power over us. — T Clark
This, or something like it, I know from experience. There are different methods - solitary contemplation works for me; for someone I know who suffers from depression, it's analyzing dreams, or it might be writing poetry or keeping a journal. Basically, the process boils down to: See it, name it, accept it, own it. Then it can't own you. — Vera Mont
This is more like denying reality though. You don't genuinely feel anything so those emotions are more or less a lie. — Darkneos
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