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If all this shit’s for nothing, why do I gotta think about it?

Tony Soprano on life

If every life is a river, then it’s little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face

Alice Hoffman, Incantation (via panatmansam)

hollygonowhere

Nobody is making you feel what you’re feeling. Nobody has the power to make you feel something negative emotionally. Your reactions are caused by how you interpret any situation. This is so important because it means that you ultimately become your own resource of emotional freedom and truth.

Adyashanti (via hollygonowhere)

purplebuddhaproject

Happiness is not the absence of problems, it’s the ability to deal with them.

Steve Maraboli (via purplebuddhaproject)

The reason that this blog is rarely active anymore is because I no longer have anything to say. I have officially assimilated into society.

aleskot

matrimonialism (noun): the ideology that embraces marriage as a cultural norm.

Cultural institutions, especially ones as deeply revered as marriage, are rarely challenged. Marriage is thought of as inherently good. When someone announces that they’re getting married, we never tell them not to. But we should. We could save a lot of lives that way (and lose a lot of friends). We never ask them why in the hell they’re marrying the toothless lumberjack they met at Middleton Sports Bowl; we never let it slip that perhaps they can do better than the obese schoolteacher whose hobbies include paint-by-number and video golf. We don’t say anything because it’s not the person that they’re marrying that we’re celebrating. It’s the institution itself. And that’s the problem. Marriage is considered a social good. Even if the people getting (or staying) married don’t love each other or stopped loving each other three decades ago.

American culture is overflowing with matrimonialism in every form of media. Think of the bridalmagazines, the New York Times Sunday wedding pages and that apex of matrimonialism:eHarmony, whose website touts: “On average, 542 people get married every day in the United States because of eHarmony; that accounts for nearly 5% of new U.S. marriages.” Side note: I’m guessing that eHarmony accounts for an even higher percentage of divorces.

To clarify, marriage isn’t inherently bad. It’s our uncritical celebration of marriage as a category that’s a problem. While our cultural contract allows us (and in some cases even requires us) to criticize and question the single about their lack of a partner, we can’t ask similar questions to marrieds. Turn the usual questions on their heads and you’ll see what I mean. There’s nothing unacceptable about asking a single person why she’s not in a relationship. But if a woman tells you that she’s been married for 25 years, you’re not allowed to interrogate her. You’re supposed to effusively congratulate her. You can’t ask her: “Why have you spent the last quarter-century with that man?” or “Do you ever wish that you’d never gotten married?”

We have to pretend to be thrilled about all of our married friends’ and families’ anniversaries, the longer the marriage, the better. How many times have you heard this: “I’m so proud of [my parents/my friends/those old people down the road] for staying married for forty years! Aren’t they an inspiration?” Actually, no, no they’re not. They bicker. They never have sex. Often they wish they’d married other people. Sometimes they’re enemies.

Because our social rules forbid us from questioning marital relationships, married people assume that they should feel happy. And because research tells us that marriage makes most people happy, unhappy marrieds conclude that they must be outliers. But a lot of this marital happiness stems from our matrimonialism, our setting up of a society that values marriage. Married people get social approval and all its attendant benefits, so they feel that their relationship should have value, regardless of whether or not they’re personally happy. —Hallie Lieberman

fifidunks

The architecture of the internet must support a global, universal micropayments capability. In this way, anyone could charge for information made available online, whether it is music or a program for a future robot. A silly YouTube-like prank might generate a windfall for a silly teenager, while a scholar’s writing might be only occasionally accessed, but over a long period might still generate enough income to be of use. People could then re-create the best social formula that has been achieved thus far in human experience. Middle class people could own something- the information they produce- that would give them sustenance as they have children and age. In order for this scheme to work, there would have to be some structural changes introduced gradually, as I explain in the book. This direction is the only way to create a human-centric internet, instead of one that serves the cultists who believe in information more than people. It would not attempt to make information free, but instead make it affordable. It is worth noting that this is exactly how the web would have developed if the initial design proposal for it, dating back to the 1960s, had been carried out. (This was Ted Nelson’s vision.) It is the obvious way to design the network if people are your top priority.

Jaron Lanier (via fifidunks)

zenmister

Comparing yourself to another person is an act of violence. It is an act of self harm. Even if you compare yourself favorably to one person or group of people, you are building a house of cards that will collapse as you try to stand on it. Self-comparisons are hard to avoid. If we do not compare...

Q: I heard that meditation is supposed to empty your mind, free your mind of thoughts. Is that right?

A: That is certainly one effect that meditation can have and, admittedly,having a mind free of thinking can be a very delightful experience. That said, however, it would be a big mistake to say that ultimate happiness or peace is synonymous with not thinking. In Buddhist psychology “thought” is just another sense object like “sound” or “visible form” and, just as we can hear or see an object without there being any kind of delusion or disharmony within us on account of that, so it is also with thought. There can be a thought in the mind but it can be known clearly and completely for what it is – it is not intrinsically an intrusion on our peace of mind. What makes thoughts problematic for most of us is that we are compulsively prone to believing in their contents – their stories and value-judgements – so maintaining any kind of real objectivity with thought, as we might be able to do with other sense objects like sight or sound or smell or taste or touch, seems like an impossibility. Thought seems to be in a totally different category, although in truth it’s not. With time and the skillful development of meditation, we might well be able to learn to focus and calm the mind to the point where conceptual thought stops altogether. I would see this as a pleasant bonus rather than a final goal. More useful is to aspire and practise to see thought as transparent, insubstantial. In this way, when thought is there – whether deliberate or not – there is no sense of cluttering or entangling within the heart and mind. Its presence is just like a fragrance or a physical feeling, a visual image or a sound – it embellishes the silence and stillness of the mind, rather than occluding or corrupting it

Excerpt from Finding the Missing Peace by Ajahn Amaro.

Get it here.

#ajahn amaro #finding the missing peace #meditation basics

solarforest-blog

To practise, we must start exactly where we are. Of course, we can always imagine perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone else should behave. But it’s not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.

Ajahn Sumedho (via echoshaman)

zenmister

The purpose of a Zen practice is to find peace of mind. Buddha’s great insight is that through working with your mind you can find peace. The flip side of that insight is that the reason that you do not have peace of mind is because of your thought habits. Zen is a tradition of practitioners coming to realize what the Buddha realized. In the two and a half thousand years since Buddha, Zen has picked up a lot of baggage. It has travelled from India, through China into Japan, Korea, Vietnam and throughout the world. Zen has developed distinct practices in every country and in every practitioner. That is all baggage. The realization that Buddha had is the same simple realization today as it was when he had it. Put down all of your baggage and experience your essential nature.The problem we encounter when we try to put down our baggage is that we don’t know how. When we feel the weight of our baggage and go to put it down, we can’t tell what is us and what is our baggage. We have spent a whole lifetime accumulating baggage and we can’t imagine ourselves without it. When we suffer from anxiety and depression, we become so identified with our baggage that we may think we don’t like ourselves. What we don’t like is our baggage. We don’t even know ourselves. If we knew ourselves apart from our baggage, we would not only like ourselves, we would love ourselves.To put down our baggage, we practice meditation. That is the most basic Zen practice. The Zen devices that are designed to help practitioners put down their baggage, the koans, the robes, the shaved heads, the tea, the chanting, the paradox can become baggage too. Baggage is complicated that way. To cut through the complication of baggage, simplify things. Put all your baggage down. Don’t worry if you accidentally put yourself down in the process. Don’t worry.Anytime you feel the weight of your worry, reorient yourself to your surroundings. You can take an hour, or three seconds, depending on how eager you are to pick your baggage up again. Simply breathe in and out and be absolutely perfect in that moment, no baggage. You will find peace right there in your mind. Even in your mind.