#073 Positive and negative thinking are two sides of the same coin.
Positive and negative thinking are two sides of the same coin; both are anxiety driven. if you believe negative thoughts cause bad things to happen you then you have a distrustful and infantile view of suffering. Its hard to accept that the universe is chaotic and that often times bad things might occur completely at random. These "bad" things are not due to cosmic retribution or punishment or from an outdated war God; furthermore, that these same random events have allowed many species to evolve into the myriad of shapes and forms they have taken throughout the eons, all due to the happy accident of a random universe. The randomness is the engine of life itself. Randomnessness makes us feel unsafe and its our ego's job to dispel anxiety, so it creates a reason for things. The ego imposes itself on reality with a safer feeling reality. As Heisenberger says; "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
Our ego's job is to protect us from pain, and it does this by distancing its self from the pain that goes along with feeling compassion for a victim. With his negative-anxiety based view of the universe, we can now blame the victim for the suffering that they are experiencing. Here are several examples.
There are a few separate instances where Buddhists have blamed the holocaust on the bad karma of the Jews. i kid you not. Another more personal incident was from a Tibetan buddhist who asked me, "what did you do in a past life to put you in the wheelchair?" According to no less then 3 Astrologer/Psychics my disability was caused by, 1.) raping a woman when i was an Apache indian, 2.) sacrificing children to the dark lord, and 3.) being a wizard at Atlantis. Jesus was faced with the same issue. He was asked, "why is the man crippled, was it his sin or his parents sin?" Jesus replied, "so he can be healed." Jesus gets their heads out of the clouds and shows them how to be compassionate. (Sometimes the humanity of the man is obscured by the same anxiety that made him a death God).
There is a saying in Zen i am fond of, if you will please forgive my attempts at translation.
"When the self confirms the ten "thousand things" (everything) that is delusion.
"When the ten "thousand things" (everything) confirms the self that is enlightenment (intimacy).
or as Robert Aitken might say, "Let us take up the old horticulture and let the flowers tell us who we are." - The Dragon Who Never Sleeps.
I would like to clear up a few points about Karma and suffering. Karma simply means the natural consequences of our behavior and actions. What is the Karma of nationalism mixed with Racism? - Nazis. Doesn't that make a lot more sense then blaming the victim, - blaming the perpetrator? On the other hand a Holocaust survivor who refuses to talk about their suffering minimize their chances of relieving that suffering. That is the karma of repression. Karma is natural, not metaphysical. The suffering we cause on our selves is due to our ignorance, ignorance of the fact that we and the whole universe are perfect just as as we are. It took millions of years for us to evolve such a complex system of emotions. Even the capacity to suffer is a natural and good part of our beings. We could not exist without it.
I vow to stop telling the universe what it is supposed to be.
i vow to recognize my ego giving too much importance to its own thinking.
I vow to sink into reality and let it tell me who I am.
I vow to think about death as a means to vanquish the anxiety about its inevitability.
Our ego's job is to protect us from pain, and it does this by distancing its self from the pain that goes along with feeling compassion for a victim. With his negative-anxiety based view of the universe, we can now blame the victim for the suffering that they are experiencing. Here are several examples.
There are a few separate instances where Buddhists have blamed the holocaust on the bad karma of the Jews. i kid you not. Another more personal incident was from a Tibetan buddhist who asked me, "what did you do in a past life to put you in the wheelchair?" According to no less then 3 Astrologer/Psychics my disability was caused by, 1.) raping a woman when i was an Apache indian, 2.) sacrificing children to the dark lord, and 3.) being a wizard at Atlantis. Jesus was faced with the same issue. He was asked, "why is the man crippled, was it his sin or his parents sin?" Jesus replied, "so he can be healed." Jesus gets their heads out of the clouds and shows them how to be compassionate. (Sometimes the humanity of the man is obscured by the same anxiety that made him a death God).
There is a saying in Zen i am fond of, if you will please forgive my attempts at translation.
"When the self confirms the ten "thousand things" (everything) that is delusion.
"When the ten "thousand things" (everything) confirms the self that is enlightenment (intimacy).
or as Robert Aitken might say, "Let us take up the old horticulture and let the flowers tell us who we are." - The Dragon Who Never Sleeps.
I would like to clear up a few points about Karma and suffering. Karma simply means the natural consequences of our behavior and actions. What is the Karma of nationalism mixed with Racism? - Nazis. Doesn't that make a lot more sense then blaming the victim, - blaming the perpetrator? On the other hand a Holocaust survivor who refuses to talk about their suffering minimize their chances of relieving that suffering. That is the karma of repression. Karma is natural, not metaphysical. The suffering we cause on our selves is due to our ignorance, ignorance of the fact that we and the whole universe are perfect just as as we are. It took millions of years for us to evolve such a complex system of emotions. Even the capacity to suffer is a natural and good part of our beings. We could not exist without it.
I vow to stop telling the universe what it is supposed to be.
i vow to recognize my ego giving too much importance to its own thinking.
I vow to sink into reality and let it tell me who I am.
I vow to think about death as a means to vanquish the anxiety about its inevitability.