RE: Are You Living For Temporary Relief From Your Mind? (Part 2)
You may or may not be right, depending on how one interprets your article. I can only say that, in general, I dislike attempts to cure mental illness that are of the "blaming the victim" variety. You don't see that happening much when it comes to physical ailments, but it's common when it comes to "mental" ailments (that are equally physical). I'm more in line with Rieki's approach: do other things, change your routine, pick up a new hobby, eat well, exercise, find out the sources of unhappiness in your life, and take pills if you need to, hopefully temporarily. And meditation, as you've described it, might help too.
The above would apply to drugs and similar types of addiction. From the first part of this article I understand you're also talking about addictions of the "habits of thinking" type. Certainly (self)awareness, γνώθι σαυτόν, would go a long way toward curing those conditions, as well as just a general interest in learning new things about the outside world, that might pull our mind out of the rut.
I wouldnt consider anything that I write about to be a mental illness, and I also wouldnt blame the person per see. It is the ignorance of our minds that we are born into that causes most if not all mental suffering. My aim is to build awareness on this issue and help educate and free people from this suffering. The addictions that i refer to are unconscious mental ones such as feeding your ego, feeding of egos makes people feel good and covers up their insecurites. If they were to stop; this would expose their insecurites causing them to suffer. That is what makes it an unconscious addiction. They would be unaware of this pattern in them yet it is influencing their lives. If they become aware, they can free themselves of the pattern (addiction) and also of the underlying insecurites that caused the pattern to develop in the first place.
I did also mention drug addictions as an example of how we can block out undesirable thoughts and feelings an as a comparison to other types of addictions but the main area that i focused on was unconscious mental addictions.
Also you mentioned finding out the source of unhappiness in ones life, that is exactly my aim. I personally belive that the source of unhappiness in ones life stems from the mind and their conditioning and awareness of this is what can set you free from it.
Thanks for the comment!
As a person with no metaphysical beliefs (atheist, skeptic, materialist) I find it rather peculiar that ignorance just happens to be associated with suffering (and, I assume, knowledge to be associated with happiness or at least contentment or at least non-suffering). I would like to see people search for truth without being guided by pleasure and pain. So for instance, would the Buddhist be saying the exact same things without suffering to guide his beliefs? My philosophy of suspicion makes me suspect that there's a strain of hedonism running underneath Buddhist doctrine, and it makes the Buddhist trace all suffering back to some broken erroneous view of the world, because he so hates pain, that there's no way he can trace it to truth, he has to make pain a result of delusion, just like a person in love with his wife tries to explain away all indications of infidelity. My more pragmatic feeling says that knowledge could easily lead to suffering, or ignorance to bliss. In fact, my experience, and perhaps Western tradition, says that that's how things are most of the time! But, in general, I would say the two simply have nothing to do with each other.
Buddhists emphasize this internal source of suffering. Our Western tradition often emphasizes external sources of suffering. Both bring negative results if taken to an extreme. Buddhism, taken to an extreme, makes you complacent, unwilling to fight for your rights like feminists, for democracy, for the vote, for the 8-hour workday, etc.: everything if your own fault, you simply have to change the way you think. The Western tendency to blame everything on others also brings obvious detriments. I guess each instance has to be judged individually. But I'm generally all for a slimming down of the ego, that's for sure!
I dont associate general ignorance with suffering, I associate ignorance towards the workings of the mind and our emotions with suffering. Ignorance is bliss, I couldnt agree more. Ignorance of suffering would certainly be bliss but what about the people that are suffering from things like depression and anxiety? They are not ignorant to suffering but are ignorant to how emotions are supposed to work, what they are for and how focusing on certain thoughts and feelings causes them to become habitual. Just like muscle memory, we have mind memory too.
I am not buddhist nor do I practice buddhism. The release of emotions causes a balance in our being. If someone had an imbalance of anger in them, they would be more than willing to fight for their rights. They would probably be out throwing petrol bombs and rioting. Being complacent is on the other side of the spectrum, it is also an imbalance that could be caused by blocking out your anger or being thought that feeling anger is wrong. If you experienced anger in a balaned manner, you wouldnt get taken over by it and become unconscious to it. You would feel it as a result of something that you dont think is right and consciously decide the most appropriate form of action to take.
I can very much relate to this view of Buddhism. I've often had similar thoughts, however, having practiced vipassana (a form of meditation) I can say that the principles of buddhism have been very helpful to my mental wellbeing over the years.. the whole idea is to observe, not to blame oneself for the suffering. By observing sensations as they are not clinging or resisting, it allows the mind \ hearts healing process to go on as it should. Which can also assist quite a bit in transitioning from addicted states. Just observe, just observe :)/
Exactly, we must allow ourselves to heal as opposed to getting involved in the goings on of the mind.
True. I myself meditate (just 10 min a day, before bed!), and I love many aspects of Buddhism: basically all the aspects I see as philosophical rather than religious.
well, as is the case with religions. it very quickly diverted from the practices that Gautama taught, because they were too hard :-D
Here is my take on it based upon my understanding of qabalah. There are three pillars in the tree of live in which the 10 spheres are organized. Middle Pillar is the pillar of equilibrium. Right side is related to "force" and the left side is related to form. so all of "god" and reality is divided between force form and equilibrium. without getting too much deeper than that, because it would require a lot of text and time, qabalists work with the positive and negative forces(in a polarity sort of way, masculin feminine ect) to work their way up back to the all, while learning how to master those forces. While buddhism as taught by gautema is a middle pillar religion where the intention is to work directly back to the divine without stopping about to play with the forces so much.
I hope that wasn't too general to make some sense of. I will have to blog about it sometime when I get around to it for easy reference.
Yeah that's too airy for me. I practically need a definition for every single word you used! :P
Ikr it's one of my interests that I need to write about in order to learn it enough to be conversant