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The Real Secret....

Back when I was playing drums for the great downbeat poll winning, grammy winning, Buddy Montgomery,He said, "Playing time is concentration." [time being swing, groove, the pocket, soul: the life force of the music] He also added, "You got to have the fahr!! (fire). Concentration? The secret? The key? The meaning of life? concentration?! Usually the answer has been, "I don't know man. I just play."

But when a Buddy Montgomery tells you something, you take it as a koan and wrestle with it. What he was talking about was Flow (c.f. below). All of those elements obtain.

And what of "fire?" Obviously, passion ....

What is concentrated is not a grimacing ego-directed focus, but the 'psyche' the aggregates ... The physical body, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness.

1. "form" or "matter"[4] (Skt., Pāli rūpa, Tib. gzugs):
external and internal matter. Externally, rupa is the physical world. Internally, rupa includes the material body and the physical sense organs.[5]
2. "sensation" or "feeling" (Skt., Pāli vedanā, Tib. tshor-ba):
sensing an object[6] as either pleasant or unpleasant or neutral.[7][8]
3. "perception", "conception", "apperception", "cognition", or "discrimination" (Skt. samjñā, Pāli saññā, Tib. 'du-shes):
registers whether an object is recognized or not (for instance, the sound of a bell or the shape of a tree).
4. "mental formations", "volition", or "compositional factors" (Skt. samskāra, Pāli saṅkhāra, Tib. 'du-byed) :
all types of mental habits, thoughts, ideas, opinions, compulsions, and decisions triggered by an object.[9]
5. "consciousness" (Skt. vijñāna, Pāli viññāṇa[10], Tib. rnam-par-shes-pa):

(a) In the Nikayas: cognizance.[11][12]
(b) In the Abhidhamma: a series of rapidly changing interconnected discrete acts of cognizance.[13]
(c) In Mahayana sources: the base that supports all experience.[14]

So what Buddy laid out was not only the secret of swing, but a key insight into Buddhism, not to mention David Hume's notion of "the self is a bundle of perceptions."

And what of "the fire?"

From the Greek,

Psyche: 1647, "animating spirit," from L. psyche, from Gk. psykhe "the soul, mind, spirit, breath, life, the invisible animating principle or entity which occupies and directs the physical body" (personified as Psykhe, the lover of Eros), akin to psykhein "to blow, cool," from PIE base *bhes- "to blow" (cf. Skt. bhas-). The word had extensive sense development in Platonic philosophy and Jewish-infl. theological writing of St. Paul. In Eng., psychological sense is from 1910.

Maybe Freud said it best when describing the sublimation of libidinal energy.

So what is to swing? The concentration of the body-mind in the one-pointed sublimation of sexual energy.

An end to suffering...

As a psychologist, as Buddhist, a musician, a philosopher, and as a human being, one has chosen the path to the end of suffering, stress, existential anxiety, emotional dysphoria, mental illness on the road to happiness.

The first step along this path is as follows:

I. Samma ditthi .... Right view

dukkhe ñana .... understanding suffering

dukkhasamudaye ñana .... understanding its origin

dukkhanirodhe ñana .... understanding its cessation

dukkhanirodhagaminipatipadaya ñana .... understanding the way leading to its cessation

In other words the end of suffering starts and ends with seeing things as they really are.

At first this 'right view' is a conceptual one. Over time it is a matter of direct experience. Try it, you'll like it.

So is life suffering? Indeed much of it is. Although, our culture is based on denial. But, we all age, get sick and die. While there is much joy in between, love affairs end, cars rust, the bills are due, the stock market collapses. But with it all, the insideous thing is that we often feel a sense of discontent. As the song says, "Is that all there is?



Is there no higher meaning? Is my purpose a true one?

The root cause of this discontent is desire, craving and clinging. Losing what we've got. Not getting what we want.

What is the end of discontent? First realizing that everything is impermanent and subject to change. (e.g., "We've grown apart, my love.) This impermanence denys us a sense of security. (What if I lose my job?) Finally, there is the sense of existential groundlessness to find that all is without an eternal essence. Phanthoms, ghosts, evanescent mirage.

OK, so what leads to the end of this discontent? That is the subject of this series of posts. We've seem step one. Only seven more to go..


Comments? Let's make this a dialogue.

Here's some temporary release from stress & discontent:

FLOW

I would be most interested in what situations the reader has experienced FLOW.
Components of flow Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following as accompanying an experience of flow:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).

2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).

3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.

4. Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.

5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).

6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).

7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.

8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.

9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.[2]

Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.

Anatta

Anatta outside of Buddhism


The ego is not master in its own house. - Sigmund Freud



Re: Anatta outside of Buddhism
“Clearing” (in the English version most of us are using) translates Lichtung. “In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing.” (Martin Heidegger)



"The 'self' is a clearing in which phenomena occur." (Bob Budny)

“I may venture to affirm the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” (David Hume)

Selflessness - The Core Of All Major World Religions - Has Neuropsychological Connection, MU Study Finds

21 Dec 2008

All spiritual experiences are based in the brain. That statement is truer than ever before, according to a University of Missouri neuropsychologist. An MU study has data to support a neuropsychological model that proposes spiritual experiences associated with selflessness are related to decreased activity in the right parietal lobe of the brain. The study is one of the first to use individuals with traumatic brain injury to determine this connection. Researchers say the implication of this connection means people in many disciplines, including peace studies, health care or religion can learn different ways to attain selflessness, to experience transcendence, and to help themselves and others.

This study, along with other recent neuroradiological studies of Buddhist meditators and Francescan nuns, suggests that all individuals, regardless of cultural background or religion, experience the same neuropsychological functions during spiritual experiences, such as transcendence. Transcendence, feelings of universal unity and decreased sense of self, is a core tenet of all major religions. Meditation and prayer are the primary vehicles by which such spiritual transcendence is achieved.

"The brain functions in a certain way during spiritual experiences," said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the MU School of Health Professions. "We studied people with brain injury and found that people with injuries to the right parietal lobe of the brain reported higher levels of spiritual experiences, such as transcendence."

This link is important, Johnstone said, because it means selflessness can be learned by decreasing activity in that part of the brain. He suggests this can be done through conscious effort, such as meditation or prayer. People with these selfless spiritual experiences also are more psychologically healthy, especially if they have positive beliefs that there is a God or higher power who loves them, Johnstone said.

"This research also addresses questions regarding the impact of neurologic versus cultural factors on spiritual experience," Johnstone said. "The ability to connect with things beyond the self, such as transcendent experiences, seems to occur for people who minimize right parietal functioning. This can be attained through cultural practices, such as intense meditation or prayer or because of a brain injury that impairs the functioning of the right parietal lobe. Either way, our study suggests that 'selflessness' is a neuropsychological foundation of spiritual experiences."

The research was funded by the MU Center on Religion and the Professions. The study - "Support for a neuropsychological model of spirituality in persons with traumatic brain injury" - was published in the peer-reviewed journal Zygon.

"Our research focused on the personal experience of spiritual transcendence and does not in any way minimize the importance of religion or personal beliefs, nor does it suggest that spiritual experience are related only to neuropsychological activity in the brain," Johnstone said. "It is important to note that individuals experience their God or higher power in many different ways, but that all people from all religions and beliefs appear to experience these connections in a similar way."

Consciousness

Here's a couple of thousand articles. Let's talk. I don't know if the blog is set up for open posting. Stay tuned, until I work it out.

Buddhism & Existential Phenomenology

This could have been heard from the Buddha:

Existential phenomenology (glosses are mine)

Basic themes of existential phenomenology are "lived experience," "modes of being," "ontology," and "lifeworld."

In his last work The Crisis of the European Sciences (1936), Husserl had already turned phenomenological analysis away from the transcendental ego and consciousness, to the prereflective lifeworld of everyday experience. Especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty radicalized this turn toward the existential world as we live and experience it.

(i.e., 'things as they really are,' impermanent and without essence.)

With Heidegger this turn toward the lived world became an ontological rather than an epistemological project. Instead of asking how the being (essence) of things are constituted in consciousness Heidegger asked how the being of beings (things) show themselves to us as a revealing of Being itself. For Heidegger the phenomenological question became: How can we let that what shows itself be seen in the very way that it shows itself from itself? Phenomenology requires of its practitioners a heedful attunement (mindfulness) to the modes of being of the ways that things are in the world. Heidegger's existential phenomenology is also often referred to as ontological phenomenology (concerned with being) while Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is epistemological (concerned with knowledge and the cogito).

Merleau-Ponty provides an existential interpretation of Husserl's program in his 'Preface' to the Phenomenology of Perception. Instead of Husserl's description of a disembodied consciousness that constitutes the meaning of things at the ideal level of the transcendental ego, Merleau-Ponty describes consciousness as embodied awareness of primordial experience. Consciousness is existence in and toward the world through the body. While Husserl's phenomenology is oriented to transcendental essences, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is existential, oriented to lived experience, the embodied human being in the concrete world. The purpose of phenomenological analysis for Merleau-Ponty is not the intuition of essences but rather it is "concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world." Instead of striving for certain knowledge Merleau-Ponty believed that phenomenological inquiry can never yield indubitable knowledge. "The most important lesson that the reduction teaches us," he says, "is the impossibility of a complete reduction." While Mearleu-Ponty held a chair in psychology and pedagogy, for him phenomenological method resembles more closely an attitude than a psychological research method: "Phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner or style of thinking... We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology... Phenomenology is accessible only through a phenomenological method." (such as meditation, vipassana?)

Buddhism and Politics

Here is a timely quote from bhikkhu bodhi's The Nobel Eightfold Path:
The most basic defilements are the triad of greed, aversion, and delusion. Greed (lobha) is self-centered desire: the desire for pleasure and possessions, the drive for survival, the urge to bolster the sense of ego with power, status, and prestige. Aversion (dosa) signifies the response of negation, expressed as rejection, irritation, condemnation, hatred, enmity, anger, and violence. Delusion (moha) means mental darkness: the thick coat of insensitivity which blocks out clear understanding.
Capitalism could be about providing jobs, raising the general standard of living, reducing poverty, and making a buck doing it. But the oil companies, wall street, the auto makers, the housing industry, became possessed by greed and here we are.
The right co-opted "Christianity" ignored the gospels, focused on "revelations" (added to the bible to bring Christianity in line with the "peace through war" ideals of the roman empire), and turned "Christianity" into a hate group. Obviously, these observations don't apply to all. Delusion & ignorance? Need go no further than the bush white house. Even Obama has hired a homophobe hater to pray at his inauguration.

Hello

Hello from a blog virgin.
I've got a variety of esoteric interests and have made friends on forum globally. The web is good.

Topics of interest include:

• Buddhism, theory & practise primarily from the perspective of the Pali Canon.
• Psychology orientation: person-centered-psychodynamic-cognitive-mindfulness-meditation.
• Philosophy, especially existentialphenomenology.
• Physics & cosmology.
• Classical Literature.
• Music: Jazz, "20th21st Century," improvisational in any context, percussion & rhythm.
• 'Women of the world"
• Cultural diversity
• Politics (I'm a bleeding heart liberal)
• Ethics
• Comparative religion
• Art especially abstract expressionism
• Film
• Poetry especially Robert Creeley & Bukowski
  
• International food, clothing.
• Third-Wave Feminism
• Consciousness