Thanks. Mindfulness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness and meditation are getting more and more popular/acceptable nowadays! Very useful on personal level.
The dhamma.org ( 10 days) is actually the most effective tool. I am assuming you are looking for things that work: you can do this to check how well it works. Try to find a place where people need peacebuilding efforts. Try to get as many ( the most "problematic" people) to try one session. It is "secular", so people do not go there to be brainwashed into changing religion. Also, if you team that up with ( for the people who are Catholic or Christian) with some St Ignace retreats, usually within 10 years they get out of poverty from their own efforts.
Love it. Any way I can get rich quicker? How much for my eternity? Are you suggesting the poor should pay good money for the retreats you suggested in order to get out poverty, with their own efforts? What kind of logic is it? Any link for your claims, please!? How many retreats you did, and when? Please share/summarise your experience for each treat here! Or with a new thread! http://www.elitetrader.com/et/index.php?threads/jokes-2.93321/
My own experiences are detailed here : http://www.elitetrader.com/et/index.php?threads/the-day-to-day-psychology-of-a-trader.289762/ The thread was actually kind of "forbidden" two times ( as the harcelers had "influences" on trading forums, but Baron for some reasons let it run). The same thread was run at 'forexfactory.com) and I got the thread and myself booted out ( as their modos were "bedding" some of the "females", so it was easy to find escuses) http://www.elitetrader.com/et/index.php?threads/spirituality-videos.259035/ http://www.elitetrader.com/et/index.php?threads/spirituality-videos-part-ii.266315/ I first went to do a www.dhamma.org myself , when it was suggested by someone that it could help my problems. I did not know anything about Asia; but I made the effort to find the risks linked to this retreat. Finally decided to do it, and Asia was the only country I could do it quickly. So I went there ( Malaysia). I did it two times there, but some people messed it up there. I did not know about other retreats, so I could not do it for a while ( slandering effects). Later on I discovered the St Ignace retreats, so I also tried it and understood more things about "socio-economic issues". Now: no. My suggestion would be that you finance whoever you want to help get out of poverty : do finance their full trip return to a retreat. If they want to do another one, do finance the trip again as many times till they feel they got it. Then, IF and only IF they are Catholics or Christians, you can suggest a St Ignace retreat. Poverty is a scandal. Politicians have so far failed to lift people out of it - except China who managed to lift 700 millions out of poverty into middle classes (Chinese standards). Most people assume poor people do not know how to get out of poverty: it is false. They are the best place to know what to do: the problem is they have been polluted by the media and the culture that shows them all the ways it can not be done. After one person does the dhamma, what I have noticed, is the person starts to shake off, unproductive things/people who drag/keep them into poverty.
Did Jesus say, " Hey the poor and hungry, go find and pay some good money for some St Ignatius retreats. (Of course, you would have to move/fly first to a developed country for the beautiful peaceful retreats! You may learn something from some established elite guys during retreat, if they like you!) Possibly, in 10 years time (if you still alive), you will get out of poverty with your own efforts (networking with those wealthy guys earning 6 figures in trading)!" ?
You are making a LOT of assumptions. But I am not going to address these here. I can not understand your seeming anger when there are tools and methods that work. If you check the website www.dhamma.org : they have more than 250 centers worldwide. So no, no need to travel to Asia: take the time to read these long threads, I had to find a safe place asap, hence I went to Asia as there were up to 6 months waiting list in European centers. Now you ask about St Ignace retreats : I have precised clearly IF the person is Catholic or Christian. Now, I have read enough "Muslim" bashing to not talk about Islam. If you had asked about someone Muslim who had done the steps of getting through this mere 10 days dhamma.org, I would have suggested the equivalent for Muslims. Now why religion : because Religions have all an aspect where one needs to look at their own lives, and reflect on their own actions, specially those they are not too proud of, aka SINS. This is the second key : sin can be about always getting angry, not listening, lieing, fornication and all the panoply of sins that actually weaken the person, and make it difficult for a person to avoid paths that finish in poverty. Now, one person is actually financing, from own pockets, people ( in Africa, in France and trying it with one American) to do the dhamma.org. The truth is people are resistant to try solutions that work. I am suggesting to you to do the same : take some of your money, and pay for a poor person you want to sincerely help to do a dhamma session. What is wrong with that? Wny not try it and see for yourself ? I even suggested to try with the most "problem" people: what are you afraid of?
Actually 10 years time scale is much much much longer : one year from when the person has done enough dhamma session to get it, and enough St Ignace session to want to do it. From then, I'll say max 2 years to get out of poverty, but I prefer to be large. And 10 years max to be wealthy.
can you precise what your questions are. I should continue: I then after the St Ignace went on to do a 3 weeks meditation retreat, and another 7 days one. I was then accepted for a 3 months one, and this was enough for dhamma.org to understand that their assessment ( based on slandering) was a mistake, and that I was saying the truth, and they could check details on the thread I started. What are you scarred of?
Q Karen Barkey Professor of Sociology and History at Columbia University Shared Holy Spaces Posted: 25/11/2015 07:34 AEST http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen...624086.html?utm_hp_ref=australia&ir=Australia ... Hundreds of such sites can be counted in historical sources and many still continue to be shared despite the often violent "unmixing of peoples" and nationalizing policies of nation-states that emerged in the post imperial, post colonial world. Practices of sharing religious space have survived in both urban and rural settings, showing their rich and textured fabric of mixed traditions, amalgamated narratives and jointly incorporated superstitions and beliefs. In these spaces where people still mix, they constantly innovate within a traditional practice, they add on, they rationalize and explicate to make sense to themselves and their interlocutors why they belong, why they keep coming and appropriate what is different or why they welcome the "other." It is in this production that I am interested in, historical and contemporary, aiming to carry out a study of how and why people enter structured situations that are defined by difference and construct meanings to appropriate this difference in shared sacred spaces across time along the history of the Ottomans and modern Turkey, Greece and the Balkans. We can start with a few preliminary statements about the contemporary features of sharing sacred places in Turkey and especially in Istanbul in the 21st century. In Istanbul, Greek Orthodox churches are an important site of religious mixing between Christians and Muslims who share devotion to the space. These Greek Orthodox sites often share the common feature that they all have a spring or a source of "holy water" (ayasma) that brings blessings, cures illness and provides health to worshippers. The legend of the benefits of these sources of holy water was established in Ottoman, Byzantine and even in pre-Byzantine times. Each ayasma has a particular history, a narrative of discovery and is referred to in various historical descriptions. The discovery is associated with a miracle of curing an illness often of a dignitary, who then establishes a church in the said location. The benefits of the water and the sacrality of the space are transmitted from generation to generation, through multiple accounts. It is through such processes of inter-generational transmission that these spaces have survived, even as social and political change led to much unmixing with the loss of religious pluralism on the ground. First, such practices are part of an Ottoman legacy of sorts. Possessing tremendous religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity, the Ottoman Empire (1299-1923) gave rise to many forms of coexistence (peaceful or otherwise) that now offer us a genuine laboratory of research possibilities that have yet to be exhausted. There is ample proof that the Ottoman empire is still relevant to discussions of diversity and that the millet organization of religious communities is understood as a relatively successful historical example of ruling diversity. One of the ways that this diversity expressed itself was through the explicit sharing of sacred sanctuaries, whether they were Christian, Muslim or even Jewish. Therefore, it is clear that there is the effect of a long standing cultural and religious symbiosis, a society that has for many centuries had a high level of Muslim Christian interaction and has developed certain ritual practices which could be seen as partially "syncretic"--symbols have been absorbed and exchanged overtime, without a full merging of religious traditions. Such similarities between practices, traditions and meanings attest to a larger cultural field that has been articulated over centuries, that collected ways of doing things, habits, skills and dispositions; local knowledge about cures, remedies; forms of instruction and learning passed down through generations. Many visitors to shared sites nowadays mention Ottoman practice, their ancestors, their immediate grandparents and family as embedded in these common solutions to daily life and in rituals of sharing. A young Muslim woman who came to Vefa, a Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul, with her friends told of how her grandmother use to visit churches and take her when she was a young girl, but then added "no self-respecting Istanbullu lives here and does not know about the many churches. It is part of the mix of Istanbul. We go to church, we go to yatiris (Muslim shrines). This touring from site to site brings us closer to understanding each other." The compilation of such modes of doing represents the habitus of the Ottoman lands, the semi-conscious solutions and instincts that made people navigate their daily lives by participating in multiple different religious and cultural institutions at once, facilitated by the fluidity of boundaries and the multivocality of messages. People explicitly bring back the memories of these past practices as they were carried out by their ancestors and share a sense of nostalgia for the past. Such nostalgia is exacerbated by the new revival of Ottoman "everything" that plays to the emotional memory of people and represents the past as simply magnificent. As the new Ottomania plays out in the media, in the politics of the AKP who claim Ottoman history, especially the glory and toleration, and in the cultural production of Turkish society, it is appropriated for different purposes. Even in territories where such Ottoman nostalgia does not operate, the historical and cultural memory of an Ottoman past remains in the habitus of the generations that have experienced the transition from empire to nation-state. Another context for this participation is contemporary politics. In a manner that reminds us of Michel de Certeau's analysis of everyday forms of resistance (1988), people engage in practices of sharing, some trying to subtly subvert, others to affirm their understanding of the system. This is especially expressed by many secular, middle to upper class participants for whom sharing is a rebellious response to the Sunnification of Turkey; remembering a multi-ethnic past, reproducing a multi-cultural setting through involvement is a way to oppose the policies of AKP, even though AKP uses the same rhetoric of the multi-religious past and toleration to claim a continuity between such Ottoman practices and Turkey under AKP rule. Yet, many participants were eager to separate themselves from the AKP claims and say: "We lived for so long in a multi-cultural society - nobody will take this away from us,"--this is a statement against the contemporary politics of Sunnification and Islamic revival. As such sacred spaces known for their diversity and inclusive traditions have come to represent a form of secular opposition. Far from the politics of secular opposition the same churches are also visited by an increasingly religious Sunni population who have become aware of the benefits of these religious spaces and come to make wishes and get some holy water. Such supplicants are mostly religious women who might come to this space they define as belonging to an "other" but where their practical and rational interests help them cross religious boundaries for prosperity, progeny and a sense of general well-being that derives from being blessed by a Greek priest. In such cases, such attendance is not a subversion of the system, but a particular lens into a hierarchy of ethnic and religious pluralism. To conclude, it is imperative to explore the phenomenon of sharing sacred religious spaces in modern cities, though this has to be done with an eye to the historical, practical and political considerations that are embedded in such practices. These spaces represent diversity, but the social and cultural meanings attributed to the diversity can often be complicated and contradictory. UQ