A master monk sat by the side of the road. With his eyes closed, his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap, he sat. In deep meditation, he sat. Suddenly his zazen was interrupted by the harsh and demanding voice of a samurai warrior. "Old man! I have travelled thousands of miles on a quest to ask a question of you! Teach me the meaning of heaven and hell!" At first, as though he had not heard, there was no perceptible response from the monk. But gradually he began to open his eyes, the faintest hint of a smile playing around the corners of his mouth as the samurai stood there, waiting impatiently, growing more and more agitated with each passing second. "why should I tell a fucking ignorant asshole like you the secrets of heaven and hell?" replied the monk at last. The samurai uttered a vile curse. He drew his sword and raised it high above his head. His face turned to crimson and the veins on his neck stood out in bold relief as he prepared to sever the monk's head from its shoulders. "That is hell," said the old monk gently, just as the sword began its descent. In that fraction of a second, the samurai was overcome with amazement, awe, compassion and love for this gentle being who had dared to risk his very life to give him such a teaching. He stopped his sword in mid-flight and his eyes filled with grateful tears and begged forgiveness. "And that," said the monk, "is heaven."
I think meditation and religion keep "normal" people from harming themselves or others. nothing wrong with that. The question is why ?
I think that is the present day primary benefit of religion. Not sure it's the sole intended purpose but I think that would have to be answered separately for each religion.
Religion is responsible for more wars than politicians and kings put together, and millions upon millions of deaths throughout history... they dont really have a great record in this regard The single greatest benefit of meditation... and the reason everyone should do it in my opinion is the effect that even a single meditator has on the collective unconscious... you add to the greater good of the whole world and all 7 billion people every time you meditate... there is a line of thinking that once enough people meditate regularly then a critical mass of consciousness will occur and all will be enlightened... wouldn't that be nice
To let such infuriatingly stupid comments pass by without losing composure -- this is one aspect of zen.
To put my two cents in: It's easy for words and terms to shift in meaning over time. But it can be fun to see how they translate in other cultures to compare with our english. I'm no scholar, but certain words, when they're not taken literally, can be like fingers pointing to the moon. The word for meditation in tibetan means to 'familiarize' and the word for religion means ' the way of reality.' Why do it? In order to familiarize and recognize the nature of mind and reality. It's true, the first benefit is maybe we can stop harming ourselves and others, or as one teacher put it: ".......stop shitting in public." That'll be the day! Then when those darn veils of ignorance get lifted, you know those crazy habits of believing in a solid permanent 'I' that doesn't truly exist, and 'my territory' etc., maybe we could actually help somebody! :eek:
The practice of not letting the mind dwell will help correct these effects. When the mind dwells, the object is magnified and becomes part of the conscious. The unclean conscious will then subjugate the cleaner unconscious leading to the sickness of the mind.
IMO religion is BS, I'll assume you meant "meditation and spirituality". Why are they effective, because they bring you closer to peace, closer to your source. Being in this state more often will help you cope w/ trading stressors, especially when learning to trade. There are other tools like NLP that can help give you leverage over mental road blocks and fine tune your focus. It's all good stuff, but I contend that if you're a good trader, you have your setup, that's all that matters. Just manage the risk. Not to say trading is as easy as reciting the alphabet, but at times it is. Qualifying a trade can be just like reciting the alphabet, even drunks can do that once the alphabet has been imprinted.
Very Good. LOL. You might have noticed that mediation and trading hasn't really been a topic for a while. We're dealing with a person who has read a lot about mysticism and knows little about science. Sadly, also not a book of science. Another book that simply fools those too ignorant to do the work themselves (Buddha suggested that as well as ignoring all your mystical crap). A scan of her other books (funny how authors of quasi-science/mysticism keep taking the suckers for their money) suggests this and one of her reviewers may have enough science to penetrate the bull: Badly misinformed science, December 2, 2002 Reviewer: A reader The basis of this book is that consciousness can be explained as a Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms in the neurons. Interesting idea, sadly impossible. Bose-Einstein condensates can only exist at very low temperatures. The inside of the brain certainly doesn't qualify. The authors could've easily established the impossibility of their claim by looking up B-E condensates in any textbook on statistical mechanics. Time to get the thread to ChitChat