--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Share Long <sharelong60@...> wrote:
> Yesterday driving back from Iowa City I chuckled at my silly thought: Robin > should just do TM. But of course he has recently said that everything TM is > anathema to him. So then I thought of mindfulness as written about by Dr. Dan > Siegel in Mindsight. In his therapy practice, Dr. Siegel uses several forms > of mindfulness to help clients heal their physical brains even of genetically > based limitations and imbalances. > Some might ask with regard to Robin, what imbalances and limitations. Even > yesterday we see evidence of his brilliance. I agree. And yet for me the > questions have remained ever since the first upset between me and him around > the Russian flash mob youtube. Of course at that time I was still mostly > unfamiliar with boisterous forums like FFL and certainly with posters like > Robin. But his response to me then and his response to Bill now seem similar > to me in their self contradicting and confusing quality. Then I realized that > this is what happens when Robin gets triggered. > Triggered is a New Age word. In ancient times the village shaman would have > been consulted. The jyotishi would have done yagyas for retrograde Mercury 3 > degrees from exalted Sun. In the Dark Ages they would have spoken of > possession. In the last century they spoke of lunacy and threw people into > horrible institutions. Nowadays big pharma offers all kinds of meds to help > the brain. Too bad about the side effects such as destroying one's liver in > the process! Anyway, post New Age, experts like Dr. Siegel focus on brain > chemistry and neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to be healed > naturally. We are so fortunate that now there are powerful non drug ways to > heal the brain. Hopefully even of any ongoing harm from LSD. > Robin, I am saying all this because you said that you are using FFL to > understand what happened to you and to make sense of your life now. I'm > hoping that what I say helps with that. And I'm trying to understand myself > too in all this FFL extravaganza and our upsets in particular. > I liked the point that I think laughinggull made yesterday and will use my > own words: that it could well be that Robin is different in 3D life than he > is in FFL. For sure this is true of us all. Anyway, I'm just saying that > something like TM or mindfulness might provide the final strokes of healing > needed beyond the work Robin has done for the past 25 years. I mostly meditate with TM, but a few years ago it strangely started to morph into something like mindfulness. I would just sit there silently, not moving, not starting the mantra; the mantra seemed like too much effort to even consider beginning. there has been an odd shift in the dynamic of thought and silence, difficult to explain what it is. It is as if the mantra undoes the silence, pulls things to a more active experience. So sometimes that is what I do, just nothing. Now Barry is of the opinion that Robin has NDP. I have known people with schizophrenia. While learning and practicing TM briefly, one of these people expressed a fear that if thoughts disappeared, then he/she would also disappear. This is also a common experience that people have, at least when they do mindfulness meditation, that the identity they have built around what they do and what they think they are starts to vanish. Based on my experience, this is also what happens with TM. The change in identity seems more graceful with TM than with mindfulness. I recall Charlie Lutes talking about his obsession with football games - he knew all the coaches and players on the team he supported, was a big fan - and after meditating for a while he discovered it no longer interested him - it became just a bunch of people butting heads together. For some losing the persona wrapped around what one does and believes can be difficult. Meditators can develop a new personal wrapped around meditation which is just like the older one, but with new meditation-spiritual parameters. That one has to go too. The small self does not really become the big self, rather the small self, which is a delusion, vanishes when the delusion is removed. That leaves the 'big self', that is just reality, which has always been there. If Robin's ego is involved here, and his whole identity is wrapped around being some kind of personal ontology, I would think there would be a lot of resistance to that personal ontology being whacked into oblivion. I mean, he went through something like this once. I think he had a mystical unifying experience but not real unity. It did not work out, and now he is back with the personal, but slightly more contrite Robin. But having him do TM or mindfulness seems like asking him to take another shot at just what he has been trying to avoid all these years. Moving him in the direction of enlightenment will ultimately permanently take out his personal ontology. These techniques empty out the ego eventually - when you go for enlightenment, even if you do not realise it, you have taken out a contract to assassinate the ego, to assassinate your individual persona. And its perfectly legal since it is all in the head. A very abstract version of suicide. So if Robin wants a personal relationship with God, or with 'X', that objective reality he talks about, meditating is going to eventually make that next to impossible because the nature of unity is to subsume all relationships into a fullness where everything is so intimately connected that it is all experienced as 'the same thing', as the same basic stuff; relationship issues such as 'me' relating to 'not me' go out the window. If his brain has non-standard wiring though, the process might go awry in ways that are unexpected in the same way those with diagnosed mental diseases might be unable to practice meditative techniques without undesirable effects. For example people with schizophrenia can have very strange thoughts, and meditating can increase the quantity and strangeness of there experience, it can fracture experience further. Robin though, shows no sign of schizophrenia as far as my limited knowledge of the disease would indicate. But maybe there is something else that would endanger the process. If Barry's suggestion were true, do we have any evidence that meditation can cure NDP? What do you think Share?
