Mindfulness

Limerence 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

I write to you from inside the storm,
and from the doorway where I watch it form.
I have loved you mostly inside my head,
a theater of scenes that never get said.
You appear, then vanish, a flickering sign,
and my heart runs after what is never quite mine.
I call this love, but it burns like a fever,
a vow to a ghost and a distant believer.
I rewind small moments until they all blur,
a glance, a breath, the way you never were.
You stay perfected, framed in my mind,
and I fade smaller just to keep you kind.
I have abandoned myself chasing your name,
walking over glass while calling it flame.
Each silence from you becomes a loud judge,
each crumb of regard, a banquet I won’t budge.
Your armor is heavy, your doors stay closed tight,
yet I camp at the gate, praying you’ll turn toward the light.
You retreat into distance, I rush into fire,
thinking if I burn enough, you’ll feel desire.
I have studied our pattern like scripture and code,
watched it etch scars in my nervous road.
You step back whenever I try to draw near,
and I step in closer every time you disappear.
The gap between us is more than just space,
it’s all of my effort poured into your grace.
Now a new voice trembles under my skin,
asking why I keep losing myself to not win.
It tells me love is not meant as a chase,
not an endless exam I must constantly ace.
It whispers my worth is older than you,
that my pulse didn’t start when you came into view.
So I gather my pieces from altars and floors,
and start closing shrines with your name on their doors.
I turn these letters inward for the first time,
writing truth to the self I left out in the grime.
I step back, not to wound or accuse,
but to finally stop making myself the one I lose.
I still ache, I still want, I still remember your face,
yet the fantasy no longer gets to set the pace.
I walk away on unsteady, unfamiliar legs,
carrying both my longing and unanswered begs.
Somewhere beyond this unfinished, jagged bend,
something real may rise—if I dare not write the end.

RSP

…

DCG

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If/then: a philosophical treaties on Empirical observation in epistemology 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Prologue

This poem examines what it means to observe, to remember, and to imagine within the limits of human awareness. It follows a chain of simple “if–then” reasoning to explore how perception shapes reality, how memory reshapes the past, and how expectation invents the future. It does not claim answers, but traces consequences—drawing from ideas in physics, psychology, and everyday experience—to invite reflection on what we truly know when we say we are present.

If time is a line we feel but never see,
Then now is the only place our mind can be.
If light can act as wave until we stare,
Then what we watch may change what is there.
If measurement turns the spread into a point,
Then seeing may fix what was once disjoint.
If the observer plays a hidden role,
Then knowing may shape what we call whole.
If we can only stand inside the now,
Then all that we know must happen somehow.
If each thought is bound to present sight,
Then past and future are made in this light.
If memory is built from fragile trace,
Then truth may bend as we give it a face.
If minds rebuild what they think they recall,
Then stories of self may not be all.
If witnesses often disagree,
Then memory is less than certainty.
If the brain fills gaps it cannot see,
Then fiction may feel like history.
If we imagine a future ahead,
Then we walk through thoughts, not paths we tread.
If fear can paint what has not come,
Then the future can feel already done.
If we compare ourselves with those we meet,
Then identity forms from what we see on the street.
If aging is known by watching others decay,
Then we borrow time in a secondhand way.
If the body changes beyond our control,
Then time writes its mark on the living whole.
If the mind resists what it cannot keep,
Then loss becomes a thought we bury deep.
If we observe ourselves as we think,
Then we stand both inside and at the brink.
If self-awareness splits the view in two,
Then we are both the watcher and the view.
If attention selects what we hold tight,
Then reality narrows within our sight.
If what we ignore fades into the blur,
Then absence can feel like it never were.
If focus acts like a quiet gate,
Then what gets through may shape our fate.
If perception is filtered before it is known,
Then the world we see is partly our own.
If language frames the thoughts we keep,
Then words decide how ideas speak.
If simple terms can carry deep weight,
Then meaning can grow without ornate state.
If emotion colors what we perceive,
Then feeling decides what we believe.
If fear and hope both guide the eye,
Then truth may shift as they pass by.
If logic follows what we assume,
Then flawed first steps can lead to gloom.
If we test belief with careful doubt,
Then clearer paths may sort things out.
If science shows limits in what we can know,
Then certainty is softer than we show.
If quantum rules suggest chance at the base,
Then order may rise from a shifting place.
If randomness lives beneath the seen,
Then control is less than it may seem.
If cause and effect still guide our day,
Then patterns help us find a way.
If we learn from error and revise our view,
Then growth is built from what is not true.
If each mistake can refine the mind,
Then wisdom is error redesigned.
If we live through moments one by one,
Then life is never fully done.
If each “now” replaces the last we knew,
Then we are always becoming new.
If identity shifts with time and thought,
Then the self is a process, not a spot.
If we cling to who we think we are,
Then change may feel like a distant star.
If awareness can soften rigid belief,
Then seeing clearly may bring relief.
If we accept limits in what we know,
Then honest thought can still grow.
If meaning is made from how we attend,
Then purpose depends on the lens we send.
If we choose where our focus will stay,
Then we help shape our lived display.
If reality meets us through mind and sense,
Then truth includes both world and lens.
If we question gently what we assume,
Then thought can open a wider room.
If no final answer is firmly sealed,
Then wonder remains unrevealed.
If we stand in the present, aware but unsure,
Then the human condition remains obscure.
:::

DCG

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A wound that we carried became the Crusade 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

The Poem

We think that we argue with logic and light,
But the war in the room is invisible — inside.
You’re not fighting a fact when you’re fighting tonight,
You are fighting the person who lives in their pride.
A belief isn’t held like a book on a shelf,
It is worn like a skin, like a name, like a scar.
To challenge the idea is to challenge the self,
And the self will defend itself, near or far.
So the harder you push, the more deeply they dig,
The more certain they feel as you prove them all wrong.
The argument planted a doubt that grew big,
So they held to their story, they made it more strong.
We were not born with these views fully made,
We were broken by something we never could say.
A wound that we carried became the crusade,
An old pain became armor we carry today.
The emotion came first — long before the belief,
Before the philosophy, before the firm stand.
An experience seeking its narrative relief,
A trembling heart reaching for somewhere to land.
And reason arrived like a lawyer retained,
To argue a case that was already won.
The verdict was settled, the jury was trained,
The mind was the courtroom — and so it was done.
No study was needed, no figure, no chart,
The judgment was carved in the marrow and bone.
You cannot reach someone by way of their mind
When the road that you need runs directly through heart.
So if you would reach them, don’t carry a sword,
Don’t marshall your data, don’t build up your case.
Sit still for a moment, and pull up a chair,
And ask them the question that opens a space.
Not “why are you wrong?” but “where did this start?
What part of your living convinced you of this?”
For that is the doorway — not proof and not art,
But the quiet of wondering what you might miss.
The mind will change only when something in it
Grows curious enough to consider the cost.
Not when it’s beaten, not when it’s been hit,
But when it decides that it’s willing to cross.
We don’t change our minds when we lose in the fight,
We change when we’re curious enough to explore.
Not when we’re shamed in the merciless light,
But when we feel safe enough to open the door.
So speak to the wound that first seeded the thought,
Speak to the human behind what they claim.
The battle of argument cannot be fought

When the person defending is fighting their name.

…

DCG

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Analysis of the Core Statements
This argument rests on five interlocking ideas:

  1. Belief is identity — People do not hold beliefs the way they hold opinions about pizza. They fuse beliefs with who they are.
  2. Arguments feel like attacks — When you challenge the belief, the person experiences it as a personal assault on the self, triggering defensive entrenchment.
  3. Emotion precedes reason — Beliefs are not constructed from facts up. They are built from emotional experiences first, and reason is recruited afterward to justify them.
  4. Emotional pain seeds belief — Prior wounds, fears, and lived pain create fertile ground for specific beliefs to take hold — the belief soothes or explains the pain.

5. Curiosity, not argument, changes minds — When people do shift their views, it is not because they were defeated in debate. It is because genuine curiosity about why you believe what you believe created an opening.

Scientific Support — The Research is Robust
Jonathan Haidt — The Elephant and the Rider
Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model is the cornerstone study here. Haidt’s decades of research, summarized in The Righteous Mind (2012), demonstrated that moral and political beliefs are driven primarily by gut-level intuition — the emotional “elephant” — while conscious reasoning functions as a press secretary for the elephant, constructing post-hoc justifications. According to his Moral Foundations Theory, people are “morally dumbfounded” — they know something feels wrong but cannot explain why, which proves the emotion came first.
Dan Kahan — Identity-Protective Cognition
Dan Kahan of Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project coined the term “identity-protective cognition” — the unconscious tendency to process evidence in ways that shield one’s group identity rather than reach accurate conclusions. Critically, his research shows that higher intelligence and science literacy actually amplify this effect. Smarter people are better at motivated reasoning — they construct more sophisticated defenses of beliefs they were never willing to change.
Claude Steele — Self-Affirmation Theory
Steele’s landmark 1988 work at Stanford established that the self-system is constantly engaged in maintaining a sense of moral and adaptive adequacy. When beliefs tied to identity are threatened, the entire self feels threatened, not just the idea. The self mobilizes defensively. Sherman and Cohen’s extensions of this work confirmed that reducing this self-threat — through affirmation — is one of the only reliable ways to open a person to reconsidering a belief.
Leon Festinger — Cognitive Dissonance
Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory (1957) laid the groundwork: people experience genuine psychological discomfort when new information conflicts with held beliefs, and they work to eliminate that discomfort — most often by rejecting the new information rather than changing the belief.
Nyhan & Reifler — The Backfire Effect
Nyhan and Reifler (2010) documented the “backfire effect” — corrections to political misinformation sometimes caused people to believe the false claim more strongly. While later meta-analyses by Wood and Porter (2019) found the effect is less universal than originally claimed, the core dynamic — resistance to correction under conditions of identity threat — is thoroughly supported.
NIH Neuroscience — Belief as Self-Referential Processing
A 2024 NIH neuroimaging study found that challenges to political beliefs activate the brain’s Default Mode Network — specifically the regions governing self-referential processing and introspection. The brain literally treats a political argument the same way it treats a threat to the self.
APA — Curiosity as a Change Agent

APA research on curiosity and practical communication analysis confirm your final point: curiosity — not argument — is the lever of genuine persuasion. A conversation that induces curiosity about why you believe what you believe creates the only real opening for change.

The Concise Argument

We do not argue about facts. We argue about who we are.
Beliefs are not ideas we carry — they are identities we inhabit. When someone challenges your belief, your nervous system does not register it as a debate. It registers it as a threat to the self. You don’t think your way to a belief; you feel your way there first, often through pain, loss, or fear that needed an explanation. Reason arrives after the fact to build the case. This is why more facts, better arguments, and louder voices almost never change minds — they only harden them. The only documented pathway to genuine belief change is curiosity: a person’s own willingness to wonder why someone else sees the world differently. You cannot argue someone out of a position they did not argue themselves into.

Metacognition is the brain’s ability to monitor and evaluate its own mental processes (like perceptions, memories, and decisions) and use that self‑knowledge to guide behavior.[parisbraininstitute +3]
Brief summary of metacognition
In neuroscience, metacognition is often defined as “thinking about your thinking” or “cognition about cognition.” It involves monitoring how well you are perceiving, remembering, or deciding, and generating signals like confidence or doubt about your own performance. These metacognitive signals support skills such as noticing errors, adjusting strategies, controlling attention, and regulating emotions. Neuroimaging work links metacognition especially to frontal and prefrontal brain circuits, which are part of the broader executive control system and our sense of self‑awareness.[ac +7]
What the amygdala does in cognition
The amygdala is an almond‑shaped structure in the medial temporal lobe that is part of the limbic system. It is crucial for assigning emotional significance (especially threat, fear, and reward value) to stimuli and events, and for triggering appropriate physiological and behavioral responses. The amygdala contributes to several cognitive functions by acting as a salience detector: it influences attention, perception, learning, and memory, particularly for emotionally charged or motivationally relevant information. It also supports implicit emotional learning (like fear conditioning) and modulates how strongly emotional experiences are encoded and consolidated into memory.[nih +4]
Direct comparison
You can think of metacognition as a monitor of cognition: the anterior prefrontal cortex , whereas the amygdala is more of a tagger and driver of emotional salience in cognition.

One way to put it: metacognition watches and evaluates your thoughts, while the amygdala helps decide what in the environment “matters” emotionally and should capture your cognitive resources.[neurosciencenews +8]

The evidence shows that the amygdala functions much faster than the anterior prefrontal cortex processes

Let that sink in 

Still looking 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Still Looking

A poem for the people who have studied themselves and are still a little lost

I have been taking myself apart for years

and still I can’t explain the wreck

I know the diagrams, I’ve read the books

and still something’s caught in the neck

I’ve sat with therapists in quiet rooms

and walked out with the same old ache

the mirror offers nothing I don’t know

and still I can’t sleep when I wake

I know exactly how I pull away

I know the name of every wall

I built the taxonomy, laid it out flat

and then I went and did it all

There was a child who learned that love was leaving

who waited by a window every night

and when love finally stayed I found a reason

to stand up and turn off the light

The damage doesn’t stop when you discover it

it doesn’t care what you have named

it bleeds right through the bandage of your learning

and someone new gets stained

I’ve handed people maps of all my damage

said here’s the wound, here’s where it leads

and then I watched myself go right along

and plant the same old seeds

But something in the writing keeps me grounded

it pulls me back to what is real

not fixed, not freed, just willing to return

and say again what I still feel

There is a dignity in looking twice

in going back when nothing’s changed

the work is not the cure, the work is witness

a record of the strange

Fragility is not the proof of failure

the crack is where the light comes through

the fool who names his folly has more standing

than the one who never knew

I am not a villain for the wounds I carry

but I’m the one who gets to choose

I know the punchline now — it’s still worth laughing

at what I couldn’t bear to lose

About This Poem

I’ve been writing about myself for over fourteen years — the patterns, the contradictions, the gap between what I understand and what I actually do — and I still don’t have a tidy answer. That used to embarrass me. It doesn’t anymore, quite. What I’ve come to believe is that the examined life isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a practice to be kept. This poem is about the specific frustration of knowing yourself well and still finding yourself at the same old crossroads — and why I think that frustration, named honestly, is worth more than a false arrival. If you’ve ever read something about attachment or self-sabotage and thought yes, that’s exactly it and then watched yourself do the thing anyway, you already know what this poem is about. My blog and Substack, going on fourteen years now, are built for the people who are still in that gap — not defeated by it, just honest about it.

Who This Is For

For the people who feel things deeply but can’t always find the words — and for whom someone else’s words, when they land right, feel like being heard for the first time. For the people sitting in the middle distance between belief and doubt, between knowing and doing, between who they were and who they’re trying to become. For anyone who has ever understood their own damage completely and still had to live through it anyway. That’s who I write for. That’s you.

…

DCG

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The four step structure of successful biblical prayers 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Grok AI’s Findings:

The 4-Step Structure of Successful Biblical Prayers


Researchers fed every recorded prayer in the Bible — from Genesis through Revelation — into Grok AI, instructing it to ignore symbolism, theology, and emotional content, and focus only on the sequential structure of speech acts. When it filtered for prayers the text itself described as answered (receiving a specific, observable outcome), a clear and consistent four-step protocol emerged. In 100% of “failed prayer” cases, at least one of the four steps was violated.


Step 1 — Recognition (Acknowledgment of God’s Nature)
The prayer begins not with the request, but with a deliberate recognition of who God is — His character, power, and past faithfulness. The AI found that prayers which opened with the petition itself showed a statistically lower rate of answered outcomes. The request always came second. Recognition came first, essentially establishing the “signal connection” before transmission.


Step 2 — Alignment (Reshaping the Request Around a Larger Purpose)
This is where the modern ego struggles most. The petitioner didn’t merely ask for what they personally wanted. Their desire was restructured — rewoven into God’s broader design — so that the personal need became an instrument of a larger purpose. Purely self-interested requests were consistently reformatted in answered prayers. The AI observed this as a form of “absolute alignment” — zero entropy in the request.


Step 3 — Surrender (The Paradox of Release)
The AI found a required “clause of release” — the person praying had to signal acceptance of any possible outcome, even one running against personal survival or their deepest desire. Prayers that insisted on a specific mechanism of rescue at any cost consistently failed or produced harmful outcomes. This step is described as the most unexpected finding: the willingness to release control was structurally required, not optional.


Step 4 — Persistence (Repetition Until Outcome)
Very few significant answered prayers in the Bible were single attempts. The pattern demanded repetition. Elijah prayed seven times for rain before a single cloud appeared. The AI labeled this “optimization of cognitive resources” — the structure was not about predicting what comes next, but preparing the person for whatever comes next through sustained engagement.

The AI’s conclusion was stark: the four-step sequence — Recognition, Alignment, Surrender, Persistence — behaved within the dataset not as a literary habit or stylistic guide, but as a constant, directly correlated with positive outcomes. The probability that such a correlation could appear across the entire biblical body of text by random coincidence was described as effectively beyond calculation.

The Statistical Case for Divine Authorship: 40 Authors, ~1,500 Years, 3 Languages


The Bible was written over approximately 1,500–1,600 years, by roughly 40 different authors, across 3 continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe), in 3 languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. These authors came from radically different backgrounds — kings, shepherds, fishermen, tax collectors, military generals, and prisoners — writing in wartime and peacetime, in prosperity and famine, in freedom and captivity.
Despite all of this, the 66 books form a single, unified narrative arc: creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and new creation — with consistent theology, interlocking prophecy, and thematic harmony from the first page to the last.


The Prophecy Probability Calculation
Mathematician and astronomer Peter Stoner — in his book Science Speaks, reviewed and validated by the American Scientific Affiliation — applied the modern science of probability to Messianic prophecy:


• For just 8 prophecies fulfilled in Christ: the probability of one man fulfilling them all by chance is 1 in 10¹⁷ (one in one hundred quadrillion). To visualize this, Stoner asked you to imagine covering the entire state of Texas two feet deep in silver dollars, marking one coin, stirring the entire mass, and blindfolding a man to pick the marked coin on his first reach.


• For 48 prophecies: the probability rises to 1 in 10¹⁵⁷ — a number with 157 zeros. Emile Borel, a leading authority on probability theory, stated that once a probability exceeds 1 in 10⁵⁰, it is considered a statistical impossibility in the observable universe. 10¹⁵⁷ is so far beyond that threshold it cannot be meaningfully compared.


• For over 300 Messianic prophecies fulfilled in Christ’s life — prophecies like the virgin birth (Isaiah 7:14), birth in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), betrayal for 30 pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12), and crucifixion described in Psalm 22:16 — centuries before crucifixion was even practiced — the mathematics become incomprehensible.


Why This Matters Statistically


As LifePoint Church explains it: if you took 40 random people from a library across 1,500 years, gave them no communication with each other, told them each to write independently on hundreds of controversial subjects — history, law, poetry, prophecy, science, ethics, biography — and then assembled all their writings, the probability of them forming one harmonious, non-contradictory, unified story is not merely improbable. It is a statistical impossibility by any mathematical standard.
The standard scientific threshold for impossibility is 1 in 10⁵⁰. The Bible exceeds that threshold thousands of times over in prophecy fulfillment alone — before even accounting for its structural, thematic, and linguistic unity across authors who never met each other.
The conclusion many scholars draw is the same one the Bible itself claims: there weren’t 40 authors. There were 40 writers — and one Author.

The case of Dane 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

In third grade, Dane held a guitar like morning light,
And sang old mountains through a classroom door.
A boy with questions hidden out of sight,
Already felt the world was asking more.
He watched the grown-ups smile through private rain,
And learned that silence had a human face.
He named no wound, but carried half its pain,
Then offered others tenderness and space.
Teenage years came dressed in doubt and fire,
With music keeping time beside his bed.
He chased approval, hunger, hope, desire,
And feared the words that people left unsaid.
He laughed too loud when loneliness drew near,
Then called it wisdom just to seem less weak.
But every joke concealed a sharper fear,
That love might leave the moment he would speak.
At school he studied why the heart defends,
Why reason bends when ego wants the throne.
He read of minds, of truth, of means and ends,
Yet found no book could save a man alone.
Philosophy gave names to restless nights,
Psychology gave mirrors to his scars.
He learned that pride can counterfeit as rights,
And wounded children steer adult-like cars.
In young adulthood, Dane mistook his ache
For proof that closeness must be tightly held.
He loved as though one absence meant a break,
And every pause became a sentence spelled.
An anxious thread ran burning through his chest,
While calmer voices told him not to chase.
He tried to hold what needed room to rest,
And saw his need reflected in her face.
Yet empathy would stop him at the line,
Where love becomes a cage with holy art.
He learned her freedom was not less than mine,
And mercy must protect another heart.
He worked, he failed, he stood, he fell again,
Paid bills, wrote poems, swallowed private shame.
He watched ambition masquerade as Zen,
Then saw humility outlive the game.
His strengths were not the absence of a flaw,
But how he turned to face what made him small.
He found that truth was not a perfect law,
But courage answering the inward call.
Later, with dimmer eyes and clearer sight,
He met the God he could not fit in thought.
Not thunder only, but a patient light,
That found him most when certainty was not.
The Bible did not end his need to know,
But taught his restless mind to kneel and breathe.
A seed must vanish somewhere dark to grow,
And peace may come through what we cannot seize.
So Dane still walks where old attachments stir,
Still flinches when affection feels delayed.
But names the fear before it speaks for her,
And lets compassion interrupt the blade.
He writes because the soul must testify,
That frailty is not failure, only clay.
He asks if meaning waits beyond the sky,
Or if it forms in how we live today.
And when the final page begins to bend,
Will Dane find home, or one more road to roam?
Is God the answer waiting at the end,
Or just the voice still calling Dane toward home?

…

DCG

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In the Absence of Worry

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

 

I have some very fond memories of a quiet weekend afternoon, sitting in the patio and listening to wind chimes sounding pleasantly as the wind gently evokes a chorus.  Meandering thoughts strike me as I relax in a semi nap attending to the peacefulness of the moment.  More often than not as a child, there were many times that we could enjoy the days without the worry of some troublesome problem.  Some of the most pleasurable memories seem to come from a time when our worry factor was minimized and our experience of the world was heightened.  The “Ignorance is Bliss” argument can be yielded, and for obvious reasons this assertion is often exerted, but this author is not in complete agreement with this notion, and to the contrary subscribes to mastering ones rational and emotional states as the better choice.  I hold much more value in the education and development of a person achieving mastery over one’s circumstance than to rely on ignorance itself as a prescription for a happier less worrisome life.

We are now in the “Age of Anxiety”, in that we as people are defined by the information age, we as people are defined by the technology of the day, and that we as people are defined by the diagnosis of our medical ailments.  Children for the most part do not worry about the social implications of what governs the society.  They are more concerned with their own lives within their family structures.  They deal with navigating their own family’s mores and how it affects them.  Children navigating their own way through every day problems has been minimized by increased parental involvement in the last few decades.  In general a child of earlier decades was much more “free” from a parental influence on many common experiences growing up even though ironically the parents were more commonly at home during that time.  Despite this background my experience was largely based on discovering my way through by trial and error without parental or sibling interaction.  I had to rely on resources I  alone discovered which was an impediment at times due to the struggle with my own particular ego-frailties and self-esteem.  But before some of these issues would bring themselves to light, as a child my immersion into the world was purer in form as an experience without all the previously mentioned attitude distractions.  The phenomenon of meeting the world in a purer experience is a remarkable experience.  If you have ever watched children play, the observance of their relation to the world is astonishing, and is a very natural way of being.  Devoid of worry, one’s relation to the world without barriers heightens one’s experience.  The case for children being more in touch with their experience in the world without worry can be advanced.

mornfull angel

Of course this is not always true, but the ability to focus on the present as a child was much easier for me than it is for me as an adult.  I noticed as I aged, by the time of my adolescence I began to become more aware of the world and how I fit in.  Many of the psychological barriers I had to overcome were the thoughts that one may not be good enough, the kind of self thoughts that prevent us from taking action spontaneously and thus these “Growing Pains” tended to fend off my natural tendencies and delayed my actions until my comfort level was stabilized.  This natural ability without self-censorship seems to fade with the matriculation into adulthood for many of us and it will take practice to once again regain that listening skill without the self-doubt and ego related issues that prevent us from acting correspondingly.  Attention to what is in front of us is often disregarded because of all of our agendas, calendars, and chores in many of our lives today.  Parent, care-giver, balance of family and work and self are all part of the equation that we deal with from a day-to-day schedule.  This has always been true for generations, but today we find ourselves amidst a host of distractions with added technologies that make it even easier to pull ones attention away for the surrounding milieu.

The loss of innocence can take a toll on those who do not heed.  The loss in question is the cultural dictates that often persuade us to think about other factors of our lives whilst not giving your full attention to the business at hand.  I think that the stillness of our minds attuned to our present moments can bring about a resonating harmony with the nature of things.  If even only for the recognition of a previous fond memory of a distant past, then we can benefit from such an accordance forming this bond that we may not have the pleasure to enjoy otherwise.

The skill to pay attention to those you listen with, the skill you prove when you listen and not just hear the other person without any personal commentary is a testament to how powerful that skill is in your social life, and to how you see the world in the moment.  Employing this skill will serve one well because people will take notice.  Some may respond correspondingly, and some may not, but they will take notice.  The same principle applies to our own minds watchful judgements.  We are ultimately in control over how we feel or think about the events we meet and how we receive them as experience.

The existence of joyful experiences to remember are those events that we break from the fear of judgmental social stigmas.  Think of the first time you danced with others without fear of judgement, or when you first performed on stage in front of others somehow subduing your jitters but still “the show must go on!”  The heightening of our experience lies in the pureness of that experience.  The taming of our minds can be very powerful and a function that we have control over.  In every phase of aging, there are plateau’s of experience that place you in new territory.  And with every age we come to meet new experiences that shape and develop our remembrance of it when they happen.  I think that we are most fond of those times that we meet the world on terms that do not relinquish to worry, renounce to fear or some other undermining emotion that strips us from the experience outside of our defining it with more emotional baggage.

This is why Buddhism created and developed the Eightfold Path.

» Right Understanding
» Right Thoughts
» Right Speech
» Right Action
» Right Livelihood
» Right Effort
» Right Mindfulness
» Right Concentration

 The understanding of how we affect our experience with the world and our relation to it is a primary fundamental starting point.  Returning to how the child naturally meets the world is very Buddhist.  The nature of the child’s mind does not impose many of the doctrines that we as adults subject to it before our experience takes place.  So I ask the reader, what makes your experiences special?  Do you remember times that seemed to be were more pure from your childhood than times in your adulthood?  If this is so, than shall we seek to sustain that kind of experience in our lives today?  Seems to be a daunting task for some of us, yet one that cannot easily be dismissed.  Look to your memories, look to your children, look to see that we all are able to meet a world in the absence with worry, no matter at what phase of life!

 

 

Mindfulness

~ DC ~ 1 Comment

two wolves After putting some thought on my current everyday experiences, I reflected a great deal about just what the root cause for some of my current perspectives were bound to.  Again the discovery of being “mindful” is an important factor in reexamining prior perspectives that may be operating in the background of our everyday thoughts.  While we manage our day to day experiences, our possible misdirected thoughts are fed into our analysis for each and every day and if they go unchecked, they will skew our conclusions.  The information we receive from the eyes don’t amount to much, if the mind is blind.  Being “Mindful” is being aware of the false conclusions one can draw if one is misdirected by prior incorrect habitual modes of thinking that may not be accurate.  They may indeed be formed earlier in ones life, but continue to influence that person through-out their lives if these principles in their analyses go unquestioned, unexamined, and unchallenged in the process.

The practice of attention enables one to wake up! Awareness transforms experience. There is no right or wrong way; there is only being more or less conscious. The goal is to become more fully conscious of ourselves, not to correct ourselves. Because they rely on memory, efforts at self-correction are always removed from the immediacy of the moment.
Jealousy – unconsciously give way to hatred. Struggle against it by thinking equates to guilt. We must instead examine the thought itself and attempt to understand the context. Thought and feelings can then become windows to awakening.

Right Thinking was examined by Gautama Buddha and incorporated in his Eightfold Path that reveals some of the challenges of how the mind can distort experience.

“Thoughts” as Emerson put it, “rule the world” for the simple reason that thoughts determine feelings and actions. We can think ourselves into happiness or a deep depression. Evidence can show that we can think ourselves into healthy state or into unhealthy illnesses.
We can think ourselves into a narrow, limited world characterized by procrastination and paralysis, or we can think ourselves into a noble creative life and the actions that give it shape and substance. If we only take care of our thoughts, our feelings and actions will take care of themselves.
For better or worse, we give to others the fruits of our own thinking by the same token, we are influenced by the thinking of those with whom we associate.  It certainly helps to make friends with people who have made friends with their own minds. Observe people who are chronically bored or depressed, and you will find they dwell on negative thoughts. Observe people who are consistently happy, creative, and productive, and you will find remarkable similarities in the quality of their thinking.  By our thinking, we create our individual and collective experience of reality.  Changing our thinking for the better improves the quality of our own lives, and in doing, uplifts all around us.

The subconscious patterns of thought that can emerge out of an individuals upbringing, training, or exposure from a previous time in their lives to ineffective measures of dealing with their experience in the world can duly proselytize that persons mind set.  What is even more difficult to circumvent is the dream states these people experience and are susceptible to unpleasant derivations of their conscious lives if the sleeping untrained mind continues to revert to the faulty subconscious training from an older learned program from the past when they dream.  Since they are unconscious in a dream state, the mind will resort to programming fed from the unconscious mind that often takes hold of their dreams.