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August 07, 2019

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Mindfulness seems so boring, where as this- this is RSSB and ECKANKAR on steriods...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQjAIlFZWWc.
Now that guy knows how to teach. The others are pretenders, caught in the monkey mind , unable to go beyond. So they sit in their self created world of mental gymnastics,jumping jumping jumping from one thought to another.

I sometimes listen to dhamma talks during meditation time. Ajahn Amaro is one of my favorites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LZEd3QbXZ8

"I do agree with Harris that trying to change how we feel, as if we were a disobedient dog that needs training, is counter-productive."

And yet that's what we are doing when we tell ourselves to be in the moment...

"Fido! Heel!"

Same thing.

I see mindfulness basically as awareness training, countering the habit we have of over-thinking and perhaps more importantly our habit of automatically reacting to thoughts and situations based on cultural, national, religious (and numerous other sources) conditioning.

Most of our troubles and those of the world at large stem from group and personal agendas. Our heads are stuffed with an enormous amount of information and from this we form an identity, a self. We are rarely aware of the reactionary way in which we act out some of our agendas, often causing ourselves and others much conflict.

Without going into the various causes and outcomes of our unconscious agendas, to be able to really see for a moment where and how our reactions arise is to allow the possibility of letting them go – where appropriate.

Its not about changing how we think and feel but of being aware of those feelings. Psychologists make a lot of money helping us come to terms with our troublesome thoughts and feelings. As humans we have the ability of being aware of our own mentation. But perhaps because we have been so conditioned and manipulated by our human environment (our various belief systems), we now have such huge investments in maintaining the self structures imposed upon us - we are incapable of change.

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