His brain querned until he brought it under control. Damn it, Trig was right, there was no reason on God's earth ever to tense any muscle not actually working; and the same held true for the mind. An emotional stew would grind him down and get him to the Bishop no sooner.
It was a hard discipline, though. Kintyre had no urge to embrace Zen Buddhism, or any other faith for that matter; but he would have given much to possess the self-mastery it taught.
-copied from the above link.
You do not need to believe in supernatural entities or in rebirth.
"Faith" can be trust in meditation.
Do not try to control the brain.
Let it quern.
Let go of each thought.
Watch thoughts flow and pass.
12 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
More prosaically, what * I * was of how Manse Everard DID get that kind of training at the Time Patrol's academy. And with nothing being said about either Buddhism or learning methods of contemplation.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
That's right. Buddhism is just one tradition. Others are Taoism and Yoga.
Paul.
You can't really stop your brain from generating thoughts, or your body from feeling pain.
What you can do in both cases (it's harder in the latter) is deliberately stop paying much attention. It's when you "stop something on the way through" that it starts interfering with you. You get into self-reinforcing feedback loops.
Indeed.
Letting go of self-reinforcing feedback loops is an excellent description of zazen. I have been practicing this since 1985 and am maybe beginning to understand it. My only (spiritual) question is how deeply can I practice this before the final whistle of death, not will I reap some reward from it after death? No. I am a materialist. In any case, the Buddhist teaching refers only to the continuation of some karmic consequences, not to the survival of a soul.
The recipient of the karmic consequences (consequences of actions), according to the teaching, is a later organism, not a continuing self. Obviously, our actions have some consequences that continue after our deaths so there is some point to the teaching.
Kaor, Paul!
But I don't believe these Buddhist ideas are literally RIGHT. That is, I believe your spirit and consciousness will survive death.
Ad astra! Sean
It's a very odd feeling when you get your brain to "reclassify" pain as just another physical sensation, like heat or cold. I've been working on this for a long time, and I remember vividly the first time I really managed it, lo these many years ago.
It was in the dojo, and I broke a bone in my foot (right big toe, still crooked) when someone blocked and my toe ran right into their fist.
I knew it was pain, but it just sort of... flowed through. It was there, but it didn't -matter- and I went right on with the bout. Then I looked down and noticed the swelling.
There's a related feeling when you let a thought or emotion "flow through". Instead of, for example, getting angry, there's this flash of physical sensation, the physical sensation of anger, but it just rolls on by. It's there, but it doesn't -matter-, and your mind just notices it and proceeds.
This discussion is clarifying my understanding of the zazen that I have been practicing since 1985.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
In a very MINOR way, I've done somewhat similar things. That is, I have had injuries and I sometimes carried on with what I had been doing, instead of stopping. Very minor, mind you! I would not have been so stoic if I had been seriously hurt.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it's basically a matter of mental technique. It's not the same as stoicism; almost the opposite in fact, since you're sort of administering a mental form of anesthetic.
Opioids like morphine have a rather similar effect -- it's not that you're not aware of the pain, you just don't -care- as much. It becomes irrelevant. Both the drug and the mental technique redirect certain levels of your consciousness.
Everyone does this to some degree; increasing the degree is basically a matter of concentration and practice.
One of my sensei put it as: "When thinking, just think. When acting, just act. Don't dither."
It's the hesitation, the thinking about thinking about thinking, that produces the negative effects that get in your way. Eg., fear is a process of anticipation that jerks you back from commitment to action. By learning to "just act" regardless, you're not conquering fear, you're rendering it irrelevant, just something that passes through your mind without cluttering things up or grabbing your attention.
Your body/mind is a set of capacities, of interacting patterns. They run by themselves to a certain extent, but you can use practice and a certain type of concentration to make them harmonize better and run better.
Practicing kata properly has much the same effect as typing. The practical aspect is that in a relevant situation (a practice bout, or a fight) you can just implement these automatic patterns without -thinking- about them. Sort of like touch-typing, but applied to a wider range of actions.
You're still -thinking- but you're thinking -relevantly-, about which pattern to use and how to implement it. You don't have to think: "knife-hand block to the arm, two-knuckle strike to the armpit, follow through with a foot-sweep to the back of the knees", you sort of trigger it and it happens.
The physical and the mental are closely linked, but the flow can be two-way. For example, there are drugs that are used to treat OCD, and therapies that involve behavioral/psychological modifications.
They both affect the actual tissues of the brain, and in much the same way. Two ways to do the same thing.
Mental techniques involving emotion and cognition are similar. To use the example of touch-typing again, you're doing a whole slew of things at once. You're exercising the physical skill, you're selecting which letters to type -- with a sub-level of your consciousness -- and you're composing and before that thinking of what you want to say, all at the same time.
This is much more broadly applicable, but it's a similar process.
As an example of the process, I can affect my blood-pressure deliberately, to an extent. I physically relax, pattern my breathing, and use certain mental images -- drops falling into still water is one I find useful, though it's a bit of a stereotype. After a few minutes, my blood-pressure drops noticeably.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for your very interesting comments. They do fit in with what happened to me a few times, in a minor way. Briefly, something painful happened to me and instead of stopping or hesitating, I continued with what I had been doing. But not to such an advanced degree as the level of self control you had reached.
Ad astra! Sean
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