Rewiring?

Are Buddhist practice and other forms of meditation rewiring for the next evolutionary step?

Does meditation begin to reprogram the hard-wired fear auto-response.

Are all the lowering-stress practices merely indoctrination, a denial of a harsh society. Is death denying is part of today's unreality?

Hope thus becomes a stressor, a perpetuation of illusion, a rejection of the real.

Do practices like Buddhist meditation dim the amplitude of the switch between stress and resisting acting on the stress, creating consonance?

I wonder.

Reality is a fractal ...

Reality is a fractal in motion, self-similar, iterative, with fractional dimension, ... for recursive I-making.

Composting my discontents

Pride in compost from a satisfied green gardener made me wish I had such a close-by way to not waste. Somehow that idea of converting decomposition into renewal remained in my thoughts, waiting for an implementation. How, I wondered can I develop composting for what I no longer need. I began to think of breaking down and recycling discontents and distresses that I'm not using, releasing them as their components, and taking back in ways to fertilize myself with an intention to synchronize with flow. I found the way to do this very close-by, on my meditation cushion, breathing out in, disassembled, what I didn't need, and breathing in alignment.

A yellow lobster has been caught

Yellow lobsters, black swans

Next will be a purple fawn.

Indefinite ...

Dawn, lawn, pawn, con, gone.

Evidence resistance and cognitive dissonance

Kathryn Schultz urges, in Being Wrong, “Recall Leon festinger, who found that failed prophecies often lead to an upsurge in faith.” (p 204)

So also with the prophecies of risk and danger which incite the advocates of coercion-masked-as-treatment - - - the more force fails, the more they organize to increase the amount and scope of commitment.

Coaching, counseling and listening

I’ve been reading discussions about psychiatric coercion- services which are contingent on accepting a diagnosis, taking meds; providers using leverage for compliance. On a peer provider list, there was a post about motivation counseling, that because it was subtly suggestive, motivating towards a suggested goal (maybe med compliance), that it’s coercion was insidious. The conclusion was that reflective listening is non-coercive, allowing persons to find their own truth, thus was what peers should provide to each other.

I agree that many people who cope with mood swings, fear, voices and visions need to find our own voice, hear ourselves, that reflective listening helps a lot with that. But I also think that only listening to one’s own voice is a closed universe, one is trapped by one’s own limitations and experience. To me, expecting reflective listening to be enough for change and growth seems as if I were to introspect long enough I would be able to be able suddenly to have the insight to speak Parsi. I think there’s a hostility in refusing to offer suggestions, a condescension, a retaining of the power imbalance. I think coaching and therapy fail if they insist on working within a finite personal field.

The telephone trumps

The telephone trumps

At the end of my street is a home with an extra large gated driveway entrance and parking area. The people who live their open and close the gate with remotes, and when the gate is closed, their protective dog plays in that space and barks when cars or neighbors come too near.

Early this morning a service truck drove up to the gate, the dog started barking as the truck approached, the truck stopped but didn’t back way, the dog barked and barked and barked until I got up and went to the window and watched the standoff. A woman came out of the house, shushed the dog, said to the driver “There’s nothing I can do. I’m on a call. To Europe.” She let go of the dog, the dog barked, the woman went back into the house, the truck backed away, turned, drove off, the dog quieted, went our of my sight to the back of the house.

And I stood thinking. Why does a telephone call trump live situations? Why is a call to Europe important now that phone connectivity is everywhere and calls cost little? Why didn’t the woman take the dog into the house? What did the truck want - was it a service she had requested and she’d reschedule? And here I am still thinking, but mostly that her priority was so strongly the phone call she was on over the obstructing the truck and noise disturbing the neighborhood (or only me).The telephone trumps

At the end of my street is a home with an extra large gated driveway entrance and parking area. The people who live their open and close the gate with remotes, and when the gate is closed, their protective dog plays in that space and barks when cars or neighbors come too near.

Early this morning a service truck drove up to the gate, the dog started barking as the truck approached, the truck stopped but didn’t back way, the dog barked and barked and barked until I got up and went to the window and watched the standoff. A woman came out of the house, shushed the dog, said to the driver “There’s nothing I can do. I’m on a call. To Europe.” She let go of the dog, the dog barked, the woman went back into the house, the truck backed away, turned, drove off, the dog quieted, went our of my sight to the back of the house.

And I stood thinking. Why does a telephone call trump live situations? Why is a call to Europe important now that phone connectivity is everywhere and calls cost little? Why didn’t the woman take the dog into the house? What did the truck want - was it a service she had requested and she’d reschedule? And here I am still thinking, but mostly that her priority was so strongly the phone call she was on over obstructing the truck and the noise disturbing the neighborhood (or only me).