'Taxius, you make this shit up, and I have no idea where it comes from. WTF do you mean, I have no need for compassion?! That is so...crazy. When I am not commenting (and sometimes cursing) on FFL, I enjoy a wonderful marriage, and being with my daughter, other relatives, and friends - Believe me, I am NOT some stone cold fool, off this forum. I lead a full, engaged life, with many wishes for success, and an abundance of love, both given and received. I enjoy a unique means of expression, here, broaching subjects and views, that if not accepted, are at least discussed and challenged. I DO NOT live my life, according to statements I make, about my liberation, my enlightenment, here on FFL, to the many people I have relationships with. I live a normal and natural life, the guy picking up a sixer of Mexican Coke (contains real sugar, not corn syrup), at the Safeway. I never see known 'spiritual teachers' or watch them on TV, or the net, or read books about God or spirituality or spiritual teachers, or associate with meditating, spiritual, or religious groups. Haven't been to a TM Center in almost twenty years. I have been at this spiritual life for nearly forty years, and aside from what I enjoy expressing here, the rest has long since been integrated, invisibly, into a normal life -- couldn't pick me out of a line-up. Hope that helps.:-)
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : Not likely, but why pray? How is that going to change the situation as you perceive it? I do have a certain tolerance for Jim; unlike Barry, I do read some of his posts, though their usual brevity and emotional coarseness is a turn off. (Barry's emotional coarseness is also sometimes a turn off, but I do not perceive him to have a genuine attachment to it, so mostly it is just fun.) Compassion for Jim is not necessary, he is enlightened by his own account, therefore not in need of it. I would have better understanding if he was a little more clarifying about his experience. Sympathy is generally worthless as it just imitates someone's suffering or discomfort, or coddles their conditioning, which is what we desire to minimise. CYNIC: a person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honourable or unselfish reasons. I am probably more of a fatalist than a cynic. I am more of a sceptic than a cynic. I think people are motivated by those forces we call laws of nature, and that there is not a real entity in there performing the action. Rather there is an elegant machine with inputs and outputs, and getting the mind of the machine, the processes of the machine to realise it is a machine is of paramount importance for its happiness, satisfaction, and contentment; and from this arises tolerance, compassion, understanding, and with some machines, even sympathy. If one is laid back enough, tolerance is a given. Compassion is recognising a situation for what it is so one can focus on the best possible resolution of difficulties so that the experience of what is, at the very least, most real, opens into experience; this does not necessarily imply any sympathy if it prolongs inconsonate, conditioned behaviour. Understanding requires some input, and there are certain situations where understanding simply cannot be assimilated so one must act in a more cursory fashion, and with probably less satisfactory results. There are many things I do not understand; the world is wide and vast beyond the grasp of the human intellect except in bits and pieces one at a time. If I have no heart, this is the way nature made my mind; you will need the tolerance to accept that for it is not in the power of a fictional entity to change the machine. People assume TM will change all these things, but in practice this does not seem to be the case most of the time, people remain more or less the same. Enlightenment is not about change. It is about what is always the same. Enlightenment does not change these things. Behaviour modification might, but this often does not come about by an act of will but by outside imposition, such as provided by being surrounded by the mores of an organisation or community; and often here, it is just token acceptance, not an actual change. The reason you have all these so-called moral rules in religion, is faith, belief, and even technical practice — ritual, spiritual techniques — does not much alter human nature. Prison tends not to alter human behaviour, and social conventions form a psychological prison that has much the same effectiveness — that is, practically none, for if the stops are removed, all hell breaks loose. So if a person is to be 'good', then probably that body has to be born that way and will flow naturally along those lines of behaviour; and those that are not, well, we see them everyday. Rotten thoughts come from the source of thought, whatever that may be, just as easily as 'good' thoughts. The TMO simply removes those from the roster who fail to conform to the allegedly predicted results of meditation, and hopes nobody notices the change. The higher up in the organisation though, persistence rather than removal seems to be the rule. Would another, deeper awakening result in a looser, more compassionate emotional tenancy for 'me'? It might or it might not; I have no idea; I do not know what remains of and for my life, I just know it goes forward and it has been satisfactory for some time. It is now time for me to sit very quietly for awhile. I do this from habit and it seems to correlate with what I would call improvements in my grasp of life, but from this point on, as it has been for the last decade or so, how that might or might not unfold is a complete mystery to me. Allow me the space to have this happen. Prayer is not necessary, for nature takes its course in any case. All beings revolve as if mounted on a machine. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <steve.sundur@...> wrote : I will pray for you taxius, that maybe you will be able to get out of your head a little, and into your heart a little, and then you will understand the tenants of tolerance, compassion, understanding, and sympathy. These are worthwhile emotions dude. I am not sure how you culture them, but for sure you don't culture them by a certain hard cynicism we often see here. It's not complicated. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : Don't you think this last sentence is a bit presumptuous? I mean, you are enlightened and all that, and can tell the rest of us how enlightened or unenlightened we are, but how do you determine how rich a person's experience is, other than your own? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <steve.sundur@...> wrote : I will pray for you taxius, that maybe you will be able to get out of your head a little, and into your heart a little, and then you will understand the tenants of tolerance, compassion, understanding, and sympathy. These are worthwhile emotions dude. I am not sure how you culture them, but for sure you don't culture them by a certain hard cynicism we often see here. It's not complicated. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : Don't you think this last sentence is a bit presumptuous? I mean, you are enlightened and all that, and can tell the rest of us how enlightened or unenlightened we are, but how do you determine how rich a person's experience is, other than your own?