Understanding Ourselves

How to Realize Benefits of Meditation in the Real World?

Published on by Jim

How to Realize Benefits of Meditation in the Real World? Part 2, Posted on: July 4th, 2012 by Rakesh Sethi

This is the second article by Rakesh on this topic.  Here are my comments I posted about it:

As I said in my comment on the first article, one benefit I have found from meditation is clarity of mind, which enables me to see the truth that sets me free to enjoy and love what life is offering. Part of that truth is watching how the human instrument, the mind/body instrument, works. For instance, I can watch as life produces stimuli to the body which in turn creates thoughts in the brain, which in turn creates reactions in the body, some of which we call emotions. I have also noticed that we can re-train or re-program the mind/body to react to stimuli and thoughts differently if we want a different experience. This is what I do mostly now in my meditations, I re-train the body/mind instrument to react to whatever stimuli life is offering with positive (healthy) emotions. The are lots of healthy side benefits of the practice that I could talk about another time.

I will add here that there are many health benefits to practicing positive emotions.  These include both mental and physical benefits.  I find that the more I practice positive emotions the more peaceful, relaxed, content and positive I feel and experience life as.  I can see why almost all spiritual traditions encourage people to practice positive emotions.

What is the True Purpose of Meditation?

Published on by Jim

What is the True Purpose of Meditation?. Posted on: November 13th, 2010 by Rakesh Sethi

This is a decent article about meditation, but I do not think the author has gone far enough, so I added my comments:

I have found that meditation calms the mind, brings inner peace, stillness and CLARITY.  It is with this clarity that I have been able to see the truth that sets me free to perfectly enjoy and love ALL that life has to offer.  For instance, I can see that virtually all the stress I experience is a product of MY REACTIONS to what life is offering: my thoughts and then my habitual emotional reaction to those thoughts.  A thought is really nothing more than an electro-chemical impulse traveling along the neurons of the brain and it cannot hurt me, it is only my reaction to the thought that can cause me stress or pain.

So I have changed my practice to include practicing positive emotional reactions to ALL thoughts.  So most of my “meditations” now focus in on practicing happiness, joy, love, peace and feeling freedom.  All of these are inner experiences and ENTIRELY a function of habit, which can be changed.

 

NHL blogger and Aurora victim, first escaped Toronto shooting (via intuition)

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NHL blogger and Aurora victim, first escaped Toronto shooting.

This blogger wrote, “I can’t get this odd feeling out of my chest. This empty, almost sickening feeling won’t go away. I noticed this feeling when I was in the Eaton Center in Toronto just seconds before someone opened fire in the food court. An odd feeling which led me to go outside and unknowingly out of harm’s way. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how a weird feeling saved me from being in the middle of a deadly shooting.”

This is something I have always wondered about, if people have some premonition that there was going to be some dangerous situation just before it happened.  There is scientific evidence that people around the world were aware of 9/11 minutes before the first planes hit the World Trade Center.  It is like the Cosmic Consciousness know everything before it happens.

Now the challenge is to become sensitive enough to be aware of this when it is happening and both able and willing to act on that sensitivity.  I suspect that there will be a lot of false starts before one gets it down.

Trusting intuition is a hard thing to do at first, but with practice we can improve the quality of our perceptions and this can greatly enhance both our safety or health and the quality of our life experience.  It is my experience that meditation is the practice of listening to our subtle intuitions, so meditation enhances our ability to be aware of subtle indicates that danger is upon us.

I feel sad for the skeptics out there that are closed to all the benefits that intuition has to offer us.  I am not saying that all skeptics are closed to these ideas, only that there are some that refuse to even consider that we can know about events like this shooting before they actually happen.

Understanding

Published on by Jim

I have had a long-standing interest in understanding how this human instrument works.  This interest is not limited to the physical or medical functions but also the neurological, psychological, mental and emotional aspects of the human instrument.  My interest leads me to watch my body, my mind, my emotions, and myself as I go through life.  I particularly watch when I practice various spiritual disciplines or think various ways, to see the effect on the quality of life that these disciplines and ways of thinking have and WHY they produce those effects.

In my practice of watching myself and of watching others I have seen some very interesting aspects of human consciousness that when I try to share that with others I usually only get resistance.  Of course, this in itself interested me, for I wanted to know why there would be resistance to understanding ourselves.

I have seen that this resistance comes from the ego, a mechanism within the human instrument dedicated to survival of the human instrument.  It is imagined that if we understand ourselves then we will no longer treasure the human instrument as mysteriousness or ‘special’.  However, this is not true, for understanding only enhances the appreciation.  It is superstition that creates the fear of understanding.