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Real Life / Re: This Cosmic Dance of Bursting Decadence
« on: September 05, 2013, 10:19:24 AM »At the end of the day, the idea is still there that we're locked in a system of death and rebirth, with the end goal of breaking free. It's a cool idea, but it's based on nothing. I imagine I'll get that anywhere, with any spiritual system — this point where the actions and the beliefs they recommend are based on an assumption that has no real basis. That's probably going to be a thing I can't really meet her halfway on, without it being some kind of lie.
That's understandable. A lot of people are turned off by the death/rebirth thing.
I could see meditation maaaaybe being worth a look. I seriously tried to give it a go a couple of times, a few years back, but the idea of stalling into a sort of blank stasis rarely seemed an appealing alternative to doing something more alive. I kind of think I should look into this a bit more, because she's really into meditation, and maybe that might have some appeal I'm not seeing.
"blank stasis" isn't necessarily wrong, but... it also kinda is. Well, it depends on what kind of meditation you're doing. But it's more of a way to force your mind to concentrate. In a way, it's kinda like mental exercising, in that it gets easier to concentrate the more you practice. For the breath type meditation I mentioned earlier, you're probably going to focus on your breath for about one minute before you get distracted. You're going to keep getting distracted. It's basically impossible to have an unbroken focus when you're meditating.
I think part of it is that, at least as far as I understand it, you meditate to step out of your life, and closer to this undercurrent of the universe, from which we build up and away from, before falling back into when we die. At least, that's how I see the idea. Maybe I just have this completely different idea of what meditation is, than what others think it should be/see it as being useful.
Meditation means different things to different people. I'm not really familiar with that idea, because the type of meditation I did when I