watch these please

THIS

AND THIS

"Before you can let things go, you have to admit them into full consciousness. In meditation, our aim is to skillfully allow the subconscious to arise in consciousness. All the despair, fears, anguish, suppression and anger is allowed to become conscious...we contemplate fear and desire so that these do not delude us anymore: we have to know what is deluding us before we can let it go."

"...in this way you are moving towards what is going on in your own body rather than being pulled out into objects of the senses. If you do not have any refuge within, then you are constantly going out, being absorbed into books, food and all sorts of distractions. But this endless movement of the mind is very exhausting."

"...this is where many of us in our society get stuck. For example, American society does not allow you to develop emotionally, to mature. It does not understand that need at all, so it does not provide any rites of passage for men. The society does not provide that kind of introduction into a mature world; you are expected to be immature your whole life. You are supposed to act mature, but you are not supposed to be mature. Therefore, very few people are. Emotions are not really understood or resolved - their childish tendencies are merely suppressed rather than developed into maturity."

"If you are someone who is always being wounded or offended by life, you always have to run off and hide or you have to find a group of obsequious sycophants to live with, people who say: 'You're wonderful, Ajahn Sumedho.' 'Am I really wonderful?' 'Yes, you are.' 'You're just saying that, aren't you?' 'No, no, I mean it from the bottom of my heart.' 'Well, that person over there doesn't think I'm wonderful.' 'Well, he's stupid!' 'That's what I thought.' It's like the story of the emperor's new clothes isn't it? You have to seek special environments so that everything is affirmed for you - safe and not threatening in any way."

-Ajahn Sumedo


CONSTANT CARNIVAL

A sick society breeds sick people, who, unknown to themselves, suffer unconscious and seemingly invisible symptoms.
As you would avoid a person with a cold or any other sickness in varying degrees in order to avoid contamination yourself, I think the only healthy thing to do is avoid these sick people so as to avoid contracting psychic, emotional, and spiritual disease.
This is not to say they are to be ignored, banished, abused, or deliberately ostracized. We wouldn't do that to a person with a physical sickness that can spread. We interact with them of course, but we do keep a certain distance from them, don't we?
I think it is the same with other levels of sickness.

But I don't think it is their fault. It is easy to know when you are physically sick but many in the modern world never know the multiple dimensions of their possible and mostly unconscious disease...how could they, they are never taught means to know it and instead, are forced to become sick themselves through a system that tells them sick is healthy.

And I have grappled with my tendencies in the past of avoiding certain people...I felt as if I was hiding too much behind a wall...or being too high and mighty...even when I really don't think I am. But somehow today I realized some of the major reasons behind this.
It is just too emotionally, psychically, mentally, and spiritually draining. Other people's essences can infect and get into you if you aren't careful...it happens very subtly and quietly. This can be a good thing...but with sickness, obviously it is not.

These people obviously need medicine, but it is very hard to cure someone when they don't know, and cannot be convinced, of their sickness.

"The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. 'Live,' Nietzsche says, 'as though the day were here.' It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal- carries the cross of the redeemer- not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair."

-Joseph Campbell