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anger as a reason to avoid meditation

Please forgive me if this is not a proper space to discuss the long journey from starting point (no meditation) to desired goal (daily meditation 80% or more of days) for someone living in an individualist and undisciplined culture;

Like many others in such a situation I suspect, I go thru spells where I don't meditate. I'm still trying to understand why, in order that I can eventually stop doing so. Even right now I'm playing a game of some sort with myself by making this post, but that's actually beside the point.

I finally noticed one correlation: the spells line up (sometimes) with periods where I'm "angry at the world" in some sense ... feel bitter disappointment at dreams which didn't come to pass for some unjust or unaccepted reason, etc etc etc. This turns into sullen (or hot & fiery, depending) resistance, and then I don't meditate for a while until I get over it. But sometimes this takes months, and anyway, it's the exact opposite of what I need to be doing in such a situation. So ideally I could come to understand this and dispense with the whole pointless resistance part.

Anyway. Just posting to paint myself into a corner so that I have to stop skipping, but, I am curious if there is anyone else out there who has noticed this.

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  • You've noticed that there is a kind of tidal ebb/flow to your ability to meditate...

    Notice, simultaneously, that if you meditate when you can, persistently, that the portion-of-the-tidal-cycle in-which you can meditate, increases...

    Had you never bothered meditating, your ability wouldn't increase or become more-normal, would it?

    Persistent-right-direction is the root competence, in evolving oneself.

    Please read Daniel Kahneman's brilliant "Thinking Fast & Slow":

    Instinct, addiction, prejudice, and trained-expertise, are all what he calls System-1 mind.

    System-2 mind is considered-reasoning.

    Becoming addicted-to-meditating is possible, and productive/useful, at your & my level.

    if one's mind is in terrible shape, and I'm saying that as a braindamaged 7+-years-homeless-person, then it can take decades to get addicted to meditating, but Combined Arms, the use of ALL available-dimensions of leverage, helps

    ( e.g. a special meditation-space, use of habit/ritual, incense, high-quality-light, calendar/alarms to block-out time, comfy clothes, a good yoga-mat for asanas, fitness-practice one LOVES doing, whichever that one is, getting the sunshine one needs, no distractions allowed, EVERYthing, all combined, to gradually force the System-1 habit into improving, see? )

    For meditation to be able to break the cycle of uncontrolled-reincarnations, it needs to be continuous.

    As-in asleep, awake, ALWAYS.

    Maintaining it through even Delta-brainwave sleep prepares one's mind for maintaining it through the 7th phase of life, the stage after the stage after the "white light" of the death-process.

    ( probably Holecek's books are the best for that stuff, for you modern buddhists )

    Always keep in mind 2 things, re prying one's continuum from its unconsciousness:

    1. if one doesn't face-into karma enough, earn new learnings & understandings enough, one has discarded/lost one's finite life-opportunity to have those earnings, and the ocean-of-samsara is infinite ( endless stream-of-Universes ), but human-category-lives definitely are not anywhere-near the majority of life-conceptions for a continuum to get caught-in...

    2. pushing-too-hard creates either breakage ( damage or/and aversion ) or a kind of "bulimia" cycle, so pushing-too-hard isn't productive.

    These 2 limits mean that the most strategic way of working, is to gently & relentlessly continue pushing oneself to face-into karma & to improve one's training...

    IOW, Kaizen is the most-strategic religion there is, and I find an old style of Vajrayana, nobody bothers with it nowadays, to be the sanest cosmology there is for me.

    You need to understand what variation-of-The-Middle-Way is your right-Way.

    Are you a moderate-path-person?

    If so, then use moderate-path-person means of realizing.

    Are you a soul who cannot tolerate any more of samsara's abuse, and you need out now??

    If so, then use the steep-path-person means of realizing.

    Do not, however, use the antidotes-style of the other category of people.

    Alexandra David-Neel rightly identified that using wrong-category of antidotes is "deadly poison", in her book "The Secret Oral Teachings of Tibetan Buddhist Sects", about a century ago.

    All the people who take ordainment, then "cast off their robes" of ordainment, are doing the "bulimia" thing, and it isn't the wisest way.

    They also are demonstrating the non-wisdom of taking a path at the wrong steepness-vector for one's unconscious mind, or one's character/nature.

    • Gently relentless improving...

    • ALWAYS keeping right-overall-direction orientation...

    • Pragmatically using what works for you...

    • Combined Arms: using ALL that works, stacked into the most effective leverage you can maintain...

    Combine these into your means of earning your Realization.

    It is rightfully-yours, right?

    ( :