I came to a bit of a realisation in a recent conversation with a friend:
It
seems to me that a lot of mindfulness teaching is focused on the
physical world, and that may reflect the need to overcome the profound
disconnection between emotions and self in the “Western world” (which has often arisen, it seems to me because of the “stiff upper lip” / Protestant work ethic thing).
However: the world of ideas is also a valid world, and there are, I suspect, times when it is better to focused on being mindfully in the world of mind / ideas, rather than physical sensations and immediate but suppressed emotions.
The advantages of being mindful on ideas includes: not “accidentally” engaging in unethical and/or harmful behaviour, being better able to to maintain personal boundaries, not forgetting to work on making the world a better place, and recognising the reality of, and begins to develop the ability to engage with, the “subtle” world - nonphysical levels of reality in my parlance, but also as shown in this diagram:
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Going back to mindfulness:
- as used by Western psychology, it is a cultural appropriation from Buddhist and other Asian meditation practices, and actually is a prelude to proper meditation;
- there are other exercises for building awareness - such as the exercise attributed to the misogynistic mystic Gurdjieff, relayed via his pupil Ouspensky, where one practices focusing in detail on all the input from one sense, and then practices focusing on all sense at the same time. This is still focused on the physical, and was developed by Gurdjieff (or Ouspensky) to, in their language, “wake up” humans.
Next: What do you do about an insecure victim who is harming others?
Stop them ...
This a less severe variation of the problem of a dog with rabies: the dog is a victim, but it could cause harm to others, and, sadly, must be stopped.
As a variation on that, Mary Trump wrote a book [Simon & Schuster; Apple Books; Amazon] about how her family’s abuse “created” Donald Trump.
So ... if he is a victim, what does one do?
Well, given the massive harm he is doing, those actions MUST be stopped first and foremost.
In Trump’s case, healing him is probably something that can’t be done until his next life; in the case of many other people, healing may be possible if it is offered early enough.
There are two important provisos on that.
Firstly, many people are incapable of allowing for worldviews that are outside theirs, and thus may actually be enforcing social conditioning/”normative” behaviours/values - or even try to enforce social status approaches - when they try to “help”. That all boils down to some versions of “help” actually being active manifestations of harm - attempts to “convert” (actually torture) people out of being neurodivergent or LGBTQIASB+, which is a particularly vicious combination of bigotry, violently enforced conformity, and personal suppression of discomfort.
Secondly, freedom of choice must be respected: unless you have valid and good legal authority or are in an intimate relationship, you can offer help, but must accept the person’s choice even if that is to reject your offer (and the choices of action in an intimate relationship are around negotiating boundaries etc and possibly leaving - and letting the other person know what the consequences of them not changing might be).
The other key issue here is how people are stopped. In general, that can be done with kindness in many situations - just don’t be patronising, condescending, or superficial (spiritual bypassing and the various toxic manifestations are particular problems).
And it must be done nonviolently - this blog is about psychic work: leave physical interventions to police.
Also, self care is vitally important.
Possible flaws
Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:
- there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;
- I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
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Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here.
(Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear)
Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2024 NO AI
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