Be Nonjudgmental of Lost Sheep

Be nonjudgmental of the lost sheep whose behavior would damn them by their wicked deeds.

Furthermore, do not label them "damned" or call them "wicked." Only the truly apostate are only destined to stand before the Fire. Therefore while they live, there is still hope for reconciliation.

For we who are children of the light are only projecting our fear of their destiny, if they do not repent of their wickedness, by judging them thusly.

Yet it is up to the children of the light to bring light into the darkness of the lost. Thus, treat kindly and firmly the lost sheep, and patiently guide them back to the Lord.

Affirmation on Life (poem)

Whatever happens in life,
I hold onto the positive aspect
and accept the negative as
inspiration to learn from
my mistakes without regret.

Indeed, I live for the moment
when what I have learned
helps me to see clearly
the path to life as-is.

What helps me the most
is careful meditation
on those mistakes
which results in change.

Killing Ants: The Art of Positive Thinking

At a picnic, ants are usually the bane of enjoying quality time with family.

Yet, in their mundane lives, people often are stuck with ants of a different sort, the behavioral and mental negativities which constitute the negative mind.

ANT is an acronym coined by Doctor Daniel G. Amen in his book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. It stands for automatic negative thinking.

Such thinking is evidence of an overactive deep limbic system, which lies in the centre of the brain. The deep limbic system consists of the thalamic structures, and hypothalamus, and the immediate surrounding structures.

Functions of The Deep Limbic System

• sets the emotional tone of the mind
  
• filters external events through internal states (creates emotional cooling)
  
• tags events as internally important
  
• stores highly charged emotional memories
  
• modulates motivation
  
• controls appetite and sleep cycles
  
• promotes bonding
  
• directly processes the sense of smell
  
• modulates libido

Here is a summary of the nine basic forms of automatic negative thinking with remedies to defeat them, cooling your deep limbic system in the process. Summary of automatic negative thoughts

1. "Always/never" thinking: thinking in words like always, never, no one, everyone, every time, everything. If you catch yourself thinking these absolutes, stop and think of examples that disprove your all-or-nothing attitude.
   
   
2. Focusing on the negative: seeing only the bad in a situation. The purpose of finding the positive in your life is to give your life more balance and optimism to a world you too often consider negative.
   
   
3. Fortune-telling: predicting the worst possible outcome to a situation. Remind yourself that if you could see the future, you'd be a lottery millionaire by now.
   
   
4. Mind-reading: believing that you know what others are thinking, even though they haven't told you. When there are things you don't understand, ask about them to clarify them. Avoid mind-reading at all costs because of their infectious nature.
   
   
5. Thinking with your feelings (emotional reasoning): believing negative feelings without ever questioning them. Whenever you have a strong negative feeling, check it out. Look for the evidence behind the feeling. Do you have real reasons for feeling that way? Or are your feelings based on events or things form the past? What is true, and what is just a feeling?
   
   
6. Guilt beating: thinking in words like should, must, ought, or have to. It's better to replace "guilt beatings" with phrases like "I want to do..." So, in the above examples, it'd be more helpful to change those phrases to "I want to live my life the way I want", "I want to act in a way that is positive", "I want you to treat me better", and "I want us to get this done". Guilt isn't productive. Get rid of this unnecessary emotional turbulence that holds you back from achieving the goals you want.
   
   
7. Labelling: attaching a negative label to yourself or to someone else. Negative labels are very harmful, because whenever you call yourself or someone else a jerk or arrogant, you lump that person in your mind with all of the "jerks" or "arrogant people" that you've ever known and you become unable to deal with him reasonably as a unique individual. Avoid negative labels.
   
   
8. Personalizing: investing innocuous events with personal meaning. There are many other reasons for others' behavior besides the negative explanations a dysfunctional limbic system picks out. E.g. the supervisor may not have called because he found other coworkers to work a shift, lack of sites to people, or called in sick. Since you'll never fully know why people do what they do, it is best not to personalize the behavior of others.
   
   
9. Blaming: blaming someone else for your own problems. Whenever you blame someone else for the problems in your life, you become powerless to change anything. The "blame game" hurts your personal sense of power. Stay away from blaming thoughts. You have to take personal responsibility for your problems before you can hope to change them.

Affirmations
Don't believe anything you hear &mdash especially in your mind!

You can do whatever you set your mind to do. Just remember to hang around positive people.

By taking personal responsibility for your problems, you are owning the right to a better life for yourself.

Possible Solutions to Cognitive Distortions

Usually when a person is negative about what another person has said or written, it says more about his unconscious negativity in his life.

In some rare cases, it may be indication of any number of cognitive distortions.

If so, here's what I managed to come up with as possible solutions to key cognitive distortions.

1) Things do not fit black and white categories. This is the fallacy of all or nothing thinking. Things might be both grey and colourful. The proof of this is the metaphor of a digital photograph, which is saturated with colours and tinged with shades of grey. Likewise, being human, I am not perfect and live within the limits of my imperfection. The solution here is found in pausing to reflect on the greyness of living in post-modern times.

2) A single negative event does not fit into any sort of pattern of defeat. This is a fallacy of over-generalization. For each event has both positive and negative qualities. Therefore, I need to focus on accepting the event as happening as it is.

3) The fallacy of the mental filter is that it distorts reality into being just the focus of one negative detail which is dwelt on until all of reality is darkened. What positive details I may have noticed are forgotten, but not for long. I may think of the positive details as they come into focus. Thus, reality is not dark nor is it just that one negative detail.

The truth is, reality is composed of neutral events and things to which each of us ascribes positive or negative qualities based on criteria according to a multitude of factors including our experiences, education, vocation, and so on.

4) Positive experiences are more important to my well-being than negative experiences. The fallacy of disqualifying the positive is that it rejects those positive experiences based on the flimsy criteria that "it does not count" or some other baseless claim. Everyday experience consistently demonstrates that positive experiences occur more often than negative ones, because that is the way the human mind works. It is how the universe works.

5) The fallacy of jumping to conclusions consists of the negative interpretation of events despite there being no definite facts which convincingly support the conclusion. One variety of jumping to conclusions is mind reading, where I may conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out. The solution to this is to either check it out or to pro-actively drop all thought of the matter using meditation. The other variety of this fallacy is the fortune teller error, where I may anticipate that things will turn out badly, and feel that my prediction is an already-established fact. The solution to the fortune teller error is to not anticipate any kind of outcome at all, but to go with the flow i.e. life will bring to me great rewards when I go out into the world.

6) The fallacy of magnification (catastrophizing i.e. making a catastrophe of a thing) or minimization is the exaggeration of the importance of things (my mistakes or someone else's achievements) or "the binocular trick", the inappropriate shrinking of things (events, details) until they appear tiny (my own desirable qualities or the other person's imperfections). The solution to exaggeration of importance requires a lot more work i.e. everything is of equal importance, neither greater or lesser. My own desirable qualities is as important as the next person's. Other people's imperfections are usually of no consequence. Indeed, the fallacy of magnification requires meditation consisting of careful reflection on the matter in order to cut through the delusion of magnification, catastrophizing and minimization.
7) The fallacy of emotional reasoning is that I may assume my negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things are i.e. "I feel it, therefore it must be true." The solution here is to see that the way things are are equally devoid of my emotions, positive or negative. If I feel that the way things are as "bad", then that is not true. If I feel that the way things are "good", then that is not true either. My feelings do not make the way things are true or false. The fallacy of emotional reasoning is the fallacy of the false dilemma.

8) The fallacy of should statements consists of the use of "should" and "shouldn't", as if one had to be whipped and punished before being expected to do anything. "Must" and "ought" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When I direct should statements towards others, I feel anger, frustration, and resentment. The solution to this fallacy is to mindfully let go of guilt, and have no expectations of self and others.

9) The fallacy of labelling and mislabelling is the extreme form of over-generalization. Rather than describing my error, I attach a negative label to myself. Rather than admitting I didn't visit my mother , I call myself a "bad son". When someone else's behaviour rubs me the wrong way, I attach a negative label to him: "He's weird". Mislabelling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured and emotionally loaded. These labels may have context in the real world, but only within the dysfunctional context.

Such over-generalizations are inappropriate judgement calls which are not helpful in any situation since they tend to create more stress and suffering for each of us.

Thus the solution to labelling and mislabelling is to let go of any tendency to label and mislabel behaviour and people. In order to do so, I will cultivate, maintain and perpetuate a nonjudgmental attitude towards life.

The Greyness of Living: Thoughts on Psychological Development With Respect to Borderline Personality Disorder

Psychological development has an emotional context to it. For emotional maturity implies psychological maturity, yet highly developed psychological maturity requires a developed sense of humor to reflect one's emotional maturity appropriately.

In theory, children evolve morally from the black-and-white thinking of what psychiatrist Melanie Klein calls "paranoid-schizoid" to the grey world of the depressive phase. However, "paranoid-schizoid" denotes a psychologically immature phase of psychological development in early childhood.

In contrast, "depressive" suggests a mature phase of psychological development.

1. When young, self and the object, good and bad, were experienced as the same. No concept of "I and thou" existed, only "me, my and mine".
2. Good and bad are not the same. Good is acceptable, while bad is unacceptable. Depending on their actions, the other as a person is seen as either all good or all bad. Thinking about another person as bad implies that the self is bad as well. Therefore, it's best to consider the caregiver to be a good person, so that the self is also seen as good.
3. The self and the other possess both good and bad qualities. Having hateful thoughts about another person doesn't mean that the self is all hateful and doesn't mean that the other person is all hateful either.

Splitting - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

"In a moral sense grey is ... used positively to balance an all-black or all-white view (for example, shades of grey represent magnitudes of good and bad)." &emdash; Grey in popular culture - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey#In_popular_culture

Commentary: The use of medication to treat clinical depression suggests that within context of society, clinical depression is not conducive with productivity in society. Medication thus is used to help stabilize what society views as a medical condition that prevents a person from exercising his responsibilities and obligations to society.

Within context of the ethical definition of grey, as covered by this note, splitting does not imply one is out of control. This is because it is primarily a defence mechanism, and has its uses as a behavioural tool, despite its crudity.

Splitting's crudity is that people are seen as either all good or all bad. Within context of psychological development, then, the word "crudity" suggests that psychological immaturity to be crude in function.

Furthermore, it is suggested that seeing the self either as all good or all bad, depending on how one views others, is a crude way of viewing the world.

What I need to do to manage borderline personality disorder (BPD) is to "integrate the good and bad images of both self and others". This is the affirmation to manage BPD.

In order to integrate the good and bad images of both self and others, it's useful to pair statements rationalizing good and bad.

In order to achieve that aim, I will quote the third stage of psychological development and comment on it: "The self and the other possess both good and bad qualities." - This statement is a synthesis of the following opposing statements: "The self possesses both good and bad qualities", and "the other possesses both good and bad qualities."

"Having hateful thoughts about another person doesn't mean that the self is all hateful and doesn't mean that the other person is all hateful either."

"Having loving thoughts about another person doesn't mean that the self is all loving and doesn't mean that the other person is all loving either."

However, me thinking all loving thoughts neither makes me a good person or a bad person. Rather, it makes me a person who is being positive.

Within the context of this article, the act of being positive has both good and bad qualities to it. I am not being positive to be good; I am being positive because it affirms self management of BPD.

This brings me to the use of grey as the positive response to black-and-white thinking (splitting).

As an affirmation to help manage BPD symptoms, i.e. lessen stress, the following statement is useful: "Shades of grey represent magnitudes of good and bad."

Even though writing out my thoughts about BPD and its management may be seen as rationalization, it helps me to see BPD as an part of my character which only arises when under stress.

To best appreciate what I have written in this article, one would have to look at the spectrum of defence mechanisms.

Splitting is a pathological defence mechanism, which means it is on the first level of defence mechanisms.

Defence mechanisms are categorized into four levels:

Level 1 - Pathological

Delusional projection

Denial

Distortion

Splitting

Level 2 - Immature

Acting out

Fantasy

Idealization

Passive aggression

Projection

Projective identification

Somatization

Level 3 - Neurotic

Displacement

Dissociation

Exaggeration

Hypochondriasis

Isolation

Intellectualization

Rationalization

Reaction formation

Regression

Repression

Undoing

Level 4 - Mature

Altruism

Anticipation

Humour

Identification

Introjection

Sublimation

Thought suppression

While I may use defence mechanisms of the first three levels, it remains in my best interest to use altruism, anticipation, humour, identification, sublimation and thought suppression to help manage stress.

Meditation on The Nembutsu

By calling to Amida as He simultaneously calls to her, the devotee consistently affirms one's gratitude through the Name-that-calls.

With consistent affirmation, the Name-that-calls helps her uncover the precious treasure known as Buddha Nature.

Uncovering Buddha Nature, the devotee realizes that she is a sentient being, subject to the limits of existence.

Knowing these limits helps the devotee to devote herself to the Buddha.

In devoting herself to the Buddha, she deepens her faith in Him, His teachings, and the Buddhist community.

In deepening her faith, she continues her affirmation through gratitude to Amida.

This affirmation through gratitude to Amida Buddha is called Buddha Remembrance

Buddha Remembrance helps the devotee to listen with her heartmind.

Listening with her heartmind, she is able to hear Amida Buddha calling, and simultaneously call to Him.