"That's the goal now," he says, "to spread into the ghettos and inner cities."
Deepak Chopra has ventured to Harlem, N.Y., and Reno, Nev., talking to blacks, Latinos and Asians about people being rivers of energy. He tells them their mind is wired into every cell of their body, that nasal breathing techniques can effect brain activity, that ayurvedic herbs can pack as much punch as any drug.
How does Chopra think it's going so far? What do city folk make of his New Age wisdom?
"They say, 'Deep stuff!'"
This is the challenge for rehabilitation centres for addictions: to convince drug addicts and especially alcoholics that the inner energy of meditation is a high higher than any known drug that they got their hands on.
Yet addicts are well known for their ability to detect BS if and only if they have been totally honest with themselves that their addictions are not due to "bad parenting", but their rebellion against the basic social rules that govern our very lives.
While they may do so because of the unwillingness to live by the rules society imposes on us all, addicts pay a price for their so-called freedom, a freedom that is an illusion behind which a licentious lifestyle crumbles into the abyss of darkness that so many addicts face due to abuse of their freedom to choose.
However, meditation will work for anyone who meditates due to their willingness to cut through their own BS, of which the main one concerns their so-called ability to detect BS in people wiser than they are.
In short, they have to also cut through the white lies that society imposes on us all to create working communities, and accept that they are completely different in their use from lies, both blatant and subtle, that actually destroy communities.
For example, if a friend I just met asked me what I did on last Friday, then if I wanted to remain discreet, I could merely say "I went on an errand", and changing the topic, rather than being candid about paying my bills since my Fridays are my paydays.
In contrast, I am usually candid with my roommates and my best friend because they are in my inner circle of friends, and not someone I met off the street.
Although I admitted to how I spend my Fridays in the course of my argument, I will not reveal details because they are personal facts that are private and are known only to me, my employer, my bank and the government through their tax department.
Regarding bills I pay, I will only be candid about debt collectors due to the fact that they consistently tell white lies in order to obtain a lot of money right now (preferably over $100 a month but far less than what I owe Fido and Rogers Mobility) in a short period of time (usually within 48 hours but that could be negotiated).
I am mentioning this because of my addiction to technology - and it is evidenced by the late hour spent writing this article.
By being this candid, I hope to share the word that meditation works. If I didn't put positive effort into meditating on my debt, then I would still be in denial and the debt would not get paid.
Therefore, in my mind, I am a recovering addict with an addiction that no one else takes seriously except myself.
I think in Japan, they call people like that "otaku", though in the West, otaku are great for information content but lousy on emotional affect.
However, there is some overlap between addiction and the collections of knowledge and experience of otaku, even though otaku are likely to chew me out for "labeling" their intense love for technology or even works of art as "addiction."
Overall though, we otaku could be so gung-ho about anime and manga, why not meditation too? For the most gentle of meditation is combined in many therapeutic settings, and is borrowed from Asian sources more so than Western sources.
Though I will say that even me blogging online is therapy. It is also a form of vipassana meditation when I focus on cutting through the initial negativity toward the positive outcome.
If anything that I have written confuses you, then you are not ready to truly free yourself of your addiction and become a true otaku who is essentially free of whatever he obsesses over.
How dos you tell when that happens? When you can go to a convention, a group therapy session, or even a family reunion to help friends and family get to know you well, that is a start.
Another sign that you are otaku is that you vacillate in your writing between first-person (I and me among similar pronouns), second-person (you and the names of people), and third-person (they, them, and often one or it).
Returning to the quote from an anti-cult website, I can certainly support the use of meditation techniques. However, that quote is not a product endorsement of Chopra since it has been taken out of context for me to promote meditation on my terms, which I am free to do.
I am merely selling the idea that otaku are harmless when they become more socialized with fellow otaku. As well, any obsession that leads to social isolation on the long run really is worth the effort of abstaining.
As for addiction, that is only when your lifestyle is negative affected by your obsessions e.g. you spend more time watching anime than socializing with friends, using excuses to avoid brushing up on your social skills.
Anyway, I am not proud to be otaku, nor am I ashamed to be otaku. Otaku is a neutral word in the West, yet is misused by lazy Japanese journalists who turned it into a badge of shame.
Yet even journalists are closet otakus as pararazzi when they obsess about celebrities such as Morning Musume and stalk them.
Finally, the ultimate freedom is to use less technology in the public sphere, and to occasionally use technology. First, one day dedicated to using your smartphones less and your senses more, including using the mind to ask questions about matters other than technology.
Originally written on May 10, 2005 at 2310H PDT
Reference:
http://www.rickross.com/reference/deepakchopra/deepakchopra20.html
Showing posts with label therapy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label therapy. Show all posts
20141026
20131015
Prison as Therapeutic Community
I feel that we need an alternative to prison to prevent self injury and reduces the stress which causes such behavior.
It involves a ghost town and miles of fencing though. It might cost up to a billion dollars including the doctor, the staff and the business licenses.
Why not a therapeutic community in the sticks?
To prevent abuse of trust by staff, reward whistle-blowing.
To prevent prison escapes, all women make and sell products and services. If someone does escape, then it would be to avoid being a productive member of that community. Let the RCMP handle them.
Why it won't work: it "rewards" crime with a job opportunity.
This is what needs to be done to prevent self harm: women's prisons should not be punitive forms of rehabilitation of criminals. It needs to be viewed as a therapeutic community.
Otherwise, the middle management have lost the vision of what prison ought to be.
It involves a ghost town and miles of fencing though. It might cost up to a billion dollars including the doctor, the staff and the business licenses.
Why not a therapeutic community in the sticks?
To prevent abuse of trust by staff, reward whistle-blowing.
To prevent prison escapes, all women make and sell products and services. If someone does escape, then it would be to avoid being a productive member of that community. Let the RCMP handle them.
Why it won't work: it "rewards" crime with a job opportunity.
This is what needs to be done to prevent self harm: women's prisons should not be punitive forms of rehabilitation of criminals. It needs to be viewed as a therapeutic community.
Otherwise, the middle management have lost the vision of what prison ought to be.
20121125
State Abuse Leads to Suicide
Anna Caroline Jennings (1960 - 1992)
Anna Jennings was sexually abused when she was less than three years old. This was the first of several abuses that occurred over her lifetime, and put a confused, frightened child into a mental health system that neither recognized nor treated Anna's real problem. Diagnosed 'schizophrenic'.. she was institutionalized for more than 12 years from age 15 to 32. Although she attempted to communicate the 'awful things' that had happened to her, there was no one to listen, understand or help her. She took her life on October 24, 1992, on a back ward of a state mental hospital.
PTSD due to sexual abuse may look similar to "schizophrenic" symptoms, but the labeling is used by the authorities to pretend the abuse never occurred.
This is similar to Freud's rewrite of his "women's psychiatric disorders are due to incest" into the psychoanalytic theory co-opted by the State.
In a sense, psychoanalysis is a form of patient abuse. This is why it has the worst record for "cures" and lots of case histories of relapse and possible further victimization of clients of psychoanalysts.
As it stands today, the effective therapies accept life history as real to the patient, but do not address the history directly. Rather, the patients are given coping skills and strategies to do a continuing self-assessment on their own.
20071101
Of Buddhist Retreats and Psychiatric Wards
With respect to Buddhist retreats and psychiatric wards, a few people who attend such retreats might consider them to be similar to psychiatric wards in jest. For humor is the best way to get over the fact that we are born mad and that a Buddhist retreat will cure such madness.
For such madness cannot be cured by medication or by incarceration in a psychiatric ward, but by learning meditation.
In essence, such madness is considered normal in Western society. I think they call it consumerism, and in its extreme, people end up not only packing on the pounds but also stuffing their homes full of knick-knacks only useful in making a homey maze.
However, Buddhism is a toolkit for escaping into reality from the madness called Monkey Mind which all people develop in response to the distractions of their ignorant experience with reality, of which consumerism is a symptom.
What you and I think is reality is merely a consensual pseudo-hallucination.
We can never experience true reality directly because it has been known to leave some people mad, ready to do violence to themselves and others out of fear of the consensual madness we confuse for reality.
Yet the trauma of a child's life adds to this reality's misery leading to mental disorder and other issues. That we deprive a child of useful coping mechanisms is atrocious. Buddhism could provide a very effective coping mechanism, yet the anti-religion police have deemed Buddhism a religion and have borrowed meditation to be used by the willing without the religious trappings.
Sometimes they appears that they teach a form of meditation to the people in the psychiatric wards with medication enhancing the meditative part immensely. All any patient actually needs is a sound therapeutic instructions to help with recovery.
Thus is a psychiatric ward considered a psychiatric retreat for people who have been scarred by their childhood traumas. All we need is to provide a text on psychology to help people recovering from their childhood traumas understand how their mind works.
I've yet to see this happen in a psychiatric ward. Rather than therapy, a psychiatric ward depends on order and the medically expedient way to maintain that order is through sedation. For it seems as though the majority pf patients find a psychology text to be useless in preventing their madness from returning.
I disagree: the majority of patients tend to develop insomnia due to anxiety arising from fear. Insomnia leads to hypomania, which is useful in its overall productivity but once it morphs into mania, it's of no use at all. Once a person enters the psychotic state, there's no use in waking him up to reality, because his psychotic state of mind has built a useful substitute called "psychosis".
In no way does a text on psychology describe this path to madness. Instead, we're told that adequate rest is important to maintain healthy sleep. Yet the chain from fear to psychosis can be easily broken by administering a sedative to promote sleep. However, a few psychotic people fear sedatives because of the manic delusion that they are sane and an underlying fear that adequate rest would ruin their substitute for reality.
Yet few sane people are able to tolerate being awake for 24 hours because of the auditory and rarely the visual hallucinations attendant to sleep deprivations.
Meditation helps in this case, because it provides a way of using the hallucinations to benefit the psychotic. In Vajrayana Buddhism, there are divinities known as wrathful deities. They may represent a person's negative emotions such as anger, desire, fear, lust, and passion. Whatever their description is, it implies that a person who hears of it choose the harmless way of managing it as described in the Buddhist text.
I propose that the visions and voices a psychotic sees are actually his negative emotions, and are quite harmless. Indeed, the most expedient method of handling these hallucinations is to satisfy them by neutralizing them with their opposites while the mindful practice of loving-kindness.
In the rare case where psychosis is comorbid with psychopathic violence, strong sedatives may be recommended because of risk of harm.
Overall, the use of Buddhist psychology in Buddhist retreats would benefit its participants. However, meditation would only be of limited use in out-patient clinic since Western psychology mistakes certain behavioral aspects of Buddhist meditation to be abnormal due to the limits that Western psychology places on the mind i.e. the incomplete bio-chemical model of the human mind.
For the current Western medical model of the mind is inadequate to help Buddhists with their underlying psychological conditions which is more easily explained by Buddhist psychology.
Indeed, when the social model of the human mind is combined with the bio-chemical, this complete model of the mind is best explored with the tool of Buddhist psychology, meditation.
Originally published: November 1, 2007 1525H
Update posted: February 26, 2013 0943H
Reference:
Welcome to the Vipassana Sanitarium: http://welldoneprocrastinator.blogspot.ca/p/welcome-to-vipassana-sanitarium.html
For such madness cannot be cured by medication or by incarceration in a psychiatric ward, but by learning meditation.
In essence, such madness is considered normal in Western society. I think they call it consumerism, and in its extreme, people end up not only packing on the pounds but also stuffing their homes full of knick-knacks only useful in making a homey maze.
However, Buddhism is a toolkit for escaping into reality from the madness called Monkey Mind which all people develop in response to the distractions of their ignorant experience with reality, of which consumerism is a symptom.
What you and I think is reality is merely a consensual pseudo-hallucination.
We can never experience true reality directly because it has been known to leave some people mad, ready to do violence to themselves and others out of fear of the consensual madness we confuse for reality.
Yet the trauma of a child's life adds to this reality's misery leading to mental disorder and other issues. That we deprive a child of useful coping mechanisms is atrocious. Buddhism could provide a very effective coping mechanism, yet the anti-religion police have deemed Buddhism a religion and have borrowed meditation to be used by the willing without the religious trappings.
Sometimes they appears that they teach a form of meditation to the people in the psychiatric wards with medication enhancing the meditative part immensely. All any patient actually needs is a sound therapeutic instructions to help with recovery.
Thus is a psychiatric ward considered a psychiatric retreat for people who have been scarred by their childhood traumas. All we need is to provide a text on psychology to help people recovering from their childhood traumas understand how their mind works.
I've yet to see this happen in a psychiatric ward. Rather than therapy, a psychiatric ward depends on order and the medically expedient way to maintain that order is through sedation. For it seems as though the majority pf patients find a psychology text to be useless in preventing their madness from returning.
I disagree: the majority of patients tend to develop insomnia due to anxiety arising from fear. Insomnia leads to hypomania, which is useful in its overall productivity but once it morphs into mania, it's of no use at all. Once a person enters the psychotic state, there's no use in waking him up to reality, because his psychotic state of mind has built a useful substitute called "psychosis".
In no way does a text on psychology describe this path to madness. Instead, we're told that adequate rest is important to maintain healthy sleep. Yet the chain from fear to psychosis can be easily broken by administering a sedative to promote sleep. However, a few psychotic people fear sedatives because of the manic delusion that they are sane and an underlying fear that adequate rest would ruin their substitute for reality.
Yet few sane people are able to tolerate being awake for 24 hours because of the auditory and rarely the visual hallucinations attendant to sleep deprivations.
Meditation helps in this case, because it provides a way of using the hallucinations to benefit the psychotic. In Vajrayana Buddhism, there are divinities known as wrathful deities. They may represent a person's negative emotions such as anger, desire, fear, lust, and passion. Whatever their description is, it implies that a person who hears of it choose the harmless way of managing it as described in the Buddhist text.
I propose that the visions and voices a psychotic sees are actually his negative emotions, and are quite harmless. Indeed, the most expedient method of handling these hallucinations is to satisfy them by neutralizing them with their opposites while the mindful practice of loving-kindness.
In the rare case where psychosis is comorbid with psychopathic violence, strong sedatives may be recommended because of risk of harm.
Overall, the use of Buddhist psychology in Buddhist retreats would benefit its participants. However, meditation would only be of limited use in out-patient clinic since Western psychology mistakes certain behavioral aspects of Buddhist meditation to be abnormal due to the limits that Western psychology places on the mind i.e. the incomplete bio-chemical model of the human mind.
For the current Western medical model of the mind is inadequate to help Buddhists with their underlying psychological conditions which is more easily explained by Buddhist psychology.
Indeed, when the social model of the human mind is combined with the bio-chemical, this complete model of the mind is best explored with the tool of Buddhist psychology, meditation.
Originally published: November 1, 2007 1525H
Update posted: February 26, 2013 0943H
Reference:
Welcome to the Vipassana Sanitarium: http://welldoneprocrastinator.blogspot.ca/p/welcome-to-vipassana-sanitarium.html
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