Protestantism

» pink101 - Sociology

In response to Sociology posted by paper_turtle:
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"...an effective prevention program."
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Prevention of what?
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Were your psychology programs all behavioral?
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-- posted by pink101

» paper_turtle - Sociology

In response to Sociology posted by pink101:

Prevention of what?
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Societal problems such as poverty, abuse, addictions.

You can get an overview of Woodbury's PCD program here:

http://www.woodbury-college.edu/programs...
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Were your psychology programs all behavioral?
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Skinner was a behavioral psychologist--I'm definitely not a behaviorist. My courses mostly covered psychology from a variety of perspectives. I took advanced level courses in abnormal psychology, and the psychology of learning (and a couple of others whose topics escape me at the moment--that was 30 years ago). I did an independent study on humanistic psychology, which is pretty much the antithesis of behaviorism.
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peace and love,
Paper Turtle

-- posted by paper_turtle

» pink101 - Sociology

In response to Sociology posted by paper_turtle:
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Just curious.
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Thanks.
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-- posted by pink101

» HeadZenCards - Rudeness--PS

In response to Rudeness--PS posted by paper_turtle:

If you want encouragement, soft smiles, ego stroking, gentle caresses of your self-contracting ways, pats on the back and sweet words of solace, find yourself a Nice Guy or Good Girl, and hold their hand on the sweet path of stress reduction and egoic comfort.

But if you want Enlightenment, if you want to wake up, if you want to get fried in the fire of passionate Infinity, then, I promise you: find yourself a Rude Boy or a Nasty Girl, the ones who make you uncomfortable in their presence, who scare you witless, who will turn on you in a second and hold you up for ridicule, who will make you wish you were never born, who will offer you not sweet comfort but abject terror, not saccharin solace but scorching angst, for then, just then, you might very well be on the path to your own Original Face.

Most of us, I suspect, prefer our spiritual teachers to be of the Nice-Guy variety. Soft, comforting, non-threatening, a source of succor for a worn and weary soul, a safe harbor in the samsaric storm. There is nothing wrong with that, of course; spirituality comes in all sorts of flavors, and I have known some awfully Nice Guys.

But if the flavor tends toward Enlightenment instead of consolation, if it drifts away from soothing dreams toward actually waking up, if it rumbles toward realization and not egoic fortification, then that demands a brutal, shocking death: a literal death of your separate self, a painful, frightening, horrifying dissolution - a miraculous extinction you will actually witness as you expand into the boundless, formless, radical Truth that will pervade your every cell and drench your being to the core and expand what you thought was your self until it embraces the distant galaxies.

For only on the other side of death lies Spirit, only on the other side of egoic slaughter lies the Good and the True and the Beautiful.

"You will come in due course to realize that your true glory lies where you cease to exist," as the illustrious Sri Ramana Maharshi constantly reminded us. Your true glory lies on the other side of your death, and who will show you that?

Not the Nice Guys and not the Good Girls. They don't want to hurt your feelings. They don't want to upset you. They are here to whisper sweet nothings in your ear and place consolation prizes in the outstretched hand of the self-contraction, balm for a war-torn weary ego, techniques to prop it up in its constant battle with the world of otherness.

In a sense, it's very easy being a Nice-Guy teacher: no muss, no fuss, no wrestling with egoic resistance and exhausting confrontation. Be nice to the ego, pat it on the back, have it count its breaths, hum a few mantras.

Rude Boys know better. They are not here to console but to shatter, not to comfort but to demolish. They are uncompromising, brutal, laser-like. They are in your face until you recognize your Original Face - and they simply will not back off, they will not back down, they will not let up until you let go-radically, fully, completely, unhesitatingly.

They live as Compassion-real compassion, not idiot compassion - and real compassion uses a sword more often than a sweet. They deeply offend the ego (and the greater the offense, the bigger the ego). They are alive as Truth, they are everywhere confronted with egos, and they choose the former uncompromisingly.

Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, used to say that nobody comes to a therapist to get better (although they always say they do); they really come to perfect their neurosis.

Just so, nobody comes to a spiritual teacher to get Enlightenment (although everybody claims they do); rather, they come to a spiritual teacher to learn more subtle and sophisticated egoic games - in this case, the game of "Look at me being really spiritual."

After all, what is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It's not the Spirit in you, since that is already enlightened and has no need to seek.

No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher: you want to see yourself in the presence of the spiritual game, you want to meet yourself tomorrow as a realized being - in plain language, you want your ego to continue into a spiritual paradise.

Every deeply enlightened teacher I have known has been a Rude Boy or Nasty Girl. The original Rude Boys were, of course, the great Zen masters, who, when faced with yet another ego claiming to want Enlightenment, would get a huge stick and whack the aspirant right between the eyes.

And that was just the beginning, that was the easy part; things got nastier fast - but at the other end of that brutality lay ever-present Realization, a shocking jolting death of the self and the radiant resurrection of infinite Spirit as your very own true nature: if you could stand the heat.

Rude Boys are on your case in the worst way, they breathe fire, eat hot coals, will roast your ass in a screaming second and fry your ego before you knew what hit it: undo your self-contracting fear and sizzle your well-honed defenses: if you can stand the heat.

So, can you stand the heat? Or would you like more soft and consoling words of comfort, more consolation prizes for an Enlightenment that will continue to elude you? Would you like a pat on the back, or are you ready to be skinned and fried? May I suggest this? If you can stand the heat, you will indeed come to realize that your true glory lies where you cease to exist, where the self-contraction has uncoiled in the vast expanse of all space, where your separate self has been roasted and replaced by infinity resplendent - a radical Release much too obvious to see, much too simple to believe, much too near to be attained - and your real Self will quietly but surely announce its Presence as it calmly embraces the entire universe and swallows galaxies whole.

For it is radiant Spirit that is looking out from your eyes right now, speaking with your tongue right now, reading the words on this very page, right now. Your real Self is glorious Spirit in this and every moment, and it takes a very, very Rude Boy to point that out and to stay in your face until you recognize your own Original Face, shining even here and now.

= Ken Wilber

-- posted by HeadZenCards

» paper_turtle - Commnication

In response to Some Interesting Comments posted by pink101:

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Phil wrote:
My praxis has always been communications. As a small boy, I remember being fascinated by the idea of advertising.
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I fell in love with words before I could even read or write. I remember as a really small child filling an entire notebook with squiggles (which I imagined was actual writing) because I realized, although I couldn't have verbalized it at the time, words have tremendous power.
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I was motivated in part to study communications because I was fascinated with how dictators gain power over people through communication. If they use physical force alone, or are over-zealous in physical "persuasion" they soon run out of followers, and are out of a job.
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It seems to me that the chief tool a dictator uses in gaining power through words is violence. They beat people over the head with the message. They threaten those who don't accept their position with loss of freedom, economic hardship, imprisonment, and even death. They use words which say, on the surface, that they think their audience is the absolute best. But the message between the lines is that the audience is stupid, weak, and desperately in need of a visionary leader/hero.
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You, Phil, sometimes refer to weak minds, and weak minds are easily won over by a dictator. They already have a low opinion of themselves, see themselves as weak, powerless, and under threat. They therefore believe it is futile to reason things out for themselves.
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But there are always those who are not weak minded, who see verbal violence for what it is, and refuse to be intimidated by it. (Not talking about your/Phil's communication style here, in case you were wondering).
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Authentic spiritual practice is arrived at through peaceful relationship/interaction with (or enquirey into) one's world. I do not believe authentic spirituality can be taught or apprehended through verbal violence. Doesn't much matter what point the speaker/writer wants to make. If he/she smacks you up side of the head with it, the message is coming from the egoic mind, not the heart. He/she is not appealing to reason, but to the listener's emotional buttons. The person delivering the message wants a loyal lap dog, not a companion for the journey.
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At least, that's how I see it.
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peace and love,
Paper Turtle

-- posted by paper_turtle

» paper_turtle - Zen & the art of Commnication

In response to Commnication posted by paper_turtle:

Teahouse practice means that you don't explicitly talk about Zen. It refers to leading your life as if you were an old woman who has a teahouse by the side of the road. Nobody knows why they like to go there; they just feel good drinking her tea. She's not known as a Buddhist teacher, she doesn't say, "This is the Zen teahouse." All she does is simply serve tea--but still decades of attentiveness are part of the way she does it. No one knows about her faithful attention to practice, it's just there, in the serving of tea and the way she cleans the counters and washes the cups. (Jean Hershfield, poet, in Fooling with Words, by Bill Moyers)
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peace and love,
Paper Turtle

-- posted by paper_turtle

» pink101 - Commnication

In response to Commnication posted by paper_turtle:
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The power of words.
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Yup.
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But, words get their meanings changed around so that what used to mean one thing can easily be made to mean another.
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Words like freedom and liberty for example.
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The Bush administration is changing the meanings of those words for America. Have you noticed?
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-- posted by pink101

» paper_turtle - Commnication

In response to Commnication posted by pink101:

Yes I have noticed that people change the meaning of words to suit their own purposes. People also project their meaning onto the communication of another.
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peace and love,
Paper Turtle

-- posted by paper_turtle

» paper_turtle - Sociology/Psychology

In response to Sociology posted by paper_turtle:

Phil--

BTW, Erich Fromm, whose book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness I mentioned yesterday, is (or was when I was in college) an existential psychologist.

peace and love,
Paper Turtle

-- posted by paper_turtle

» pink101 - Commnication

In response to Commnication posted by paper_turtle:
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Well, you make it sound like it's a matter of individual understandings.
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But, it isn't.
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We live in a society with a long and well documented history. There are different definitions given as to what any particular thing means to us. Right now, the political powers that be are putting great effort into changing our views of reality. Comments are made that George W. is a little short upstairs; but, I don't think we should kid ourselves about that. He is a cunning strategist and is under the control of handlers who know explicitly what they are doing and want to do.
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There is a distinct effort being made to rearrange America's understanding of the definitions of what it means to be a free people. It is the soft belly of America and Bush is hitting it steady and hard. You and I are being convinced that we have to temporarily give up certain civil liberties in order to protect our nation from the evils of Al Queda terrorists. That's plain bull sh*t. Bush is trying to convince Americans that we are at war--a war with no end in sight that will go on for decades and one, in which, we must look to the president as our Commander-In-Chief. He is putting almost his entire effort into convincing us of that fact he wants us to accept.
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A short history of America under President Woodrow Wilson, President Franklin Roosevelt, and President George W. Bush will show you how these three men dealt with the Constitution and our civil liberties. It is a matter of life and death for you and for me. But, tell me, what do we know about that history? Anything at all?
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Those who don't know their history are bound to repeat it. Who is the one in danger, the president or you?
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-- posted by pink101