All Thoughts Are Just Thoughts
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- Опубліковано 8 бер 2022
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Uchiyama Roshi is such a force … his description of “thoughts as secretions of the brain” was essentially a turning point in my practice and life. Transcendent.
Disclaimer:
Hi there Dr. Zacko-Smith,
It's true ... the ideas, thoughts, and feelings we experience are indeed secretions of dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, oxytocin, etc. It makes me sad that people turn this into a nihilistic approach to life.
The devaluing of human life is what causes war, genocide, and oppression. On a smaller scale, the effects of the nihilistic view have caused entire communities multi-generational trauma, poverty, and violence.
It's a miracle in every sense of the word that Earth is in the perfect position from our sun, and received the perfect composition of cosmic dust to catalyze everything contained here and to allow sentient beings to experience this place we call home. There is no predestination, but I can understand why the concept was invented. Some things feel so right, due to our secretions (haha), that conjure the idea of a designer, and begin to feel like a personal mission of benevolence. As cliche as it sounds, all the small things that individuals have contributed, has led, and will continue to lead toward a more just society. I think this is the ultimate reason to sit zazen.
It's hard to say this right now because of what's happening to the people in the Ukraine, but, in the grand scheme of things, humanity has gotten better over the ages, which is a miniscule amount of time when you think about the appearance of man on the geologic time scale. Things will get better.
Anyway, those were just some early morning thoughts spewed from my dopamine, serotonin, cocktail spiked brain. Good day :)
@@Blahndle I was just relating my own perspectives here. Can’t tell whether you are supporting them or slamming them. 😜 In any event, I’m definitely not a Nihilist.
@@dr.jeffreyzacko-smith324 I was just agreeing with you, I talk/write too much😅
Things I realized - if I realized anything - are:
• Thoughts just happen, there is no thinker.
• Thoughts are neither true or false because "true" or "false" only exist relative to other thoughts.
• Asking for the truth of a thought is like asking for the truth of the numeral four. Ist it true? True to what?
• The intellect does not know or understand one thing, just like an encyclopedia on a shelf does not know anything. The intellect literally only "makes sense" of things.
• There is no ego within thinking - the entire thinking is "ego", it is hardwired to be so. There is no such thing as an enlightened thought.
• The key to awakening seems to be: run that intellect into a wall, be it confusion, desperation, overburdening, exhaustion. It needs to come to its end, it needs to fall into that silent abyss of "I have no idea. I cannot make any sense of this."
• Planting your butt on a cushion like a child for absolutely no reason and absolutely no gain may be enough.
It's nice to see a next good video.
Ziggy shouted the answer at the perfect time (4:10). What a pal.
I think people get confused by thoughts that are about something real or important, and then believe those thoughts are real or important.
Please another video about "Mind cannot be grasped !"
The lava lamp is a great metaphor!
Hey Brad can you play Magic Carpet Ride? The part after he says "Let the sound take you away"? Also can you do a video on your opinion of the people who say westerners who practice Buddhism are commiting culture appropriation. Asking this because this happened to me recently. Thanks for your videos man.
Love that song. And don't pay attention to people who say stuff like that. I did an AA in History and I'm minoring in Religious studies. Religions mix with the culture that they spread too and they carry things over from different cultures too. Cultures mix as well over time. Take care man
I wrote about that in 2016. I'm not sure if I made a video on it. I think maybe I did...
hardcorezen.info/is-white-buddhism-cultural-appropriation/4752
@@HardcoreZen Thanks Brad. Still would love to see you play that portion of the song 👍.
@@HardcoreZen i'm fairly sure he's asked you that question before with the same answer/link given by you
there's a lot of people here "developmentally impaired" just about everything, early dementia, personality disorders, cognitive impairment, semantic-pragmatic difficulties
i was thinking this is like your days when you were "caregiving" to the developmentally disabled as a young man, it may have been a more formative experience than you realise
and then i thought further and this is actually the cross section you had in zen, buddhism and any religion historically, monasteries were in effect asylums of a sort hence all the rules
Thank you, made a lot of sense to me
Our brain consumes a lot energy, so thoughts are by products like heat, sounds, vibrations....like a car engine
Car-engines are a by-product of our brains. One could also see it this way...
Thanks for the video--it really helps explain some of my experiences during meditation. Quite often when I redirect my attention back to my breath, my previous mental state seems to... linger. I try to be careful not to fight the incoming thought or pass any judgements. I accept the fact that the previous thought is immediately coming back. But it doesn't. I "feel" stuck. Stuck in this place: with thoughts yet thoughtless. I never really understood what was happening. This video adds much needed context. Thanks.
@buzz magister funny that you mention that. I HAVE actually studied engineering control systems. With this analogy, the brain is more like the thing being controlled and meditation is the PID controller. In my experiences, outside influences knock the brain out of its setpoint. On it's own, the mind will then wildly swing about. A system in chaos. Meditation (or journaling or other techniques) then add a damping effect to bring the system back to its setpoint. Mild disturbances can be leveled out usually in the first 20-25 minutes of my meditation. Big disturbances, such as incidents occuring during my duties as an elected official, can take a couple days of intense meditation to level out. I see why monastics keep these disturbances to a minimum. From there, what becomes interesting is the "noise" of the system when it's hovering about its setpoint.
Question posed to Ramana Maharshi….
Q: “Is sorrow just a thought?
Ramana: “All thoughts are sorrowful”
Yes. Prior to verbalization, many thought-fragments occur at once (in parallel). Those that will be elevated to our consciousness are ‘transformed’ to sequential words or images. While perception occurs in parallel, actions occur sequentially (e.g., only one foot swings forward at a time when walking). Parallel thought-fragments occur all at once: in each successive moment. Sequential thoughts are built up over time into sentences and paragraphs, and depend on time to express their meaning/relationships. When sequential thoughts are silent there is less interference with the myriad parallel thought-fragments.
The ‘source thoughts’, the more basic thought-fragments, tend to be relational, indicating associations between ‘things’, and generally indicate the more constant (eternal) aspects of such relations. They represent our deeper perceptual understanding of things, taken as our reality. We perceive the eternal in every moment. (“And Eternity in an hour” - William Blake)
“Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tsu
- Translation by Gia Fu Feng & Jane English
Chapter 16:
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind rest at peace.
The ten thousand things rise & fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.
Knowing constancy, the mind is open. …
the fools imagine
they can cease to exist
while existing
with their stupid rules
what defines
cannot be defined
@@osip7315
"But a fool believes he sees
The wise man has the power to reason away
What seems to be
Is always better than no-thing
And no-thing at all keeps sending him"
- The Doobie Brothers
More hermeneutics, according to Báihuà-commentaries: "Knowing the Way [of everything,] is wisdom[, which transcends mundane biased knowledge,]..."
@@JimTempleman the fool replies with "dumbie bros" quotes
so, we know you have an affinity for garbage, drug induced in the latter case ?
@@gunterappoldt3037 voynich
Was the Buddha's realization of suffering, its cause, cessation, and the path just a thought? If so, why should we care? If not, what makes it different?
" My mind is out of it's mind" - Eddie Chacon.
What about the actions that follow thought , do you see thought and action as directly related , action following thought ? Say the thought ‘ I hate that guy because he hurt me ‘ , then the action of punching him. How would you describe them ? Are actions just actions ?
look up "psychic reality"! a term in psychoanalysis...
In (1900a), the concept referred to the force of reality associated with the subject's internal fantasy life, which could oppose and even dominate perception of external reality; *it could, in other words, seem more "real" than reality itself*. From the outset the emphasis was on the objective nature of subjectivity, the reality of subjectivity for the psychical apparatus-even at the expense of its relationship to external reality.
Love the shirt. Misfits + Three Stooges, nice.
I would say thoughts are our attempt to give ourselves a narrative, they often act as a way for us to provoke certain emotions in ourselves or avoid others, building patterns of emotions that then tend to trigger semi-automatically. Our mind is like sand and thoughts move a ball on this sand. After each thought the sand becomes less and less even as the ball paints a circuit on it where it will be more likely to fall in the future. Thoughts are just thoughts is an attempt of the man overwhelmed by them to lose attachment to a circuit that ran out of control, or, in certain cases, is an acknowledgement that a given set of thoughts is the result of compartmentalizing a part of ourselves, often to avoid inhibition, and that, as a result, the thought is not representative of what you think but the result of a "what if" that has been running for so long it is not even clear what the ifs were exactly as these ifs appear to us more as the personality they give rise to than the ifs that defined them at the beginning as a part of ourselves. Silencing your mind eventually causes the sand to become even once more, from there thoughts are not just thoughts but a tool that can be used to direct your emotional regulation by gaining stewardship of what thoughts you allow to drag you away from being present and, as you clarify the compartmentalizations, your what ifs are no longer implicit but explicit and you can start to rebuild a solid and healthy foundation where thoughts are more than just thoughts. They become your company in solitude, or an exta push to achieve something. Whatever aspect you want to focus on, thoughts will play an helpful role in your life if you build them accordingly. The Greek used to say, he who lies in his thoughts is creating an enemy within. Your thoughts can be many things but they should always be true to yourself, detachment from your thoughts isn't a solution, it's the first step in bringing peace to a mind that is at the very least fractured or engrossed in itself. Ultimately one must own his own thoughts as one would his actions or words lest they always be at the mercy of circumstances, with a personality that isn't a choice but the result of trauma and conditioning. When in doubt, don't think, it will make the remaining thoughts all the more impactful because thoughts are just thoughts but they are not useless just because you can't gain anything directly from them. They help shape who we are just as much as our actions or circumstances, when you simply dismiss them as just thoughts, you are making them another circumstance while you should strive to make them another action.
I hope this resonated with somebody, peace.
I was just reading ‘Opening the Hand of Thought’ by Kosho Uchiyama and I saw a paragraph that might be a good inspiration for a future video if you’re interested.^^
On p.12, he’s discussing the letting go of concepts, and then he defines “complete tranquility” using the Japanese terms ‘nehan jakujo’ and ‘shoho jisso’. I love the way he discusses this topic, but I think it runs a bit off from the definition of ‘tranquility’ that most people might have in mind. For most people, tranquility is usually thought of as a positive feeling, but what Uchiyama Roshi describes reaches to the roots below feelings. It’s a rich and important topic with some opportunities to explain these Japanese terms.^^ ha ha
Just read this section in Don’t Be A Jerk, good stuff, Brad 🤘
Attention of attention. Thinking it skillful to notice the area (body/mind) between silence and the dream of symbols which attention narrows into ignorance through. Free floating thinking with an open attention is preferable to that kind of judgmental framed thinking. Exhalation through the feel of thought area in the head is a great tonic to suck arise exaggerations.
Do you mind linking me to the video where you mentioned something about the act of barking and existence?
Brain thought and heart (what?) thought are interesting. The heart is made up of a lot of neural tissue. There's a documentary on human physiology on Netflix, the heart and brain work very closely together, so secretions of hormones (feelings) are very much under control of the heart. Hormones influence our brain thought.
Isn't picking and choosing thoughts what we do most outside zazen? factories and offices.
And that's work, right? e.g.Scientific research is the work of sorting thought. But not in zazen. Unless at some point(which I am not) the practice can render the profession of sorting thoughts effortless?
There is no difference between thought and speech I don't think
I'd share my thoughts on your thoughts about thoughts, but just typing that out hurt my head a little. I'll leave it at this:
Bass! Heck yeah!
Hey Brad,
Hope you're doing well! I have kind of a silly question, but here goes anyways: do you have any thoughts about robots/computers? It seems to me that you would say we have responsibility in how we take care of the stuff around us, but is there some potential intelligence (coagulation of consciousness?) that should give me different ethical considerations in how I treat my desktop computer vs how I treat my kitchen table? If the line between life / not life isn't all that clear, how does that work here? I promise I haven't been smoking anything (today), this just seems fun to speculate about to me 😊
hi brad i think the volume in your videos might be a little high - my headphones almost exploded from this one. x)
you do not have a sangha to be tarnished by your actions, and i will feel no guilt or remorse, by giving you a criminal record.
ukrainian lullaby ?
sounds like an artillery barrage ?
ua-cam.com/video/vtx5NTxebJk/v-deo.html
@@mjsfo ua-cam.com/video/NUsXNrhPWT8/v-deo.html
there's something real going on in this world, not sentimental beatles pap
@Andrew Levin Pap? PAP?
The Beatles original "Yesterday and Today" 'baby butcher' cover was banned in the United States and replaced with a blander, non-threatening image. There was a little something going on then that The Beatles were protesting through art (e g slaughter of innocents) called The Vietnam War.