meower wrote: 

Stay away, far, far away as possible.  Seriously.

 meower wrote: 

BUMP for Dr. DMAX!

I have a kid who's non-custodial parent and her other child (who lives with her) keep getting MERSA.  The dad (who the kid lives with) is concerned about sending his son there for visitation...... Dmax or anyone else, should he send the kid??  I'd told him to call his pediatrician, but he's in the process of switching doctors and can't get through til the well visit which is in two weeks.......
Thanx!

 dmax wrote: 
Nobody consciously says to himself "Oh, I'm just going to add some layers of anxiety;  hey, I need a change."   The layers sort of...come naturally.  It's an aspect of human nature.

Or, are we to have New Capitalist Man, who is rocked by all sorts of threats and deprivations, but who just happily hums his way right through it?

 

 dmax wrote: 
That is just how I faced cancer and worked through it.  Attitude is just as important (maybe more) as the treatment.  No whining, no complaining, just sucked it up and faced it.  I journaled all the way through it and they are still up if anyone wants to revisit.  This place was probably my most important support group during the battle.

Now I am broke, and unemployed, but I am still alive.  Life is still worth living, although there is much to vetch about in the world.  Vetching is an exercise, while living is the reality.

.
Here's the first journal from 2008,  which romeotuma linked to as well a while ago including his most accurate post that accurately explained my particular cancer and what I face(d).  I like to think that I walk the talk. 

 BasmntMadman wrote: 
You know, it's probably hard to believe, but there is a scenario where a person can be ill or in some other calamity and simply be aware of the situation, take the proper steps to address it (change whatever parts of it they can change, like take meds or sell belongings or ask for help) and otherwise be accepting. The situation just is. Adding layers of anxiety on it only clouds the ability to deal with it.

Not everyone (including me) is capable of that, but it certainly seems like a goal - instead of living a life where the present is pre-empted by fretting about a future. Make the present as reasonable as possible, and plan for the future, but fearing it, dwelling on it?

You can't enjoy the lovely meal in front of you if you're fretting about balancing the checkbook. Focus on the meal, then focus on the checkbook. 

 dmax wrote: 
Absolutely correct.  Worrying about future events beyond reasonability can be devastating.  Thinking too far down the road was one of the things I had to reign in to help recover from clinical depression and debilitating anxiety.  Meds played an important part in that recovery, but the most important part was channeling mental energy.

I had a great psychologist help me slow down and get to live in the present during the peak of that crisis.  A nasty divorce, full time school, full time job and moving back in with the parents and dealing with unfinished family conflicts between me and the folks, all at the age of 40ish.  I have no idea of my psychologist's references and training as in the sense of Freud, Gestalt, Tolle or Buddhism or whatever.  He was patient and found a way to relate to me, that was what mattered.

Being in the middle of a crisis is not the time for reflection and solving world problems.  Do not look for answers to old problems as they may never be answered.  It is the time to put on the blinders and live in the now and repair yourself.  Define your needs and define the obstacles and figure out how to remove the obstacles.  Once the now is in order and priorities are established based upon current needs are met, then one may begin to allow themselves the luxury to look forward.  So many self repair methods and philosphies are based upon one day at a time.

On our fridge:

Yesterday is history ...
Tomorrow is a mystery ...
That's why today is the present ...

One can freely interchange "now" and "gift" for "present" in the above.  Knowing that part makes it all the more meaningful.

If you don't have enough, if you face a personal calamity if you get ill with almost any treatable disease, of course you're going to worry, and worry one hell of a lot. 

This is such a basic point that only an utterly stupid or dishonest person will deny it.

It's unbelievable - it seems to be getting to the point where conservatives admit that the populace is facing want, but, hey,  they just shouldn't worry about it and it'll all be just fine.

When news that the peasants didn't have bread came out, at least Marie Antoinette suggested they try cake;  US conservatives don't even offer that, just "hey, don't worry about it."

 hippiechick wrote:
 
That's a great point to make: we are still fighting and killing each other over things that happened centuries ago. Like this story from Iraq, probably apocryphal: A US patrol is leading a raid to capture a suspected insurgent. They have Iraqi forces with them, and are under strict orders to bring the guy in alive. The officer explains the mission to his troops, and one of the Iraqis says 'I cannot capture him alive. I must kill him.' And the officer asks 'Why? Why do you have to kill him?' The Iraqi replies 'because he killed my brother'. 'What? He killed your brother? That's awful. When did it happen?' '1372' replies the Iraqi.

As long as we're stuck in the past, we'll have the same problems. We, all of us, need to learn from our past. So we can make different mistakes, instead of the same ones over and over and over again.

 hippiechick wrote: 


Oh, his free association stuff is everywhere...  he is as relevant as Parmenides and ontology...



 

 dmax wrote: 
Freud is the father of modern psychotherapy, but his ideas are mostly irrelevant now.

 romeotuma wrote: 
Freud's ego was a totally different thing. Best to leave him out of this.

 cc_rider wrote: 
Exactly. I don't think it means rejecting data. "I ate that before and got sick"
I do think it means moving away from the idea of "I turned down that job last year and I can't stop regretting it."

 cc_rider wrote: 
Agreed.  I spent WAY too much of my life pining for what once was/never was.

 hippiechick wrote: 
You are not the story. You lived in the midst of the story.

That was where Tolle merged the ideas into the concept of eternity, I think. If you separate "everything" into object or the space that allows the object to exist (there's the room, but the wall is not the room, the chair is not the room - the room is the space). The solid stuff, the matter, is the impermanence. Everything, literally, is temporary.

So what is eternal? Not the solid stuff, but the stuff in which the solid exists. The space between the object, which gives home to the object. The quiet, the nothingness.

In the case of us, it's not the solid thinking mind thoughts that are permanent. They're the transient use of the calculator mind that we use temporarily and then tuck away. They're the chair in the room, but not the room itself. The mind isn't who we are, it's the thing inside the room. It's the temporary aspect of who we are.

Extending the analogy, we're the consciousness, the empty space, that includes as a subset the thoughts that we have. We've all had awareness without thought - simply looking at something and experiencing it without giving it a name or otherwise doing something data-driven to the experience. That's the experience of consciousness, and closer to who we "are" than being immersed in what we think. We're that silent experience that gives a space to where thoughts occur, but our thoughts are not primarily "us." 

 rachlan wrote: 
I'll softly play taps for ya...

 cc_rider wrote: 
Do we learn from history? We're still fighting and killing each other, so it doesn't look like we have learned much.

The point is, we are not our stories.

 dmax wrote:
  I find that line of reasoning sorely lacking. Why? Because we LEARN from our HISTORY. Sure they're just stories. The Bible, Koran, Torah, Tao, I Ching, those are all just stories too.

I know what you're trying to say though: being STUCK in the past does no one any good. But examining our past and learning from it, well, that's a different matter, isn't it?

 dmax wrote: 
Exactly. But our egos want us to be in that space, to create stories about ourselves, to keep us from the uncertainty of the present. Without our stories, our identities, who are we?

 hippiechick wrote: 
Now all that stuff is just an interesting story about the past. It's not related to what's happening today.

I could tell some really interesting stories about my past, too, but they're just stories. There's nothing to be gained by living in them now. I have a relative who filters just about everything that happens to him now through an event that happened 30 years ago. Why?