Life and Death and Coins

Response to Jess - full post here

Yes, that would be quite the loophole. While I love that game with all of my tiny heart, I think that the analogy is limited to shadow and light, I do not think it would be relevant to life and death conversations. Shadow is the absence of light - death is the cessation of life. You can have things which are neither live or dead (rocks for example).

Right now I agree that immortality is not within our reach. However, I think that it's not so incredibly far away actually. I don't agree that what begins must end, I think that in the not-so-distant future we will be able to see immortality. I'm not saying that everyone will choose it. I think it would be necessary to give people the choice to die when they want to. So in that sense there will be death; but any given individual could choose to live forever, or at least until the universe collapses on itself. Though actually, even then, if the multi-verse theory has any weight, even that won't be able to kill people permanently.

Pre-Marital Sex

This is less relevant to Buddhism than I would have liked but I was thinking about the whole abstaining from sex until marriage thing. The opinion that everyone should abstain from sex until they are married is still around; many Christians still think that this is relevant advice for our contemporary society. I was thinking about it and decided that society has changed heavily since the onset of that guideline. That guideline/rule was put into place many years ago (around 2000 at the least); at that time the life expectancy was much less for any given individual. As such, when people were biologically  ready to produce children, they got married. They, on whole, seldom had to repress their sexuality. In this society, people live to be much older and, as such, tend to get married later in life. These individuals who choose to abstain from sex, assuming that they actually have an inclination towards sex, are only bottling up their sexual energy. I think that  this may not be the best idea, and probably isn't precisely what the Christian God would want. He may want people to have sex only after they are married, but his rules would have to be altered slightly to apply today.

Buddhism and Self-Defense

Chapter 26 Verses 389, 391, 405, and 406 of the Dhammapada, all feature the same message: Do not harm others, even if they harm you; do not use weapons, words, or thoughts to harm them, etc.

While I was reading through this chapter I was thinking about possible scenarios where this sort of philosophy would provide a disadvantage. Given that I follow this philosophy myself, it was something seriously worth considering. I wondered about what a Buddhist would do if someone came up and attacked them, intending to seriously wound them (put them  in critical condition), or kill them. I realized then that I had already come up with a solution which is the style of martial arts that I am learning; aikido, I think, would be an excellent style of martial arts for those who take this part of the teaching seriously and strictly. It's philosophy is basically that if someone is an attacker, something about them is wrong or off-balance so it is the job of the person being attacked to defend themselves and to protect the attacker from injury. I can imagine that aikido appeals greatly to many practising Buddhists. The philosophies seem to blend so perfectly.

Meditation and YOU MUST BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION

People seem to equate various practices with beliefs. I was once meditating in my room when my father entered and saw me there. Now, I had only recently informed him that I no longer wanted to practice Catholicism. In response to seeing me meditating he informed me that it was absolutely crazy to believe in reincarnation. At that time I had not known that the rebirth that Buddhism speaks of is not a literal transferring of souls. I was, however, meditating for more practical reasons, so I found it slightly far-fetched to see that he had equated mediations so hastily to believing in reincarnation. I don't particularly believe or disbelieve in reincarnation and I was only meditating to relax. People do often tend to assume that partaking in certain activities must necessarily have been caused by some ideological opinion change.

Meditation and Hearing

I practised meditation for two reasons that I can remember. The first was to relax after some sort of strong emotional distress. The second was to to focus on my hearing ability. I would sit in quiet-ish areas and try to focus on one noise that was distinctly more quiet than other noises, the hum of an electronic device is a good example. I would work on concentrating on that until it was easy to pick that thing out from others. Then I started to try focusing on more than one thing. I would find a recording of a simple drum beat and then I would concentrate on both the hum and the beat. After that, I started to try to count the drum beats and concentrate on the hum again. I continued with this sort of thing, until I was able to focus on three things with proficiency. After that, I tried to concentrate on things that were more distant from me. This worked fairly well, and at one point in time, I could sit in crowded rooms and listen in to one conversation over others.

Meditation to Relax

Response to Ryan - full post here

I practised meditation for a while. I was not doing so in search of spiritual experience so I never really had one related to meditations. It was, however, useful in relaxing and controlling breath. It helped to sort out problems that mattered from problems that didn't, and it helped to determine solutions to those that did matter. I used it countless (not really though) times in order to calm myself down after any sort of large emotional distress.

Proper Noun Church

In response to Lauren's post - full post found here

When you think of lip balm, adhesive strips, tissues, slow cookers, and cotton swabs, you likely think of, respectively, chapstick, band-aids, kleenex, crockpot, and Q-tips. These companies who own the brand names that we associate with products are incredibly talented and maybe slightly lucky. My point here is that sometimes it is the work of organisations to replace a general product with a brand name. The catholic church, actually, is one of those organisations. They do not object to the association of the word church with Catholicism. In fact, they often do it themselves; I would not doubt if this were completely intentionally done. You can look at the Catechism on the Vatican website and see examples of that all over the place . This part, here (http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P29.HTM), mentions the Church often.