Joyce Meyer and the Buddhists in a more "civilized age"(yesterday, the ninth of october).

 

So.  Sunday, it was, I remember it well, because it was yesterday.  Twas the best of times; twas the worst of times.  Twas also the remnant of a more civilized age.

The Buddhist devotional recommended that we welcome stray thoughts, without being perturbed by them.  Such demands we know when a stray thought is indeed, "stray", and not something else.  Furthermore, it demands that we know how to handle such, but think of the contrary, how people can rebuke themselves and so forth, all for stray minutia that crops up.  

Or worse still, in the form of not recognizing stray thoughts as indeed just stray thoughts, taking whims as "normative" or foundational in their thinking.

THEN.  And the day goes on.

Joyce Meyer talks about thinking with purpose.  Kind of mitigating the waste in thought, to an extent, and finding a facility to direct one's thinking.

As a kind of fixative, I guess, we choose our thoughts, and maybe that goes towards, in her world, what we pray about, what we care about, the work we direct ourselves towards during the interim.

I still like the kind of Midnight Ball In The Redroom that is the welcoming of stray thoughts, kind of holding the barn door open, in the active sense, then the fun of wading through and making sense of it all without real disturbance.

It requires some emotional and intellectual distance from the material of the thoughts, one supposes.

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