[sanjuro]

I was watching "Rescue Me", and one of the firefighters going thru a rough patch has an epiphany, and cleans up his life and starts taking Yoga.

Being in the hippie capital of the world, I see plenty of yoga studios and other spirituality centers. But I was thinking why you might gain some inner peace and relieve stress, I realized not many of the people I respect, people who get things done, are "spiritual" in that way...

 

[N8 v2.0]

I was watching "Rescue Me", and one of the firefighters going thru a rough patch has an epiphany, and cleans up his life and starts taking Yoga.

Being in the hippie capital of the world, I see plenty of yoga studios and other spirituality centers. But I was thinking why you might gain some inner peace and relieve stress, I realized not many of the people I respect, people who get things done, are "spiritual" in that way...

 

[stevew]

to relieve stress I listen to music, go for a drive in the middle of the night, or entertain the thought of riding a bike.

yoga has kicked my ass before.

 

[Tenchiro]

All the people I know who are "spiritual but not religious" are wierdos. Yoga however strikes me as just another way to excerise.

 

[sanjuro]

Certainly this is not a dig at yoga, but the price of spirituality is the sense of struggle and fight many people need to succeed.

 

[kahner89]

I was watching "Rescue Me", and one of the firefighters going thru a rough patch has an epiphany, and cleans up his life and starts taking Yoga.

But I was thinking why you might gain some inner peace and relieve stress...

ummmmmmmmm????

 

[kahner89]

and you got that from Rescue Me?? this is why i hate most of the shows on tv now.. they have taken most of the originals and cleaver shows off because people didn't understand them. i am not saying you one of these people but it is funny how you got the yogaess off of Rescue Me, but yoga is not all spiritual although it deals with it a lot in order to clean not just your mind but also your body

 

[jimmydean]

My folks are over-the-top Catholic and I was raised that way. When I got older and learned a few things, I seperated myself from the church, but I consider myself "spiritual". My belief system is based there, but I have a lot of issues with organized religion (like killing in the name of it).

Yoga is great, but kicks my ass. I have found out a lot about myself through martial arts. Same sort of thing as yoga, but with more meaningful skills.

 

[MikeD]

IMHO (which is heavily influenced by the same philosophies that might have guided Kurasawa's Sanjuro...), the same spirituality and mentality that people seek in introspection and contemplation can and should be attainable in the movement and chaos of action...frankly, if you can only attain a semblance of clarity while sitting on a platform and a meditation cushion, I don't think you're really there.

That's not to say that some kinds of monastic, ascetic, or devotional practice aren't useful tools towards attaining a better state of mind, but they're not ends in and of themselves.

In any case, I think that most Western and European spirituality is completely misguided in its insistent focus on belief. It's an active practice in that it requires a continuous and almost paranoid drive to mentally construct some divine metaphysics, with this sense that if you fail to 'believe' strongly enough, the world will fall apart or there will be dire consequences. I think these roots are what drive a lot of the problems arising from religion today.

In my mind, religion and spirituality should be about reception...an opening to and awareness of the world in itself, such as it is. It's not about what the cluttered jumble of our ego thinks and creates; it's about submerging your ego and your self and letting our own mental constructs fall away to understand the world on a direct level.

Or something.

 

[Changleen]

Taoism is the most sensible philosophy (Taoism as a philosophy as opposed to Zen as a religion) I have yet come across and it is also highly compatible with M-theory, in fact is is scarily accurate once you look at the two in parallel.

 

[MikeD]

Yeah, some of taoism...not the parts about attaining immortality...and I think Zen is about on the borderline of religion and philosophy as you can get, even in a buddhist framework. It excludes the metaphysics which are exaggerated in other mahayana forms of buddhism and focuses entirely on the realtionship between individual and the world.

 

[BuddhaRoadkill]

But I was thinking why you might gain some inner peace and relieve stress, I realized not many of the people I respect, people who get things done, are "spiritual" in that way...

Certainly this is not a dig at yoga, but the price of spirituality is the sense of struggle and fight many people need to succeed

I think you answered your own question, if you were indeed asking a question. Nature being a biological continuum, there are as many way's to be "spiritual" as there are people. More active or extraverted personalities will lean toward more active expressions - like Mountain Climbing, MTBing, Martial Arts, etc... Being "in the zone" if you will. These are the people that relish the sense of struggle you seem to relate to. An outward physical accomplishment. Other more passive or introverted people will be attracted toward meditation, yoga, road riding, naval contemplation, etc... These are the ones who simply look at the mountain instead of climbing it. Their struggle is internal and not really perceivable by others. To simplify it, there is a biological difference between introverts and extraverts. Say the brain has a fixed amount of sensory input that it needs to meet. Introverts receive most of this sensory input from within their own system while extraverts need to acquire it from outside. [I would cite a source but I'm going on old psych class knowledge]

I understand how active people can get irritated by more mellow people and vice versa, but I get irritated when people judge those of a different inclination. Just because somebody chooses to sit for 6 hours does not mean they are useless. And just because someone chooses to rip down a mountain at Mach 10 does not mean they do not appreciate nature. It's a matter of finding what works for you and doing it. Let others do what they need to do for them. It's when buttchunks like the Sierra Club try to say there is only one way to be at peace with our environment that I get pissed. Or when Jarheads think anyone not moving a mountain is a waste of oxygen.

Ramble Ramble Ramble ...........

 

[Reactor]

IMHO (which is heavily influenced by the same philosophies that might have guided Kurasawa's Sanjuro...), the same spirituality and mentality that people seek in introspection and contemplation can and should be attainable in the movement and chaos of action...frankly, if you can only attain a semblance of clarity while sitting on a platform and a meditation cushion, I don't think you're really there.

That's not to say that some kinds of monastic, ascetic, or devotional practice aren't useful tools towards attaining a better state of mind, but they're not ends in and of themselves.

I made a comment similar to this to my wife. There are two points of view.

One is that if you have to remove yourself from all distractions to contemplate/meditate/spiritualize that you are really failing to apply your spirituality/religion to the real world.

The other is that when you are no longer interested by the material/secular world, you'll be ready to join a monastery and live a simpler life and appreciate your spirituality more.

When I was much younger, the only peace I truly found was in moments of crisis. Moments when my life and (usually) the lives of others hung in the balance. In those moments I had unusual clarity, the mundane concerns of everyday life faded and I was given the freedom to act. I wasn't bound by the fear of failure, because I probably wouldn't be around to suffer the consequences. When the moment was over I was either going to be the "hero" and revel in my success or dead. Normally I was an average guy, afraid of failure, of looking bad in front of my friends, of giving the wrong answer to a question. In a crisis situation everyone else seemed to have trouble thinking and acting, I became unencumbered, I was free.


Now many years later, I've come to the point where I find the world more of a distraction than anything else. It's not that I want to die, but life and the daily conflict of dealing with the majority of human beings who seem small minded, selfish anti-intellectual is taking a toll on me. I long to be free. The monastery is starting to look good.