“Vegan Strongman”; another blueprint

You might have caught word on the buzz surrounding Dr. Nun S. Amen Ra, The vegan, cyclic fasting, calorie restricting, strongman and meditator. On one level I enjoy stories like his. They challenge our thinking, our beliefs, and scientific convention. Just to give you an example, this guy does not eat meat and only eats 1000 to 1500 kilo-calories a day (at least he says). Science would generally tell you that definitely doesn’t allow you to build muscle, and probably doesn’t allow you to even maintain it if you’re at least moderately active. But this guy is doing it, and he is even the world champion of his class, so that is quite something. Quite something both for his life style in general as well as for the singular fact of his veganism. Very few body builders and strong men are vegan, and this proves it is possible. So props to him for that.

The problem with a story like this, I find, arises when you take the story of this guy who comes across as charismatic, tranquil/peaceful, in possession of a desirable body (especially in our culture a very big factor), and who speaks eloquently but authoritatively about his way of life. People in the West are restless, dissatisfied, always looking for the next big thing, always wanting better. If that is not bad enough, we have also been culturally programmed to seek truth outside of ourselves (possibly the rise in popularity of meditation is an unconscious counter move to this). Science has become a sort of manual for life. We take to Google when we feel a little sad and try to figure out what might make us happy again, instead of turning within and making an attempt at understanding ourselves. We can just see this from the vast amount of articles with tips on how to live a fulfilling life, how to beat depression or anxiety, how to be efficient or effective,  how to anything.

Now I am not suggesting that science is evil. Science is awesome and very valuable. The problem, as ever, is in the balance. When we always take to science and statistics to figure out what path to take in life, and we never consider how things feel to us, what our intuition tells us, and the other subjective factors that necessarily influence the best path for us, we are bound to run off track. We will feel weak and inadequate when we are unable to apply objectively best approaches to our own lives, and implicitly emphasise to ourselves how we devalue our own experience in favour of the objective. We let outside factors decide what, for example, a “best life” ought to mean to us, and it’s not even ought anymore – it goes straight to is without a second thought. Like this video; the best life is apparently a life that is as long as possible, with physical strength, and mental tranquility. I am not denying that this sounds appealing to me too. The point is it might simply not be true for me. “Appeal” is influenced by our egos and the cultural programming. We have to look inward to know what is truly right for us. Maybe one day my ideal life will align with what was covered in this video, and maybe by then I will shift into that. Maybe my ideal life is never that. Maybe life called on me with an entirely different mission in mind, so to speak.

It seems like the more progress we make in technology with robotics and artificial intelligence, the more we attempt to treat people as machines and generalise approaches to life as if they can be installed like some computer program. They can’t, because we have vastly diverse genetic make up and vastly diverse socio-economic environments and vastly diverse life experiences. So straight from the heart, all I can advise you is to find out what is true for you.

True selfishness

http://i.imgur.com/vDOiEMg.gifv

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byu/kleutscher from discussion
ingifs

There is so much anger in threads like these. There is so much judgment. Towards the woman. Towards the man. Talk about how this is no way to deal with frustration. You know, the interesting thing to me is that we are all that woman or that man at any one point in our lives. We are all selfish, we are all assholes, sometimes. You don’t know what was going on for the woman that made her choose to be selfish. You don’t know what was going on for the man that left him unable to hold in his aggression towards the woman and have a little perspective. I definitely know for myself that you can throw the same situation at me in different states of mind, and I respond differently.

The thing is that, whilst we can be motivated to work towards wisdom, we rarely choose our actions consciously in the spur of the moment. The actions come out of our deeper unconscious levels of well-being and wisdom. When there is only a limited amount of that present, actions can be short sighted, unsympathetic, selfish, and whatnot. When we cultivate our own well-being and wisdom, even if just for ourselves, we find our behavior changes in a positive way too. Much of this anger, frustration and inconsiderate action is just a result of deep seated anger and insecurity that pours out when we get a little nudge. Usually nothing at all in proportion to what has actually taken place.

Some people think that there are just people out there who “need to learn the hard way.” I cannot say whether there is no truth to that at all, so I won’t pretend to know so. What I do know is that answering someone’s anger with your own anger, answering someone’s aggression with your aggression, answering someone’s inconsiderateness with your own inconsiderateness, just leaves us going round in circles. You make yourself feel worse, maybe even throughout the rest of the day, and you put the other person in an even worse state of mind than they were already in, spreading their negative emotion to more people. Instead, we might try to make some space for their emotion to be there. Most of the time their response to you is not even at all about you. This I think is the most important realization to enable you to make that space and not just react instantly. You think that when a person is angry with you, they are actually angry with you. However, what is really happening, is that a certain sensitivity got triggered in this person, and they are feeling vulnerable. This vulnerability leads to feelings of anger, because we as humans are programmed to protect ourselves, and anger prepares for fighting. And when you think you need to fight, mind you, you must think you are both under attack as well as vulnerable. When a king in a castle is attacked by a farmer with a pitch fork, he is under attack but not vulnerable, and so has no need to get his arousal levels up. There is no threat. So, an angry person feels threatened in some way. They might get mean. Do we want to be equally threatened by someone who is trying to cope with their own difficult feelings, and lash out ourselves, or do we want to say “it’s okay, I understand you are uncomfortable, but there is no threat here. I have no intention of disturbing your inner peace.” Of course we don’t literally say that, because it would probably feel condescending to the other person and they might not even be able to process it properly in that moment, but we can have this stance, this awareness, in our interaction with the person. Adequate and wise responses will follow from that.

Of course, as I already mentioned, we can’t make any of this really a conscious decision in that moment. Thoughts come into our heads or they do not. What we call ‘forgetting’, really just means that a thought did not arrive in consciousness that might have been useful or beneficial at a certain time. What I think the best way to develop this and make your next response to more likely be one born of wisdom, is both education and reflection on themes like these, as well as looking inside when you reply in a way that you know is not or was not wise. What are you really feeling? Is it really the other person that this whole thing is about? Why are you angry, or sad, or disappointed? What were you hoping to get? Etc. The deeper and more honestly you dig, the better you will understand the nature of your own mind. And the better you understand the nature of your own mind, the better you are able to understand others and sympathize with their difficulties.

True selfishness is the best thing you can do for anyone you come into contact with. Of course, you first need to understand what true selfishness is. It isn’t either cutting in line or tripping someone.

 

C.G. Jung on change

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

C.G. Jung

Why Acceptance Must Come Before Change

If you’re not accepting yourself as you are at this moment

…you’re not enjoying life at the fullest right now, always living towards goals, never feeling good enough right now. If you’re always chasing after goals and never enjoying the moment you are actually living in, what good is any of it?