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Maybe not as pronounced as in your case but I can definitly understand where you’re comming from. What worked for me was trying to understand some martial arts / eastern spirituality, which brought a lot of peace and stability to my mind.

I remeber being tald about all the spiritual things that seem bonkers to a western educated mind, but with the idea that - all models are false, some models are useful, I just “tried” to imagine it working, and it actually did, the mind is an interresting thing.

Now whenever I am presented with those ancient patterns of thought I don’t dismiss them outright as false, but think of them as a model that can influence your emotions, and act accordingly.

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I always found it rather interesting how similar Buddhism is to Christian, and how different they are typically taught.

The teaching of Jesus and Buddha are really giving you the exact same advice. Self-sacrifice, honesty, hard work and being decent while you accept all the shit life throws at you and let it pass, because it will, are the ways to live calmly and fully in between the eternal struggle chaos and order.

I personally think the eastern approach was easier to comprehend than the western. Ying and yang are two dragons locked in eternal struggle, one is chaos one is order but within each dragon is a small piece of the other. Let too much of one dragon into your life and you will suffer, and since chaos lives within order (and vice versa) it’s also a fruitless struggle to chose one, because the other will always find a way to creep in.

You’ll find the same essence in the bible and the moral struggle between good and evil and a God who never tells you what he wants, but to me, it was much less clear. Perhaps especially because 90% of religions scholars are assholes and in the west you don’t meet the eastern assholes but you do meet a lot of shitty priests.

Interesting comment. I think if you were to read one of the gospels you'd pretty quickly get instructions on what God wants:

1. Love God

2. Love other people as much as you love yourself.

You'll find the second one in Buddhism, but not really the first.

That makes rather a lot of difference, because it focuses someone on being grateful for the world, rather than attempting to ignore it.

I'm not a Buddhist, but I think you've got that completely backwards. For example, the 5 moral precepts in Buddhism are refrain from: harming living things, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct, lying or gossip, taking intoxicating substances eg drugs or drink. No mention of god anywhere. As far as I can tell, in many (most? all?) sects of Buddhism there is no god. Buddha is just the first fully enlightened being (and in many sects, it's achievable by anyone -- eventually).

As there is no dogma in Buddhism, it's really difficult to casually learn what Buddhism is about. Usually people will throw a hundred books at you and say, "Well, that will get you started" (at least in my experience :-) ). However, I think you may have gotten the wrong end of the stick.

So my comment was stating that the bit about God wasn't in Buddhism, and your comment affirmed that. I think we are arguing the same point.

Certain of the Buddhist sects and practices (notably Vajrayāna) throw gods into the mix because they've incorporated local beliefs and culture.

Good grief. I'm dyslexic, but that's amazing even for me! Sorry about that!

Same, it's interesting once you see the ~hidden truth between many religions where they're basically saying the same thing. It's not the EXACT same, and that's where everyone disagrees, but I also feel like many people who are really into religion kind of "miss the forest for the trees" and focus on the exact specifics vs. the general messages and tones / themes.

To me, this is similar to how some people are really into audio and examine the minute details, while others are into music and appreciate the aesthetic qualities of it. This is not to say that either side is "better" or "more correct" or "the right way to enjoy music" or even that you can't have both!

The most enjoyable times I've ever had listening to music have been on objectively not the best sound systems. I HAVE had the pleasure of going to clubs / parties with very high-end sound systems, and I have some great gear set up at home, but I appreciate them in different ways.

I still don't feel that I've really nailed what I'm trying to say, but I hope that makes some sense to others and hopefully gives even one person a bit of a new perspective, or a hint that there is another perspective to these things :)

I’ve definitely been turning more and more towards the concept of mindfulness and being in the present moment. Although I’ll say that while it helps, I find it far from fulfilling regarding all this. It scratches the itch sometimes in a small way, but there’s still a lot of agony left over. I’ve also though more about boxing/martial arts but again I’m hesitant to jump in and try it when similar efforts have left me empty handed.

I’d love to hear more if you have the time to spare.

Well I think the key for me was the phisical excercise - the body and especially the mind requires it to be healthy, and martial arts just gave me something that I could consider “worth it” in the long run, and has its own very deep history and practice to explore and progress.

And after I got started the whole mindfulness thing just happened naturally as it was an integral part of the training itself, so it just made sense.

And with mindfulness my mind just naturally calmed itself down, I started to appreciate the moment more, and care less about stuff I couldn’t control anyway.

I never could start doing the meditation thing before on its own, but when I put myself in an environment were it was just par for the course, it was easy. I’m sure there are other ways to do it its just what worked for me.

I think I now just try not to do exactly what I want, but rather try to position myself into environments where that happens naturally, and just let it be. Sometimes it doesn’t work out exactly, but mostly it does, and is much _much_ less stressful.

Hope this is useful and best of luck :)

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