The most distinguishing feature of this Japanese school of the Buddha-Way is its contention that wisdom, accompanied by compassion, is expressed in the everyday lifeworld when associating with one’s self, other people, and nature.The Zen practitioner is required to embody freedom expressive of the original human nature, called “buddha-nature.”

Buddha-nature

...practicing without prioritising the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, or vice versa.This preparation involves the training of the whole person and is called “self-cultivation” (shugyō) in Japanese.

Nondiscriminatory wisdom

Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” that is “a position-less position.”<ul><li>“not two” means negating the dualistic stance that divides the whole into two parts.</li><li>“not one” means negating the non-dualistic stance occurring when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation. </li><li>the free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterises Zen’s achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot, however, be confined to either dualism or non-dualism, neither “not one” nor “not two”.</li></ul>

Dualism or non-dualism

Zen recommends that its practitioner follow a three-step procedure: adjusting one’s body, breathing and mind.To adjust the mind  means that the practitioner consciously moves to enter a state of meditation. He learns to disengage him- or herself from the concerns of daily life by the immobile bodily posture and the breathing exercise.Meditation trains one to sit face-to-face with one’s self, while creating a psychological isolation from the external world.This mechanism is the same as when one has a dream at night when the level of consciousness is lowered.

The Adjustment of the Mind

No-mind does not mean:<ul><li> a mindless state,</li><li>that there is no mind</li></ul>No mind means that there is no conscious activity of the mind that is associated with ego-consciousness.No-mind is a free mind that is not delimited by ideas, desires, and images.

No-mind

If the term “philosophy” is taken to mean the establishment of “the kingdom of reason",  Zen is an anti-philosophy.Reason is incapable of knowing and understanding in toto what reality is.Physical nature and human nature must be sought in an experiential dimension.

Zen as Anti-Philosophy

Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy explained 

Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

...is defined as the desire to control or influence others. It is not necessarily associated with actually having power, but instead with the desire to have power.David Winter refined the definition: need for power (also called power motivation) was seen as one of the three fundamental social motives, along with need for achievement and need for affiliation.﻿Need for power is considered to be an unconscious motivation.

Need for Power Definition

<ul><li>the use of physical or psychological aggression to force others to comply with what one wants from them</li><li>to express the need for power through gaining a reputation as an important person</li><li>high power motivation trying to affect the emotions of others (telling jokes, or by a musical or dramatic performance)</li><li>providing (often unsolicited) advice or help. </li><li>having a high level of physical fights or verbal arguments with others </li><li>gaining a reputation is another expression of power motivation</li><li>taking a guiding role within their close relationships</li></ul>

Behaviors Associated with Need for Power

People may display their need for power by making sure their names are visible on their doors, writing letters that will be published, with their names identified, or doing other things that stand out and lead to other people knowing who they are.These prestige possessions might be particular types of clothing, or music, or any other objects that will impress others.When asked to remember members of a group at a later point, those high in power motivation are more often remembered than are those low in power motivation.

Reputation

Those high in need for power may also express this by taking a guiding role within their close relationships. They like to give advice to their friends and to propose and plan joint activities. These types of behaviours result in the high-need-for-power individual being more dominant in the relationship. When two people who are both high in power motivation do form a relationship, they may alternate in taking the dominant role within the relationship.

The guiding role - dominance in the relationship

People who are successful managers within large corporations have been found to be high in need for power. Those working in government positions, where one is providing some type of service, or enforcing regulations, have also been found to be high in power motivation. Being a journalist is another power-related occupation, possibly because of the link with gaining reputation. The set of occupations known as the helping professions are associated with high power motivation.

The Need for Power predicts job choice and performance

More aggressive forms of power expression are more common in younger adults, whereas parenting and helping others may be seen more in older adults. Social role expectations affect power motivation expression as well. In general, men are more able to express power through aggression and leadership in large organisations. Women often express power in close relationships or the family.

Aggressive forms of power expression 

Need for power is considered to be an unconscious motivation. People are not necessarily aware of their own level of need for power. In fact, openly admitting a desire to have power or influence is not considered socially acceptable, and many would deny having a high need for power. 

Need for Power - IResearchNet

Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was a Vienna psychotherapist and medical doctor and founder of individual psychology.He believed that there were two decisive forces at work in world history and in the life of each individual: <ul><li>a striving for power and a social feeling. </li></ul>Both forces stemmed from man’s upward striving from inferiority to perfection.

Two decisive forces

The search for self-esteem can become neurotic as the result of brutal parents or a hostile milieu. There can be over-compensation as well as a closing in on oneself.Over-compensation can result in a quest for power. Striving for self-esteem and power is a natural process, but with over-compensation, the search for power can become the dominant aspect of the personality.

Quest for power

Adler had been influenced by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche who glorified the will-to-power. For Adler, an over-development of the will-to-power can become a deep seated neurosis. Only a health balance between the forces of cooperation and the individual will-to-power can make for a harmonious individual and a harmonious society.

Will-to-power

After 1897, he joined the socialist circles and became convinced that society helped to create the personality of the individual. Therefore, for a health personality, there needs to be a healthy society, free from domination.Adler also saw the need for a society based on equality between men and women, so that the personality of both men and women could develop fully.

Alfred Adler - an early feminist

At the end of the World War (1914-1918) he felt that the will-to-power dominated the sense of social-feeling and cooperation.Power-hungry leaders and groups debased mass social feeling by using it as a thirst for dominance.The social feeling of soldiers during the war was used for battlefield goals with efforts to exclude any social feeling for the enemy.

The dominance of the will-to-power over cooperation

When violence is to be committed, it is frequently done by “appealing to justice, custom, freedom, the welfare of the oppressed and in the name of culture.”

Power-seekers transform social feeling “from an end into a means, and it is pressed into the service of nationalism and imperialism.”The only way to counter this neurotic sense of power-seeking is to develop preventive methods by developing social feeling and cooperation.Adler stressed the need for the development of social feeling by developing new, cooperative forms of childhood education within the family and schools.

Developing social feeling 

By 1934, Adler saw that the sense of togetherness in Germany and Austria was going to be used again to create togetherness among a small circle and subverting the use of social feeling by making it a facade for nationalism, racism and imperialism.

The irony of developing social feeling 

Alfred Adler was an Austrian physician and psychiatrist who is best-known for forming the school of thought known as individual psychology. He is also remembered for his concepts of the inferiority feeling and inferiority complex, which he believed played a major part in the formation of personality. 

Alfred Adler – Power and Social Feeling

Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance.

Relationship is what makes <a href="https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/12/08/the-songs-of-trees-david-haskell/">a forest a forest</a> and <a href="https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/02/28/undersea-rachel-carson/">an ocean an ocean</a>. To meet the world on its own terms and respect the reality of another as an expression of that world as fundamental and inalienable as your own reality is an art immensely rewarding yet immensely difficult.How to master the orientation of heart, mind, and spirit essential for the art of sincere and honorable relationship is what philosopher Martin Buber explores in his 1923 classic <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743201337/braipick-20">I and Thou</a> — the foundation of Buber’s influential existentialist philosophy of dialogue.

Philosophy of dialogue: Relationship

<a href="https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/01/06/alan-watts-reality/">Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others</a>.

To the man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks. The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words. The one primary word is the combination I–Thou. The other primary word is the combination I–It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It. Hence the I of man is also twofold. For the I of the primary word I–Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I–It.

I–It establishes the world of experience and sensation.I–Thou establishes the world of relationship, which asks of each person a participatory intimacy. Thou addresses another not as an object but as a presence.

I - Thou. I - It.

“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you.”

To address another as Thou, Buber suggests, requires a certain self-surrender that springs from inhabiting one’s own presence while at the same time stepping outside one’s self. Only then does the other cease to be a means to one’s own ends and becomes real. The primary word I–Thou can be spoken only with the whole being. Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou.

All real living is meeting

Another perspective to look into relationship:  the fundamental truth of this world of appearance. 

I and Thou: Philosopher Martin Buber on the Art of Relationship and What Makes Us Real to One Another

<ul><li>positive thinking expands my gratitude and reminds me what I value.</li><li>Negative thinking helps me look my pain and problems in the eye.</li></ul>To live a full life, I can’t ignore my appreciation or my problems. Both matter. Together, they give me an even-handed view of what’s happening, so I can decide what’s working and what’s not.Believing in positive or negative thinking at the exclusion of the other is extremism. ﻿

Positive  vs Negative thinking

Negative thinking is . . . a willingness to consider what is not working. What is not in balance? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to?

Power of thinking is about trusting ourselves to “to face the full truth, whatever that full truth may turn out to be."<ul><li>Better to sit with my grief now than let it mutate into a menace as consequence at repercussions of repressing emotions.</li><li>We can’t have lights without shadows, fullness without emptiness, or joy without suffering. These elements complement one another.</li><li> “Always think positively!” trades this observable dynamic for a delusion.</li></ul>

What is the power of thinking

Believing in positive or negative thinking at the exclusion of the other is extremism.

Personal Development

The power of thinking

The answer it depends on a number of factors, including the age of the child, the likelihood they will hear it from another source, and what your family’s relationship to the conflict is.If for any reason you think your child is going to hear about this, then get to them and talk to them.If that’s not that case, you should only talk to your child, if under the age of eight, if it’s going to impact your family, if your family will really feel it.

Should I talk to my children about war?

<ul><li>A useful place to start is by asking whether your child has heard about the conflict, and if so, what they have heard.</li><li>It is important to first “process your own feelings as parent and then figure out if you should talk to your child about it.</li><li>By entering the conversation with a question, it also allows parents to listen to their child’s emotional response, and correct any misconceptions with facts.</li><li>Before correcting any misinformation, parents should ask a child how they are feeling about the information they have learned</li></ul>

How to talk to your child about war

<ul><li>According to Dr Gilboa, these messages may be something like: “Our family is safe,” “oppression is wrong,” or “<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/war">war</a> is bad”.</li><li>If the child is older, it may mean they are “ready for a more nuanced convo about conflict, such as where is the gain?” which can help them grow into critical thinkers.</li><li>While it is important that parents broach difficult topics such as war with their children, Dr Gilboa made a point to remind parents that this cannot be successfully done until they have processed their own feelings about the news.</li></ul>

The main messages

<ul><li>While social media can be a useful source of news, it can also be flooded with misinformation.</li><li>In the age of social media, parents should also be aware that their children may be exposed to information about the topic on platforms such as Twitter, TikTok or Instagram. </li><li>If your child comes to you with a piece of information that you don’t believe is accurate, rather than immediately dismissing the news, Dr Gilboa recommends asking what their source is, and then cross-referencing the information with more credible news outlets to see whether it is accurate.</li></ul>

Social Media vs accurate sources

In times of uncertainty or fear, it can be especially daunting deciding whether a child should be exposed to a topic that is frightening.

How and when to talk to children about war, according to a parenting expert

<ul><li>A consequence is the result or direct effect of an action. </li></ul>> Consequences give your child the message that he is capable of taking responsibility for problems and can handle them.<ul><li>Punishment is defined by Merriam-Webster as “suffering, pain, or loss that serves as retribution. </li></ul>> Punishment can cause resentment and rarely teaches a child what you want him to learn. It also can be damaging to your child’s self-esteem and does not facilitate secure attachment.

Consequences versus punishment

<ul><li>It backfires. Punishment is almost always delivered with anger.</li><li>It is temporary. Punishment teaches children to respond out of fear rather than out of a desire to please or do the right thing.</li><li>It reinforces the child’s negative view of self. It creates an expectation by the child and others of additional bad behavior.</li><li>It provokes revenge, makes the child feel angry and resentful.</li><li>It maintains emotional distance. Punishment feeds into their defenses against being close and reinforces a “me against you” mentality.</li></ul>

Why punishment doesn’t work

Three steps:1. Tell your child to sit for a brief time to think about her behaviors and choices.2. When you are ready, not when your child demands, go to your child.3. If your child responds appropriately — with honesty and without blaming others — give praise, a big hug, a warm smile and the assurance that all is forgiven. If your child does not respond appropriately, say, “I guess you need more time to think it over. I’ll be back soon.”

Instead of punish

Parents are often unclear about the difference between consequences and punishment and the end result. 

Parents are often unclear about the difference between consequences and punishment -- and that's one reason efforts to discipline children can be ineffective.

Consequences versus punishment 

<ul><li>Giraffes gave birth after a pregnancy of 15 month</li><li>Since the young giraffes cannot run fast, its mother will hide it or leave it with other mother giraffe “babysitters”—known as a creche—while she looks for food</li><li>Like humans, [the baby giraffes] will start to miss their mother and will wait for her where she was last seen until she comes back</li><li>Like most moms, giraffes don’t get much sleep. They are always on guard, protecting themselves and their offspring, so they only get about 30 minutes of sleep a day, usually just a few minutes at a time.</li></ul>

Giraffe

<ul><li>new animal parenting style called the “elephant mom,” is focuses on protection and encouragement the child. </li><li>Like giraffes, elephants share in the responsibility of caring and defending their young. Elephant moms will often come together to protect and save a baby elephant, even at their own risk.</li><li>Elephants are loving creatures and moms stay close to their babies, bringing them back to the fold if they wander away, bathing them, nursing them, and teaching them survival skills. </li><li> And elephants stay with their mothers for an average of 16 years. </li></ul>

Elephant 

<ul><li>The orangutan mother–infant bond is one of the most intense and intimate I’ve ever seen in any animal</li><li>Orangutan mothers carry their babies around until they are five years old and they can breast feed them until they are eight years old</li><li>When they do eventually leave “home,” the female orangutans will often come back for visits with their moms.</li><li>Young orangutans learn nearly everything they need to know from their mothers. </li></ul>

Orangutan

<ul><li>A mother polar bear must gain extra weight—more than 400 pounds—to ensure the fetus is not reabsorbed by her body</li><li>She doesn’t eat for a few months while she goes into a hibernation state before giving birth</li><li>Her cubs are tiny—just one pound—and helpless when born, but even as they get bigger, they stay near their moms for two to three years learning how to survive</li></ul>

Polar Bear

<ul><li>The cheetah mom is a hard-working single mother, having to raise between two and eight cubs at a time. </li><li>In addition to feeding and teaching them, she must protect them from lions, hyenas, and other predators. </li><li>To keep her litter safe, the mother cheetah moves her cubs to a new location every few days. </li><li>The babies nurse until they are about eight months old and then they begin to learn to stalk and hunt, getting lessons from mom and practice time with their siblings.</li></ul>

Cheetah

<ul><li>are highly protective of their young baby</li><li>after birth, they clean the baby, clear his nasal passages, and gentile cradled him</li></ul>

Gorilla

Learning and understand animals motherhood 

These six amazing animal mothers protect and care for their adorable babies in such inspirational ways. And this video of Calaya and her baby Moke, from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, will show you why gorillas make the list.

Parenting support

6 of the Best Animal Mothers and Why They Are Amazing - Learning Liftoff

﻿What rises, eventually falls. What grows, gradually decays.

true essence of life

Zen Koans are paradoxical riddles used in Zen Buddhism as a meditation discipline, which help you to become a more self-aware & wiser person.

Zen Koans: 5 Profound Paradoxical Riddles To Expand Your Mind

Emotional repression in most cases is expressed as nicenessIn people with a weak sense of self, there is often un unhealthy fusion with others.

Emotional Repression vs Niceness

What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood.

Emotional competence 

Artistic expression by itself is only a form of acting out emotions, not a way of working them through.

Art as therapy 

If the expression of anger is harmful and so is its repression, how do we hope to attaint health and healing?<ul><li>in the repression the problem is a lack of release</li><li>in the release the problem is with unregulated and exaggerated venting</li></ul>Both repression and rage represents a fear of the genuine experience of anger.

Repression of Anger

...is an empowerment and a relaxation....is physiologic experience without acting outWhen healthy anger is starting to be experienced, you don't see anything dramatic. What you do see is a decrease of all muscle tension.

Healthy Anger

Most of people will describe anxiety: tightening of the voice, shallow breathing, muscle tension - signs of anxiety not rage. Anger triggers anxiety because it coexist with positive feelings, with love and the desire for contact. Anger leads to an attacking energy, it threatens attachment.  Aggressive impulses are suppressed because of guilt, and the guilt exist only because of the simultaneous existence of love, of positive feelings.Anger doesn't exist in a vacuum by itself: is incredibly anxiety-provoking and guilt-producing for a person to experience aggressive feelings toward a loved one.

Rage - What do people really experience when they experience it?

The acting-out, the yelling, the screaming and even the hitting serves as a defence against the experience of the anger.  So, we repress the anger. Repression and discharge are two sides of the same coin.

The defence against experience Anger 

Anger is the energy Mother Nature gives us as little kids to stand forward on our own behalf and say I matter.

It offers new perspectives to see the necessity of anger, and how to deal with Trauma . 

NATIONAL BESTSELLER In this accessible and groundbreaking book -- filled with the moving stories of real people -- medical doctor and bestselling author of Scattered Minds, Gabor Maté, shows that emotion and psychological stress play a powerful role in the onset of chronic illness. Western medicine achieves spectacular triumphs when dealing with acute conditions such as fractured bones or life-threatening infections. It is less successful against ailments not susceptible to the quick ministrations of scalpel, antibiotic or miracle drug. Trained to consider mind and body separately, physicians are often helpless in arresting the advance of most of the chronic diseases, such as breast cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and even Alzheimer’s disease. Gabor Maté has found that in all of these chronic conditions, there is a common thread: people afflicted by these diseases have led lives of excessive stress, often invisible to the individuals themselves. From an early age, many of us develop a psychological coping style that keeps us out of touch with the signs of stress. So-called negative emotions, particularly anger, are suppressed. Dr. Maté writes with great conviction that knowledge of how stress and disease are connected is essential to prevent illness in the first place, or to facilitate healing. When the Body Says No is an impressive contribution to current research on the physiological connection between life’s stresses and emotions and the body systems governing nerves, immune apparatus and hormones. With great compassion and erudition, Gabor Maté demystifies medical science and, as he did in Scattered Minds, invites us all to be our own health advocates. Excerpt from When the Body Says No “Only an intellectual luddite would deny the enormous benefits that have accrued to humankind from the scrupulous application of scientific methods. But not all aspects of illness can be reduced to facts verified by double-blind studies and by the strictest scientific techniques. We confine ourselves to a narrow realm indeed if we exclude from accepted knowledge the contributions of human experience and insight. . . . “In 1892 William Osler, one of the greatest physicians of all time, suspected rheumatoid arthritis to be a stress-related disorder. Today rheumatology all but ignores that wisdom, despite the supporting scientific evidence that has accumulated in the 110 years since Osler first published his text. That is where the narrow scientific approach has brought the practice of medicine. Elevating modern science to be the final arbiter of our sufferings, we have been too eager to discard the insights of previous ages.”

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Adelina Oane
@adelinaoane

Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Need for Power - IResearchNet

Alfred Adler – Power and Social Feeling

I and Thou: Philosopher Martin Buber on the Art of Relationship and What Makes Us Real to One Another

The power of thinking

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Adelina Oane@adelinaoane

Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Need for Power - IResearchNet

Alfred Adler – Power and Social Feeling

I and Thou: Philosopher Martin Buber on the Art of Relationship and What Makes Us Real to One Another

The power of thinking

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Adelina Oane
@adelinaoane