ANM - Yes, time will keep marching on no matter what we do or don't do. :)
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ANM - Yes, time will keep marching on no matter what we do or don't do. :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by happystuff
Right but what if you are not prepared for the anxiety associated with LOSING your wealth? What about people who have money and then lose it and commit suicide because they can't deal with the prospect of not having it. You have to practice resilience or you will not be ready for it when you need it.
Actually, for suicide to be the answer to losing wealth, I think there might be more mental issues at play there than just losing the wealth.Quote:
Originally Posted by catherine
I think there is a LOT of anxiety over having wealth that maybe doesn't lead to suicide, just as there is a lot of anxiety about not having wealth. I think Seneca's point is simply an exercise in being able to maintain emotional equilibrium in any situation.Quote:
Originally Posted by happystuff
I'm interested in asceticism but not as practice for destitution. But I suppose one could go down to live in a tent in a homeless encampment for a week just for practice if they wanted, then they would be ready for that I suppose (and have made some valuable connections? I've got friends in low places .. ).
Just a question sort of tied in with this. When people go on retreats to remote places which may or may not have guides, what is the underlying expectation? Freedom from being tied to the material way of life or defining one's future or ?
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." -- Walden by Henry David ThoreauQuote:
Originally Posted by razz
The times I've gone on retreat, whether backpacking solo in the woods or spending a few days at a monastery, I've done it in the spirit of Thoreau. I've gone away to spend some time away from my daily life and all the things in it. To spend some time in a place where what I saw and felt and did would be what I was actually doing at that moment and all my thoughts would be the deep inner thoughts that were largely inaccessible among the constant buzz and clatter and rush of normal life. I went away to live as simply as I could, to get fresh air and exercise and rest. I went away to be in a place where I wasn't surrounded by myriad things that all called out insistently for me to do them or fix them or clean them or buy them or get rid of them. I went away to be me, if only for a few days. And when not on retreat, I would sometimes go into an empty closet and close the door and meditate there in the dark for an hour or two, just to clear my head and remember who I really am.
To quote Thoreau again "Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge? Seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little."
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." That is why I went on retreat.