MIND GAMES

I wonder if mind games work, but you know and I know that at times those are the only games we have left to work with. so, here's how I see it:

1) a non-pre-judgment of experience is best, no prior conditioning of how I expect to feel, or even how I do fee. An acceptance that all is as it is. No need to classify, analyze or spiritualize anything! then, we can stretch and go straight to GO.

2) In truth, mind games do work. Think of Victor Frankl's internal transcendence of life in a Nazi concentration camp and his identification of the final, irreducible human freedom, the freedom to choose one's own way of aligning one's self to any given reality. I guess that's what Roberto Benigni had in mind with his absurdist film Life Is Beautiful, but I still hate the movie because it trivializes something too holy and too horrible to make light fun of.

3) Being confined can result in a kind of liberation. On 4 nights a week I am pretty strictly confined for 8 hours to isolation in the gatehouse of a fairly deserted condo. This is my job. If I go into it with no attitude or opinion at all, I'm far better off to begin with. Having arrived and relieved the afternoon-to-evening guard, I turn everything superfluous off -- radio, AC -- then I throw open the window/doors and settle everything, myself too, down for the evening. Now it's up to me whether to make this into a prison or a prism (a refracted opportunity for creative envisionment).

4) I think that every task we accept is a kind of confinement. It helps me to sometime use a timer, as I am doing now with this writing trip. It provides a pre-determined bubble of time in which I am free to attend to what I have chosen to do. Also, it gives a cut-off point, so that one does not simply ramble on or around a task.

What MUST be done just might be done willingly or even delightfully, rather than grudgingly or hopelessly; because the spirit in which a thing is done is, after all, a choice we are free to make. It's a chance to begin all over again!

--Bill Joyner (2-28-99)

 

Mr. Li, who asserts that he has a higher spiritual authority than Jesus, Mohammed or Buddha, teaches that he was sent to earth by a "supreme being" to save mankind from moral corruption caused by consumerism, modern science and technology.

Chinese society has disintegrated so far, Mr. Li contends, that many humans are reincarnated as demons, some of them disguised as monks, "Especially in Taiwan." he has written, "many famous monks or lay Buddhists are actually demons."

Competing for followers with other cults, Mr. Li has denounced other qigong masters as "possessed with foxes or yellow weasels, and some with snakes."

At today's protest, followers extolled the virtues of their cult, talking more about the beneficial effects of moral discipline than about the greatness of their leader. "I am a better father and husband and citizen," said a 48-year-old man who came from Hebei Province, and who said he had been a member of Buddhist Law for six years. "We are making a better society. I don't get sick anymore," the man continued, "If everyone is healthy, it will save medical costs and be good for society as a whole."

Today's protest, populated mostly by people from outside the capital, elicited much fascination but limited sympathy from Beijing residents, thousands of whom gathered to look on.

Many of the cult followers carried a book by Mr. Li. Buddhist Law, founded by Mr. Li in 1992, preaches that evil lurks in the modern appearance of rock and roll music, television, drugs and homosexuality. Although the group is vehemently opposed to modern science and technology, many members use the internet.

"They're crazy," said Li Xiaoming, 27, who works for a transport company. "But there are a lot of them, so the government has to listen."

from the New York Times