Sometimes I weary of all the nice people around me. This probably makes me seem like the ultimate curmudgeon, but stay with me for a bit and I’ll explain what I mean.
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation. We will be sitting from 7:30 to 11:00 PM Eastern Time. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you. Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers, who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
Sangha Co-hosts for meditation are:
7:30 - 10:00 Ooooh and davehouck
9:30 - 11:00 thanatokephaloides
|
I know so many nice people who have become bitter as they age, they have spent their entire lives trying to maintain harmony and keep everyone happy. They’ve given up large parts of themselves in order to keep peace. Eventually they turn a corner in life and realize that no matter how much energy they expend they cannot, ultimately, maintain constant harmony; or perhaps as they age they just no longer have the energy to force niceness, and they spend the rest of their lives bitter old people.
It is fundamentally impossible to maintain harmony all the time, life just doesn’t roll that way. And ego driven human nature is too full of self interest to be fundamentally nice; so when people force themselves to always maintain an outward veneer of niceness, it takes a large amount of energy to deny the parts of themselves they do not want to share with others, and most of the time they do not even want to see that darkness in themselves either. It can be partially traced, I suspect, to a lack of a cultural spiritual tradition in the West which encourages self-awareness.
Valuing niceness and harmony above all takes extraordinary amounts of energy, that there are so many people who face life in this fashion leads to an striking personal imbalances, but also, here in the West where it is so prevalent it leads to enormous cultural imbalances. We can see it’s evidence in the rise of the Tea Party, and in the vast effect Fox News has had in distorting reality and manipulating people who are already unhappy, into giving self righteous voice to vent their deepest unexpressed rage. It sometimes manifests here on Dkos too, have you ever seen a kossack who you’ve respected and thought of as nice suddenly turn on another Kossack for proposing a concept out of that first kossack's range of approval? It can get ugly.
When I am around people who are perpetually nice it exhausts me, because I can feel their strenuous effort to remain always nice. So it is always my preference to spend time with people who are willing to be real, and who let me be real as well.
Let me pass the time with people who are free enough to be nice and NOT nice, let me spend my days with those who know both their lightness and their darkness, people who are acquainted with their strengths and their weakness and who are comfortable allowing all of that to arise in me. Let me spend my limited time with people who are comfortable with paradox and ambiguity. Let me spend my days with people who know the difference between compassion and niceness, and let us laugh gently at ourselves when we see our human weaknesses. Let us burst free of the tyranny of niceness and rejoice in being real with each other.