My mental circus, inside and out.

The Worldly Dharmas:

Pleasure/Pain

Gain/Loss

Praise/Blame

This appears to be a good time for Emma to think about the worldly dharmas.  She encountered the worldly dharmas in three different texts this week, at just the right time when she was feeling beaten up by both praise and blame, that roller coaster ride of ups and downs that probably take place in any given week, and even in any given hour of meditation.   Of the three dyads, she would have to say that praise and blame are most compelling right now, having mostly to do with Emma's attachment to work, and she feels uncomfortable wth both of these.   When she sat down to meditate, she found praise and blame roiling along through her mind, praise for herself that her breathing was slow and restful, followed by blame that she was about to cough in a room full of other meditators in her vipassana group.   So many of her thoughts are chained to praise and blame, even in the microcosm,  that it seems worth observing to figure out why that is.   And everyone around her is deeply caught up in these states, too.  They drive the workplace, and to some extent, Emma's family life.   Emma wonders whether, given the low salaries in academe, praise and blame are more compelling there than in the corporate world, which is more tied to loss and gain.   But she supposes some mix of  all the worldly dharmas are present in everyone, and cause a lot of very temporary joy and suffering.

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 21, 2008 20:37 | link | comments (2)

Emma would just like to launch a complaint againt the condom.  She recently read a study which found that people don't like condoms, primarily because men lose their erections trying to get them on.  Well, surprise.  Emma always wonders why social scientists spend their time proving what everyone already knows.  Can it be that healthcare providers and educators really don't grasp this and need a study to prove it? Now maybe, when a man is 25, the condom is easy to put on.  After all, it is still possible for a man to get rock hard instantly when he is 25, but when he is 54, and he has to stop, look around on his desk for where he put the damn things, and now struggle to get this annoying, numbing piece of plastic on his softening member, the whole business spirals into a  steady state of flaccidity.  In fact, reminded of how he is getting older and wondering whether he shouldn't take up running to get the blood flow up, he may go stomping around in anger and there goes the mood.  At that moment, risking a deadly disease seems preferable to facing the inevitable facts of our decline, even the benefits of being able to go long and slow.   Let's just state this plainly.  We don't want to be reminded in this way that we are getting old! Emma has been sad to read the depressing failures of the Phase III drug trials for microbicides that would much more effectively prevent the spread of STDs. This would be an incredible benefit to humankind, even on the very tiny scale of Emma's sex life. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 16, 2008 23:07 | link | comments (2)