May 17, 2012: Post 138, Day 138 - Fast Day

May 17, 2012

Daily Comment

What about Buddhism?

I have been a believer in the philosophy since my old high school friend Billy Bohlman sat me down and introduced his flavor of Buddhism to me in the late 1980s. 

After he moved to the Midwest in the 70s, he and I didn't get to hang out together, and I had no idea he had embraced this belief system - I'm hesitant to call it a religion, but maybe that's just a hangover from my feelings about other religions - all of them. 

Billy had taken on a lay role in the Buddhist Temple of Chicago, which was founded by a Buddhist Priest who had been in one of the Japanese interment camps during World War II. Before he gave me some literature to read, my exposure to Buddhism wasn't deeper than having read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and some articles by the American Zen Buddhist Alan Watts. In short, I was pretty ignorant.

I had an immediate positive response to this new knowledge and understanding. 

In the 1990s, I started meditating. Later, I meditated pretty regularly.

I credit my meditation practice and further reading and internal dialog with helping me through the rough times. 

I also think it influenced my relationships, some for better, some for worse. The ones where it influenced for the better were the ones that benefited from the calm, the compassion, the lack of drama that came to me over the years.

The ones it didn't help were with people who felt they needed a lot of volatility in their lives, and were looking outside themselves for solutions to their problems.

If I have developed some calm, compassion, and a distaste for the dramatic in life, I am not saying that I have freed myself completely from lapses in these areas. That is definitely not the case. But I think my thresholds are higher, and, when breached, my recovery is faster. At least, that is my perception.

One of the things I like best about Buddhism is that it (not uniquely) gets that our sensory input is not concrete reality. Buddhism accepts that perception is everything, which is why meditation is so wonderful - because it takes the focus off external sensory input, and replaces it with focus on the internal, the void, as it were.

When I say I don't think of Buddhism as a religion, I am talking about my personal view. In my practice of Buddhism, there is no worship, there is no communal gathering of like believers. I am not a member of any organized Buddhist group. I strive to internalize the basic teachings, and leave the organization to fellow-seekers who like that style.

Obviously, this is a personal take on Buddhism, unaffiliated and with no orthodoxy at all.

Please leave a comment if you visit my blog. Thank you!

 

Food and Diet Section

Today's Weight:        202.0 lbs 
Yesterday's Weight:    200.2 lbs
Net Loss/Gain:         + 1.8 lbs

Year 2012 daily weight from December 31, 2011.

Diet Comment:

Hopefully, today's fast will correct for yesterday's extra meal, which was what I should have called that epic snack I had before dinner.  Gaining 4 pounds in 2 days of 'normal' eating is not good.

By design, the fast  lasted for 22 hours. That's close enough to 24, right? I thought so.

Food Log

Breakfast
Skipped. 

Lunch
Skipped. 

Dinner

Baby carrots and home-made mayonnaise, pepperoni, chili (grass-fed beef, black beans, peas, mushrooms, tomatoes, spices).

Liquid Intake
    Coffee:   22 oz,   Water 104+ oz

Please leave a comment if you visit my blog. Thank you!