Posted on 09/07/2009 3:26:44 PM PDT by blueglass
Not long ago at Fort Bragg, N.C., the country's largest military base, seven soldiers sat in a semi-circle, lights dimmed, eyes closed, two fingertips lightly pressed beneath their belly buttons to activate their "core." Electronic music thumped as the soldiers tried to silence their thoughts, the key to Warrior Mind Training, a form of meditation slowly making inroads on military bases across the country. Think military and you think macho, not meditation, but that's about to change now that the Army intends to train its 1.1 million soldiers in the art of mental toughness.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
" Electronic music thumped as the soldiers tried to silence their thoughts, the key to Warrior Mind Training"
"She also delved into the science behind mind training to analyze how meditation tactics could help treat - and maybe even help prevent - post-traumatic stress disorder"
"Mind training"-- I love it. This is simply the government preparing our troops to fight against us. They know how difficult it would be for brothers and sisters to turn against brothers and sisters so "mind training" (brainwashing) is needed to "silence their thoughts". Of ocurse, Obama's "civilian defense force" won't need any of this mental "training", because they already "damn America", and hate us, so they will relish in smashing and burning things. But the decent ones, they will need their minds made right.
I seriously doubt a little session of Zen meditation is going to turn you into a jackbooted thug.
Since when did Samurai have thumping electronic music?
Agreed.
I think you may be reading too much into this. It’s not like our troops are being programmed. From what I read, it’s more a sort of mental training to improve concentration.
How many 100s of years kicking the ass of the enemy and some schmuck comes along with something new to “improve” our soldiers. Sounds like left wing lunitic suggestions to the end of valueless results.
Suppress this stupid BS NOW.
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Zen is clearly neither American nor Christian, so then the question is what will it do, who is promoting it among our military and why?
And since it’s faggy, new-age mind control, I like the way they call it “Warrior” training, and “mental toughness”, when in reality it takes away your ability to think. I like my mind the way it is.
Cup of coffee works for me.
“Many tens of millions of other Americans know these techniques already. “
Never tried them. Do they work?
“two fingertips lightly pressed beneath their belly buttons to activate their “core.”
Shwing!
Giggety giggety!
I wonder how many of them are just going along and telling nasty jokes about it later...
Our Marines, Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen, achieve “mental toughness” through their rigorous training and combat experience.
This sort of mind control experimentation has the odor of New Age gobbledygook and Ivan Pavlov.
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This really could cut either way. I studied judo when I was in the army—not officially, but with a couple of my buddies who decided it would be fun to do.
Zen can either be religious, or it can simply be a matter of clearing the mind to fight better. Breathing exercises, concentration, emptying the mind—not bad in themselves, although they could be misused.
As for the thumping electronic music, that sounds like a load of cr*p.
I’d be more concerned to know what the career sergeants make of this. They are the guys who are supposed to make sure that the troops are kept fit and are ready to fight. Are they being consulted? This sounds suspiciously like some sort of amateur interference with the normal chain of command. I doubt whether these zen mistresses will be going out into the field with the troops.
In the Japanese garden there is the sound of the Water, the Wind in the trees
and the wooden Bonk of the Shishi odoshi. (Deer Scarer)
All things to Focus on.
My reference was to Zen meditation practices, not to Zen. Matthew 6 covers the waterfront on meditative practice. Jonah also appears to have used some pretty standard meditative practices common to modern Zen practices.
Pray in your closet as directed by the Disciple Matthew. That’ll pretty much give you an idea of what’s required.
Nothing new. We Rangers always called it “going to our happy place”. Embrace the suck.
They managed to stay on top of everybody for over 1,000 years.
We are not talking Pure Land Buddhism here!
aka FIDO.
Ya know, I doubt if what they are doing fits squarely into the orthodox Christian worldview. Mind you that could simply be my nasty suspicious mind, but there it is.
None of which is anything like electronic thumping music. Techno torture. I wonder if we could do this to ‘insurgents’?
I see your Point.
More like Blotting out thought then becoming serene amide the Chaos.
So instead of Focusing the Mind it is actually more like White Noise and Masking thought.
Not mind control. But they should dispense with the hocus pocus and go with some simple techniques as explored by a Dr. Benson. He wrote a book about it called The Relaxation Response.
I looked this up the other day and it looks like Benson has managed to garbage the thing up over time. The original was simple stuff.
Wow. Can seppuku and ada uchi be far behind?
What they mean by silencing your thoughts is merely silencing what others have called “roof brain activity” for a time. Roof brain activity is all the random thoughts we carry around that keep us from focusing on the moment. Angry thoughts, worrying thoughts...things we can do nothing about at the moment. Draining those thoughts for a time is indeed quite relaxing.
Indeed, Samurai would not meditate to loud music. However, use of meditation by warriors and/or martial arts experts is not "faggy" or "new age" nor would it likely have anything to do with mind control to convince soldiers to be hostile towards civilians.
日本＊ピング＊ (kono risuto ni hairitai ka detai wo shirasete kudasai : let me know if you want on or off this list)
I believe somewhere Chuck Norris talked about doing martial arts without the aspects that would be tricky for Christians. And I think there are Christian soldiers who would have a problem with this.
The consequences were, back in the old days, partial deafness.
Japanese musical advances have been made primarily in modern times where the use of antibiotics has minimized this source of damage to Japanese hearing.
So, let's put it this way, if the Samurai could have heard the music they might have used it to aid meditation ~ a little "Free Bird" perhaps?!
I disagree. It worked well enough for Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Musashi in their day, and samurai were indeed the fiercest of warriors, due in large part to their mental toughness and adherence to duty and honor. Nothing wrong with that.
My Drill instructor had a breathing technique we used on the rifle range. You took a deep breathe and let it half out, then held it, got a proper sight picture and squeezed the trigger. He watched as you did this and if you did it wrong he used a simple motivation technique to correct you. We called it a kick in the ass. I t usually worked 100% of the time.
Huh?
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
I too recall those kicks in the ass as being an excellent mind control training technique. If nothing else will get your mind right, that will.
It’s not that kind of thought silencing. It’s about putting aside all distractions, so in battle they’re just thinking about the battle, not wanting to go home, not freaking out because their buddy just got killed, the fight and nothing but the fight. Adrenalin does a lot of that for you, but in the lulls adrenalin fades, Bushido training helps you keep the focus in between rushes.
A genetic thing; kind of like the entire population being nearsighted. Readily corrected in modern times of course.
We kick ass because we learn new stuff then apply it. This mind training may have potential.
I’m always willing to defer to those more trained than I, don’t get me wrong but ask yourself, exactly how good was it for them. They are toast.
Nothing insidious about mental training, but it helps to have some background of what is involved, what is achieved and why it is useful.
People all over the world teach their children from infancy to “talk to themselves” in their heads. The reason for this is that mental quietude is necessary for the attention to either become focused, or unfocused, for any great length of time. When you talk to yourself, it prevents you from mentally getting either too focused or too unfocused, by bouncing you back and forth between the two states.
In ancient times, this was very useful, because being either too focused or too unfocused is not a good mental state to be in when you are in a survival situation, like being pursued by a tiger. But today there are far fewer tigers, and free time in which being in a focused or unfocused mental state can be useful, or even valuable.
A problem exists when someone talks to themselves so much, that it is hard for them to accomplish things, because they are so distracted. Such people can sound stupid, like “surf bums” or “ditzes”, because they can hardly speak a sentence without their attention drifting.
And this is where mental training comes into play. All it accomplishes is to give a person more control over these three states of mind. It does this through the simple means of being able to turn off and on the talking to yourself.
For example, just by being able to concentrate on a written test without distraction, people do much better just because they can maintain their focus on the test longer.
Alternatively, relaxing, in an unfocused state of mind, allows the mind to be more creative and inventive, which is very useful to complex and difficult problem solving.
This ability, this self control over talking to yourself can likewise increase the intensity of prayer for the religious, so a person is not distracted between their prayer, the football game they are missing, and what they are having for lunch, along with other things that just disrupt their prayer by “popping into their heads”.
That is why there is little or no objection to it by those that practice these techniques. In the final analysis, it is not learning something new, but unlearning mental training you were given since you were a baby.
There are a bunch of techniques that achieve the same end, but they do so by the simple means of your not talking to yourself for longer and longer periods. Just by being able to do this comes the self control, until it is like a light switch in your mind, that you can turn on and turn off your talking to yourself at will, for minutes, or even hours.
Depends on the subliminals behind the music.
I have a hard time imagining Miyamoto Musashi looking at his belly button. If I recall his "Book of Five Rings" he promoted strategic and tactical knowledge as most important.
Aristotle taught Alexander how to think logically. He damn near conquered the world. I doubt Hannibal looked at his belly button. Instead, he drew upon experience and observation of his enemy.
Belly button watchers are good con men. They talk a good game for the weak who are afraid to test these ideas, I hope this is an untrue account of the direction of our soldiers.
“She also delved into the science behind mind training to analyze how meditation tactics could help treat - and maybe even help prevent - post-traumatic stress disorder”
In other words...the hit the liberal jackpot...A FEDERAL GRANT...
“she hit.....
This sort of mind control experimentation has the odor of New Age gobbledygook and Ivan Pavlov.>>>>>>>>>>
I think you are right about that. Not because the linegaes of profound warriorship practises do not work, but because New Age podunks convert the lineages into their own New Age bunk.
Genuine training in warriorship is rare, even in the east. If it was ever truly and genuinely presented to our military, we would have accomplished a wonderful thing,But the fact is that there are too many New Age podunks who sell what little they know, and to sell they jazz it up and ruin it irrevocably.
You want to see a real samurai warrior? Visit here:
In his context, what these new age idiots are doing with this so called warrior training is idiotic and it is exactly what many say: “brain washing” or as you succinctly put it,”New Age gobbledygook and Ivan Pavlov.”
This disempowers our military, another Obama inovation.
> I seriously doubt a little session of Zen meditation is going to turn you into a jackbooted thug.
It sounds to me more like “Bushido” (the Way of the Warrior) done once-over-lightly, rather than “Zen”.
If it is “Bushido” then it would be highly beneficial — however, it’s not the sort of thing that can be learned in a few sessions. It is the culmination of key learnings from the whole range of the Japanese Martial Arts syllabus, and it is a lifetime study.
As presented, this new program sounds like a gimmicky wank.
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