" 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?
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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Cup of coffee works for me.
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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The Men Who Stare At Goats is UK journalist Jon Ronson's terrific, absurd, scary, and funny nonfiction book about the United States military's weird experiments with psychic spying, "Jedi" powers, subliminal sound weapons, and, er, the ability to kill an animal just by looking at it (hence the title). The book is coming to the big screen November 6 in the form of a dark comedy starring Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, and Jeff Bridges. What fun!
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.
Nothing new. We Rangers always called it “going to our happy place”. Embrace the suck.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.