Cultivating the Heart of Compassion by Ram Dass; Mnemonic Movie – Mark II

So, here we go again to my attempts at creating mnemonic movies. It’s once again based on Ram Dass and one of his famous lectures. It’s only on audio and it’s not exactly great.
Anyways, this time I’m missing on some parts because I see them as basics or smth I’ve already learned.

The metro of Tokyo, early morning. Aikido master, confident, powerful. But never truly challenged.
A drunk comes in, a violent drunk. Immediately he insults a couple with a kid and they are swiftly escaping into the next cart. The drunk is actively looking for the next victim, an old lady is moving away too. It’s only you left and you know quite well, that with one move you will crash him into the floor. He’s an easy target. But it’s him who has to make the move first. Your ego isn’t so powerful to just attack him, but still powerful enough to create the conditions for him to make an attack. You’re looking at him, straight into the eyes, piercing him with a sense of disgust. He’s drunk, but he’s sensing your message. He’s ready to approach you… when you suddenly hear a pitchy voice: Hey, you, turn away!
It’s an old man! He’s looking for the attention of the drunk guy. You’re confused, the drunk is confused too. The old man is asking: What did you drink?
The drunk guy is like: Sake, it’s not your job.
But the old man isn’t taking any offense, he continues telling a story how he loves sake and how he likes to watch an old tree with his wife in the winter, both drinking sake to keep them warm. Then the old man asks him about his wife.
The drunk gets soft and replies: I don’t have a wife! She died. I don’t have a job, I don’t have where to live, I’m a failure.

Fear is fighting with all your power. Compassion is taking the power out of your attacker.

Your compassion suddenly rises. You realize how you were going to be fighting a man who has gone through so much pain, so much suffering… you are now understanding where this violence is coming from, why it is boiling out of him. And you feel guilty. You were ready to beat a man in a sorry state…
This old mean taught you a lesson of aikido with love. Where was your aikido? You were going to be a savage, just like any other man. You were about to answer aggression with aggression instead of love and compassion.
Meditating on this lesson, you’re leaving the metro station and heading towards the nearby park. You’re in need of some alone time, you can feel the shame tearing apart your insides.
You judged when accepting was all that guy was searching for. Your insecurity, not your fake confidence took control of your emotions, your thought control.
Now inside the forest, are you judging the trees, the flowers? No. You accept them just as they are. Can you blame a tree that it’s dying or a flower that smells? You can’t. That’s nature. Then why do you blame people for what they are? If you blame them, will you change the past? Will you resurrect the tree, make the flower smell less or the man less lonely and sad? No. You won’t. You have to accept them as they are and then interact with them. If the tree is dying, look at it and see if there is some branch that might fall down. If the flower smells, look if it is some flower you might be allergic to or just embrace the smell… if the man is angry, look beyond the anger into the causes of his anger. When we react, it’s just like medicine treating symptoms without treating the underlying problems. It’s taking aspirin for a headache instead of looking at your lifestyle that might be the cause of your constant headache.
Empathy is looking beyond what we see and hear, it’s feeling for the other party. Having the curiosity to find the reasons behind their current state without any judgment, but with compassion. If you show judgment, ask yourself: do you like being judged? Change judgment with compassion, the acceptance will follow and from the resulting marriage empathy will be born.

In the words of Wim Hof: Fully in… and let go!

Now you’re deep into the forest park. Take a sit next to a tree, look up into the leaves, see how many they are… all their individual forms, look beyond their forms into the sky and take a deep breath. Feel the stomach going up. Let go & feel the stomach go down. Deep breath, feel, let go, feel. On repeat. Switch off thinking, switch off the ego, switch off fear, switch on awareness. After a couple of hours… you’re a new man. You’ve forgiven yourself, you’ve taken your lesson and you’re ready to embrace life with a spring in your feet and wearing a magnetic smile :) Happy in the moment! :)

I hope I can remember these lessons. It’s so simple. We oftentimes label responses like the one of the old man as genius, but they are not genius, they are just natural. The old man was listening to his heart. He wasn’t listening to his mind’s ego, to his fears. He was seeing beyond the appearance of the drunk guy, he was able to see his life story. That’s empathy for another human being, something that all of us lack so much. When we master the fear, we will master empathy as a side effect.
This little mnemonic movie is bringing me from the state of fear and reactiveness into the state of bliss and happiness.

P.S. I wrote this while listening on repeat of this song ROBIN SCHULZ FEAT. ALIDA – IN YOUR EYES. The lyrics are very relevant to the post. It’s quite energetic, but touching :)

The Joys of Holotropic Breathwork During Winter Forest Bathing

I love, noooo I adore forest bathing! Especially when it is snowy in the forest. I’m so lucky that I live literally next to the mountain. I’m going out of home and the forest is 50 meters away. I need to go up a bit and then I can choose which forest path to take. I can do this whenever I want… even during the night. I’m just taking a headlight with me and it’s game on! Breathing clean air, with every breath you take you are feeling more and more grounded. When you’re angry or depressed… it’s quite a strong natural medicine. Believe, you don’t need anything else.
My practice of forest bathing is a bit strange. I guess most people don’t listen to music, but I do listen to music or even audiobooks. I’m yet to understand everything Eckhart Tolle is saying, so in this tranquility, it’s amazing how much more open is my consciousness. I’m always coming with new Aha moments and these kinds of books are putting me into a calm mental state where everything is just slow.
Your processing power and the speed of your senses is amazing. Suddenly, I can feel everything under my feet, the air passing through my hands while walking, the air going through my eyelashes and the air I’m breathing through my nose. I can smell it, I can sense where it is coming, where it has come past… Then when I touch something, my hand isn’t just squeezing an object. I can feel the form of the object through my palms. In the meantime, I’m trying different breathing techniques.
At first, I’m starting with box breathing – inhale, hold, exhale. Then fast & deep box breathing… then I’m getting into Wim Hof and finally, I can just stand next to a tree… close my eyes, take one final full inhale, close my eyes and wait for the magic to happen. I’m preferring the inhale to full exhale because I’m walking and my heart rate is a bit high… so I need a couple more minutes to calm down my heartbeat. Once I get it calm, that’s when my imagination takes full control. Visualization :)

 

My favorite piece of music for these moments is the Chicago’s Symphony Orchestra for Beethoven’s 9th Symphony led by the great Riccardo Muti. It’s a free piece thanks to Sam Zell(yeah, I know the guy is an a**hole misogynist), but it’s absolutely amazing and this orchestra is so deep in group flow after the 40th minute!
When you’re alone in the forest, it’s beautiful snow everywhere, you’re breathing, you feel a sense of connection with nature and this music is blasting… I don’t know how to describe the feeling. You can hear all the different instruments in this orchestra, and they’re a lot! You can feel how Muti is ordering some instruments to increase volume while others fade. I’m walking and I’m having this orchestra playing in my imagination.
I wish everyone on planet Earth to experience it!
Finally, flow is here! You might be depressed, you might have had a terrible day, but this experience is filling your tanks with hope and strength to persevere with sheer grit and determination, despite all the odds being against you, all the while wearing a wide infectious smile on your face.
After a few rounds of breath-holding, you don’t feel the cold. It’s -5 or -10… but my winter t-shirt feels quite warm :P Jacket and everything else is in the backpack :)
Your mood gets so high that once you’ve done 2-3 rounds of breathing, suddenly you can’t stop yourself from trying to lead the orchestra like Riccardo Muti. Your full body is experiencing this immensely rich music masterpiece. There is so much energy, that you want to express it with your movements. I feel like an Italian trying passionately to imitate Riccardo Muti! But my movements aren’t jerky, just like the 9th Symphony, the speed and excitement are greatly varying. Fast, medium, slow… you’re at one with the music. You have fine control over your movements, you’ve reached movement precision that you don’t have in normal life. This is flow. It’s an amazing feeling.
Today I read about Formula Medicine’s(that’s where many F1 drivers are being physically and mentally evaluated) new mental training facility, it’s called Mental Economy Gym! Economy, that’s it! Your mind is so light, it’s empty from all the pressure, frustration and negativity from your everyday life, and you’ve got all your senses on the task. When you’re out in the forest and breathing, listening to some Bossa Nova or Classical music… suddenly you see more, you feel more, you’re present more. It’s like you’re on LSD! But you aren’t.

I remember when I started reading about Stanislav Grof(the father of holotropic breathwork), I thought this guy was overstretching it a bit. Holotropic breathwork to help you reach the same levels of consciousness as LSD? I thought it was just marketing. Then I got deeper and deeper… started experimenting with different breathing patterns and now I can see how this state can truly be reached through breathing alone!
Breathing is the ultimate drug. Nobody can ban it, not even the most conservative communists or anti-doping agency…

I’m writing this article and I’m not breathing, but the experiences I’ve had earlier today have been enough that I don’t feel how time is passing by, it’s 12C(54 Fahrenheit) in my room and I’m with a t-shirt writing frantically about flow. My feet are warm, my hands are a bit cold… We have not evolved to be living in comfort or to desire comfort above anything else in life. We’ve evolved to be first of all enjoying life. But if we are always looking for comfort, aren’t we rejecting the variety in life? The contrasts, the lesson of life? If we don’t embrace hardship then we are never digging deep to explore and experience more of life’s richness. We are just living in our apartment boxes desiring more and more, never being content with what we have. Yet, we are all having it all, we just need to look and see it.
Our ancestors would have never ever dreamed about what even the poorest family in the Western world has, yet… most of us are not happy with life!?
This is the state in which most people live in the 21st century, living a half-life while the full life is waiting in front of them.

Btw, lately, I’ve been Wim Hof breathing while watching YouTube or other videos and I watch mostly educational videos. My usual speed is 2x, while WHM I can reach 3.5x! You see? That’s double the speed most people are capable of. I’ve just left everything else, all my mental baggage and focused in the moment. I did that on a WordPress tutorial, it was semi-technical. While Wim Hof breathing, you’re leaving everything behind and your brain is just sooooo focused on the task at hand that you can reach amazing speeds of comprehension. The less negatively emotional you are, the more focused you are.

P.S. For those who can’t relate to classical music, there is always Bossa Nova which is a Brazilian style of music and there are tons of famous songs converted to Bossa Nova! It’s very… sexy and tender. Also, Electro Swing is another style of music that can put you out of the state of stressful overstimulation. Electro Swing is an incredibly playful and fun style of music. It can easily put a smile on your face… but only if you allow it to ;) There are tons of great mixes for both styles, have fun! :)

P.S.2 I’d love to experience all this on psychedelics. I bet it will be a massive lollapalooza effect! I’ve done it on microdosing or with afterglow and you get super easy in flow, but not on a proper dose or hero dose. It’s just not safe being alone. I need someone with me, but all my friends are either very conservative in this regard or very, very interested in the exploration of the soul, but afraid to try it. You can guess who is who, men and women.

P.S.3. The moment I pressed Publish, the 9th Symphony finished!!! There are 2 minutes of applause… unbelievable coincidence :)

Be Here Now lectures by Ram Dass

Well, the original name of this article was Building and remembering mnemonic movies! :) But since nobody knows what the hell is a mnemonic movie, I decided to use the title of these lectures.

So, why mnemonic movies? I understand that memory palaces are an extremely powerful mental memory technique, but it’s not fun. The reason why memory champions use these techniques is because the real-life palaces are very rigidly imprinted in their minds and/or they can to go back physically to these structures, revisit them and remember what they’ve forgotten.
There’s one downside though. They’re rigid and rigid isn’t something that our imagination likes.

Why the McLaren 650S Spider? Carbon chassis, a great engine with enough power and I love the looks of it. The 650S GT3 is my all-time favorite GT race car in terms of beauty.

About the author. Ram Dass is one of the original psychedelic pioneers, he passed recently. His lectures are coming through the lens of an accomplished academic, extremely experienced psychedelic researcher and then… I’d say polymath philosophy researcher because during his lifetime he had researched very closely a lot of different philosophic traditions from around the world.

So, here we go. Let the movie begin:

Driving Targa Florio(my dream) in a 650S Spider, asking myself Where am I? Feeling the steering wheel, the jolt with every gear shift, my braking pressure, etc. Now a bug is on the inside of the windscreen. You’re on the super long straight and you watch it, thinking about its life. You can meditate on that thing alone… nothing else. Your gf is scared of the bug and you kill it. Life is so short… and you can be the bug for someone else. Just take full advantage of it. This bug was making plans for the future, but… it didn’t plan for the worst-case scenarios! It got into the eyesight of us humans… got smashed. And that’s it.
Now it’s starting to rain, you’re with semi-slicks. You thought that it was going to be dry and got the grippiest tire available for this trip. But suddenly, you can crash and end up like the bug. You can choose and get frustrated, you’ll have every right to be so… but nature is much more powerful than you and doesn’t care about you. If you continue thinking like this and not be in the moment, you’ll crash! There’s only one way to go. Leave frustration, injustice, and everything that went against you or your plans, leave it in the past. Be here, now! Focus on the next corner, nothing else on your mind. You’ll soon be in flow once again. Don’t worry, just trust the process & enjoy the journey. Just drive.
But that’s not enough. Happiness, play… they’re the ultimate form of presence. You are enjoying your surroundings. Whatever bad they throw at you… you just don’t care, you’re smiling and you can handle anything. You’re accepting the challenges with an open mind, open hands. You are enjoying being challenged, it’s another opportunity for you to have more fun!
So, just smile. Floor the throttle and have fun… It’s an open-top spider, but you both are smiling and laughing, while you’re exiting every corner, every challenge tail-happy, sliding… the tires are screaming, they’re happy too! :) You’re playing with the car, you’re playing with the present moment, you’re being happy while it’s raining cats and dogs and you have no roof on your head. The stereo is blasting, the engine and tires screaming, you’re singing… What’s the alternative? Most will say, don’t play with danger. We like to learn and then avoid danger, but that’s how we also build up walls, limits. What if these limits are not our real limits? What if we can have another approach, another way of accepting and using them to our own advantage?
Isn’t danger just born out from something that we don’t want to accept, something we don’t want to embrace? If we embrace this reality, then what you would consider as dangerous when you were rejecting the reality, the present moment, then it’s no longer dangerous. It’s an opportunity to have fun.
That’s all to life really. Take every opportunity, no matter what it is, take all there is from it, enjoy it as much as you can and you’ll live a life full of present happiness.
Finally, we reach the finish line, get out of the car. It’s sunshine and there is only one lesson – we can be happy doing anything, anywhere!
There is a story about how Ram Dass used to travel to different places, just because they were giving him different energy… and then he realized it’s not about the place. Home is always where you are. Enjoy it!

This is the mnemonic movie(yeah, I just came up with this name. Might be wrong, idk). I could have written an article like the book summaries of the other books, but will I remember it easily? I don’t know.
I surely still do remember the mnemonic movie I created for Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication and it has helped me… I think at least regarding books, for me, this is a better technique. I don’t just memorize, I kind of input feelings, past experiences, my passions, values, dreams, and unique meaning generally speaking. This technique feels much more richer than moonwalking with Einstein. Yeah, you’ll remember moonwalking with Einstein quite easily, but will you remember the meaning? Will you understand it and then use it in daily life? I don’t know. It doesn’t look very optimized to me for daily life. It’s surely greatly suited for competitions, but you go to the event and you need to remember the deck of cards for the next 3-4 min max. That’s what memory palaces were built for.
We will see, so far I’ve been easily remembering two such mnemonic movies for about 6 months :)
Now that I’ve put this one in writing, I hope I will remember these life lessons from Ram Dass forever.

P.S. I know that the experiences, places, object forms and obviously dreams I’ve used in this article are not absolutely relatable to the readers of my blog, but every memory palace or mnemonic movie is deeply individual.

P.S.2. The song of Delilah Montagu with Black Coffee and David Guetta is just associated in my mind with this chilled out sporty driving experience which some would suggest is a mad man driving while having fun :) Btw, I almost NEVER speed on the road. It’s not fun, cornering is the fun part ;)
Below is a map of the circuit. Piccolo means small in Italian, in that case, a 72 km circuit! There is a video with Jimmy Broadbent, the famous funny sim racer, driving a classic Porsche 911 RSR on it. It’s a proper workout on the sim as you can see! Sadly, Targa Florio was stopped long before camera technology was advanced enough to allow for a full onboard lap.

P.S.3. In the original lecture, Ram Dass is actually talking about driving quite a lot! Believe it or not, it’s quite a powerful mindfulness exercise.

That’s Targa Florio. I’ve driven the small circuit… 72 km long! You can see the straight from Floriopoli to Campofelice di Roccella – it’s several km long and it’s just straight! You can probably take a modern-day Bugatti and max it out… that’s where my mnemonic movie takes place.