Zen, Yoga, Meditation and Trading

When I was 15 I met this Zen monk who was a student of Bernie Glassman, in the school of Meazumi Roshi who founded ZCLA Zen Center of Los Angeles. Through him I started attending workshops and retreats at this Zen monastery in the catskills. After highschool I went there for a year work scholarship, I didn't want to go to college yet since I had no clue what to study. It was a great experience. I realized quickly that a lot of people were there with some very deep motivation, and I was probably more just curious. I did a lot of meditation, a lot of which was just focusing on the breath and letting go of that string of mental dialogue we have running that makes us "us".

Over the years I will meditate regularly then stop for a year or so. I find that if I meditate in a disciplined way, I am more able to let go of excited emotions while trading. I also better notice shifts that let me know perhaps my emotions might soon start affecting my trading judgement.
 
Quote from kiwi_trader:

LOL

Look up the word cult. Then go there ( http://www.dhamma.org/ ). You might be wise enough to perceive the difference.

Or you might not?
Don't know if this is true or not.
http://www.vipassana-cult.co.uk/
http://www.answers.com/topic/s-n-goenka
During the taped video discourse given in the evening every night during the 10 day course and increasingly towards the end of the course Goenka emphasizes more and more how important it is to follow his method of meditation and repeatedly states how wonderful it is. It could be suggested that he puts substatial psychological pressure on retreatants who are, due to the conditions of the course(most likely not having spoken to anyone for days), in a very open, sensitive mind state; to become part of his organisation and follow his technique. He repeatedly emphasises that this would be the only rational and wise thing to do. Even long time followers of his technique have expressed concerns that retreatants are subjected to propaganda.



http://vipassana.50webs.com/_htm/vip.htm#VIP
- the Vipassana-organization of S.N. Goenka seemed to become worse. Finally, after 10 years, it came to a honest exchange with a high-ranking western senior teacher of S.N. Goenka. Where I tried to explain my opinion in which ways we - as an organization - are heading in the wrong direction.

As a result of this honest exchange with this fully authorized teacher, he prohibited me from visiting any further 10-day course and also insisted that I not be allowed to participate in any future old disciples group-sittings. Unless, I agree to contact him and confess complete faith in all the theoretical explanations given in the evening discourses by Goenkaji (and so: my surrender to the actual practice itself was not in dispute).
 
The free will debate is mostly semantics.

This, on the other hand, is intriguing stuff: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1580394,00.html

An especially thought provoking excerpt:

A SECOND REASON THAT INFORMATION MAY BE SEALED OFF FROM consciousness is strategic. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has noted that people have a motive to sell themselves as beneficent, rational, competent agents. The best propagandist is the one who believes his own lies, ensuring that he can't leak his deceit through nervous twitches or self-contradictions. So the brain might have been shaped to keep compromising data away from the conscious processes that govern our interaction with other people. At the same time, it keeps the data around in unconscious processes to prevent the person from getting too far out of touch with reality.
 
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