{"id":2482,"date":"2002-05-23T22:00:01","date_gmt":"2002-05-23T22:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=27"},"modified":"2002-05-23T22:00:01","modified_gmt":"2002-05-23T22:00:01","slug":"off-to-the-sierra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2482","title":{"rendered":"OFF TO THE SIERRA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, we\u0092re off to the Sierra to terrorize the locals on the motorcycle for Memorial Day. I had realized that I\u0092ve been writing a lot about being a liberal, and not much about being armed, so here\u0092s the beginning of something (have to go adjust the preload on the rear suspension…) about guns. Back Tuesday with more.
\nSHOOTING AND MINDFULNESS<\/i>
\nI just realized that there have been a bunch of posts about politics and liberalness, and hardly anything gun-related at all. And I have to uphold the blog title, or it\u0092s just posturing, after all.
\nSo I\u0092m trying to teach the SO (Significant Other) how to shoot; in part because it\u0092s something I do and she wants to be able to participate (and doubtless, to quote Uncle Duke, my personal role model, to be able to \u0093return fire\u0094<\/a>), and also because I\u0092m trying to get my idea of mindfulness across to her.
\nIn her case, it is in part because she is working to become a good motorcyclist, and riding successfully \u0096 which to say surviving \u0096 riding motorcycles calls for a number of skills, but first of all calm awareness, or what the Eastern meditative religions call mindfulness.<\/p>\n

Mindfulness is nonconceptual awareness. Another English term for Sati is ‘bare attention’. It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories. It just looks. Mindfulness registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it was occurring for the first time. It is not analysis which is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process.
\nfrom Mindfulness in Plain English<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I call it simply \u0093the art of doing what you\u0092re doing\u0094. Most of us spend all our time thinking about all the stuff our minds consume\u0085what I\u0092ll put into the blog tomorrow, my Visa bill, what I\u0092ll say at the meeting tomorrow, what was said at the meeting yesterday\u0085and while our minds run with all this activity, they are only loosely tethered to what we are doing. While we\u0092re talking on the cell phone, we aren\u0092t doing a very good job of driving. In \u0093The Empty Mirror\u0094, a great book about Zen studies, the abbot accuses the Western student of being loosely tethered, of \u0093brushing his teeth while pissing, which means you do a bad job of brushing your teeth and a bad job of pissing\u0094.
\nFor me at least, I find that shooting \u0096 particularly the kind of dynamic shooting involved in tactical or combat shooting<\/a> \u0096 requires that kind of mindfulness.
\nGuns are heavy in the hand. They should be. Part of this is mechanical, the physical weight of the mechanism needed to contain the explosive power of the cartridges. And a part of it is the psychic weight of knowing this is a real weapon, and that you are suddenly both at risk and responsible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, we\u0092re off to the Sierra to terrorize the locals on the motorcycle for Memorial Day. I had realized that I\u0092ve been writing a lot about being a liberal, and not much about being armed, so here\u0092s the beginning of something (have to go adjust the preload on the rear suspension…) about guns. Back Tuesday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}