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First, contrary to popular belief, Buddhists can actually be very anxious people. That__ often why they become Buddhists in the first place. Buddhism was made for the anxious like Christianity was made for the downtrodden or AA for the addicted. Its entire purpose is to foster equanimity, to tame excesses of thought and emotion. The Buddhists have a great term for these excesses. They refer to them as the condition of __onkey mind._ A person in the throes of monkey mind suffers from a consciousness whose constituent parts will not stop bouncing from skull-side to skull-side, which keep flipping and jumping and flinging feces at the walls and swinging from loose neurons like howlers from vines. Buddhist practices are designed explicitly to collar these monkeys of the mind and bring them down to earth__o pacify them. Is it any wonder that Buddhism has had such tremendous success in the bastions of American nervousness, on the West Coast and in the New York metro area?
Daniel Smith Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety
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First, contrary to popular belief, Buddhists can actually be very anxious people. That__ often why they become Buddhists in the first place. Buddhism was made for the anxious like Christianity was made for the downtrodden or AA for the addicted. Its entire purpose is to foster equanimity, to tame excesses of thought and emotion. The Buddhists have a great term for these excesses. They refer to them as the condition of __onkey mind._ A person in the throes of monkey mind suffers from a consciousness whose constituent parts will not stop bouncing from skull-side to skull-side, which keep flipping and jumping and flinging feces at the walls and swinging from loose neurons like howlers from vines. Buddhist practices are designed explicitly to collar these monkeys of the mind and bring them down to earth__o pacify them. Is it any wonder that Buddhism has had such tremendous success in the bastions of American nervousness, on the West Coast and in the New York metro area?
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Daniel Smith

Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

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