AllatRa by Anastasia Novykh 2 www.allatra.org

AllatRa by Anastasia Novykh
increased the pupil’s chances to win the nearest competition. A good sportsman also
knows that, despite any hardships of trainings, any injuries and scratches, when he
overcomes such obstacles, he acquires skills and experience. Eventually, such sportsman
gets used to everyday heightened requirements to himself. For a detached observer,
overcoming of such various “educational” obstacles may appear as something complex
and even unnecessary for the main competition, whereas the sportsman himself is fully
engrossed in his work on his skills improvement. He is totally aware that self-pity upon
training and attempts to elude workloads will definitely cause defeat in the competition.
Our guys came to a conclusion such sports situation was similar to this meditation
because it activated the rear and lateral Aspects and then led to tracing those in one’s
everyday life when a person artificially created all sorts of obstacles for himself or
herself and learnt to overcome those. Maybe, there is the only key difference: unlike in
sports, in the meditation a person is his or her own coach, and so he or she sets the
heightened requirements to his or her vigilance himself or herself. The success of such
self-improvement work, just like in sports, directly depends on how conscientiously the
person treats what he is doing.
This example is surely comprehensibly for those who start mastering this meditation.
However, I noted that in that case the guys used a stereotyped attitude adopted in our
society as positive. In the society, sports are considered to be self-improvement and
victory over oneself, and the guys associatively compared sports to the spiritual work.
But, if we look at the semantic root of these two processes, they are far from being the
same.
Rigden: Right. These are already substitutions which people hardly ever notice at the
beginning of their sports career, but usually distinctly feel at its end. In the human
society it is considered that, if a person goes in for sports (especially the big sports), this
means he or she, first of all, overcomes himself or herself, i.e. overcomes negative
features, laziness, acquires discipline and so on. This is even regarded as a precondition
of the Personality harmonious development, whereas victories in big sports are generally
presented as the summit of human self-improvement work. At that, only few people can
notice how profound the substitutions in these notions really are.
What does the majority of people usually associate sports with? First of all, sports are
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