Some philosophy: Dhamma claims that all there is of good and evil arises from mind, and that there are three strong roots of evil: greed, hatred, and delusion. Dhamma also claims that there are two kinds of health, namely, physical health and mental health. Many people enjoy good physical health even into old age. But relatively few people enjoy good mental health unless they are vigilant and relentless in rooting out delusional thinking, alleviating ignorance via insight and rational inquiry. The above claim is typically presented in terms of two kinds of illness—physical illness and mental illness. But the term health is a corollary to the term illness and without which the term illness takes on a circular definition. Homeostasis (a normal and desirable state) requires proactive care, e.g., one must feed and exercise the body, keep it from physical harm and toxic substances, shelter it from environmental elements, and keep it free of parasitic and infectious agents in order to maintain normal functioning. (The latter concern could not have been well understood by the Buddha for he lacked microbiology.) Likewise for the mind—it requires proactive care to be free of what the Buddha referred to as the three poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. These things are all too commonly culturally acquired features of minds and are acted out without question as to their value by individuals mired in family, community, religious, and political culture. The Buddha had a theory of mind, but he probably did not understand that the brain evolved as a means for organisms to adapt to their environment. Human beings have a relatively large amount of neocortex, and because of that we also have the capacity and propensity to construct schemas that have no real-world counterpart. The real world—and the universe surrounding it—is extremely complex and much of it is beyond what our senses can detect. A history of human thought shows that although people may believe they have acquired insight into the nature of reality and the nature of sentient experience, often what they report to be reality is a reflection of their conformity to unwarranted opinion or randomly constructed delusional schemas without any objective reality checks. It is our natural inclination to acquire behaviors including cognitive and perceptual schemas by doing what we observe others doing, even from what we can construct mentally as models of what others might do. There is a neural basis for this, but again, although the Buddha or anyone else could observe this behavior in themselves or others, until quite recently it was not known why such behavior occurs. Neuropsychology | Mirror Neuron System: pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/mirror-neurons.html mail.physiol.gu.se/medfys/kogvt09/Articles/Mirror%20neurons%20Iacoboni%202006.pdf plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0030079 Social Psychology | Conformity: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment Cognitive Psychology | Schemas: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies Cognitive Behavioral Psychology | Observational Learning: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_learning psychology.about/od/developmentalpsychology/a/sociallearning.htm MINDFULNESS MEDITATION Your perceptions and desires are products of conditioning and other sentient experience you have acquired up to this point in life. You can change the contents of your mind, and you can shape your mind to be pro-social, rational, and smarter, too. That task is part of what is called mental development and, in my opinion, requires a long-term commitment to high quality education about the real world including the evolution of our species and how the human mind has evolved along with evolution of our brain. Some kinds of suffering are self-imposed although we do not always recognize this to be the case. Instead we are on a sort of automatic behavior method of coping with reality. We can change our sentient experience however by a sort of deconstruction into component parts; from that point it is ultimately a matter of adopting new, rational, wholesome paradigms. Unless you have brain damage, as in dementia, you will never lose certain mental schemas and memories. Your inner life is largely based on those schemas. The perceptions and sentient experience you have can be moderated and shaped purposefully as long as you are still functioning. Such an approach requires vigilance and practice. It can be enhanced with greater knowledge of the real world and acquisition of critical thinking skills. Consciousness is a function of a cognitive neural network processing both sensory data and memory. Sentient experience can be subjectively deconstructed into four foundations of mindfulness: 1. Mindfulness of body. 2. Mindfulness of sensation as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral (physical sensation). 3. Mindfulness of state of mind (attitude, emotion). 4. Mindfulness of content of mind (ideas, learned skills, memory, mental images, beliefs). As you consider this paradigm there will be the usual background of a continuous stream of thoughts, random or specific ideas, and images, feelings that come and go. Any of these can distract you, but you can just ignore them, too. The brain will do this sort of thing as long as you live. There is no need to suppress any of it; your brain normally processes information via random association or cognitive models you have acquired either on purpose or by random experience. These are the things that usually drive your perceptions and behavior, even your dreams. See comments by Denim at the below: debateunlimited/Debate/viewtopic.php?t=14006&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight&sid=0f2cbf1ce716039289c54343f935e52f
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 22:51:29 +0000
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