A Basic Buddhist Meditation Synthesis

Meta-Attention: Of all meditation skills, this is the most important. All it means is being aware of what you’re paying attention to: to what your mind is doing. If you’ve ever started walking or driving somewhere you usually don’t go and realized that you’d spent the last few minutes heading to work or home even though that wasn’t your intention, you’ve experienced what happens when you don’t know where your attention is, or what your mind (and body) are doing. Every time you drift off in thought without realizing you have for a while, you’ve lost your awareness of what your mind is doing.

May I be happy. May I be well. May I be safe. May I be peaceful and at ease.

Link here.

Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism

In general, religious beliefs tend to differ from empirical beliefs. Although people may think subjectively of religious belief as a true or false representation of how the world is, it is notable that certain religious beliefs do not generally update in response to evidence, and that conservatism is especially notable in the case of fundamentalist beliefs. Empirical beliefs are indications of how the world appears to us and are updated according to accumulated evidence. Fundamentalist religious beliefs, in comparison, do not track and predict variation in the world. Rather, they appear to track, and predict, social group-level commitments (Bulbulia & Schjoedt, 2012). For this reason, it has been hypothesized that religious beliefs encourage cooperative exchange (Bulbulia & Sosis, 2009b). This social-functionalist account also predicts that religious commitments are affected by the capacity for cognitive flexibility. To test this prediction, we hypothesized that impaired cognitive flexibility would result in greater religious resolve, which we operationalized using previously validated religious fundamentalism scales.

As implied earlier in the introduction, previous research indicates that certain forms of religiosity are associated with a preference for certainty and avoidance of uncertainty (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). In particular, fundamentalism is associated with the need for cognitive closure (Brandt & Reyna, 2010; Saroglou, 2002), which mediates the relationship between fundamentalism and prejudice towards value-violating outgroups, with close-mindedness and preference for order and predictability accounting for the effect (Brandt & Reyna, 2010). A need for cognitive closure represents the desire for predictability and rigidity instead of openness, and is correlated with conservative, conforming values (Calogero, Bardi, & Sutton, 2009; Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). Recently, a number of studies have found an inverse relationship between analytic thinking and religious disbelief (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Norenzayan, Gervais, & Trzesniewski, 2012; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013). These studies describe analytic thinking as an underminer of religious beliefs which may either suppress default tendencies to form religious beliefs or inhibit culturally acquired concepts. Finally, it has been argued that religious beliefs arise from deficits in perceptual tracking of ecological variation (e.g. Foster & Kokko, 2009; Guthrie, 1993). Collectively, these findings predict that fundamentalism may be related to reduced cognitive flexibility and trait openness, and that these cognitive strategies critically rely on processing in the PFC.

The present findings contribute a piece to what is becoming an increasingly complex depiction of religious beliefs that will occupy investigators for many decades because of its historically key contribution to human social behavior. In summary, we found that adherence to fundamentalist religious doctrine is partly mediated by diminished flexible conceptual thinking and reduced openness and that the key cortical region supporting the representation of diverse religious belief as well as flexible conceptual thinking is the dlPFC.

Link here.

The Sutta About Bahiya, Part 1

This time the Buddha relented and said, “Well then Bahyia, you should train yourself like this: Whenever you see a form, simply see; whenever you hear a sound, simply hear; whenever you smell an aroma, simply smell; whenever you taste a flavor, simply taste; whenever you feel a sensation, simply feel; whenever a thought arises, let it just be a thought. Then “you” will not exist; whenever “you” do not exist, you will not be found in this world, another world or in between. That is the end of suffering.”

In that moment of hearing this brief explanation of the Dhamma from the Buddha, Bahiya was immediately released from all forms of suffering generated by clinging, desiring, aversion and ignorance. The Buddha then went on his way.

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Real practice is not about setting up some ideal of practice or the spiritual life; something to strive towards and attain in some distant future. This just creates more conflict in the mind between the so-called “ideal” and the actual and leaves us living in the future rather than learning how to live fully right here and right now. This is about doing what Bahyia did; having some willingness to honestly assess our lives and how we are living them and then to act directly and immediately on that information. This means a willingness to be attentive to our actual life as it actually unfolds in this moment. Begin to take a look and see where and when there is a gap between your understanding and how you are actually living in the light of that understanding. This practice alone can revolutionize our life.

Link here.

Hallucinogenic drug found in 'magic mushrooms' eases depression, anxiety in people with life-threatening cancer

The Johns Hopkins group reported that psilocybin decreased clinician- and patient-rated depressed mood, anxiety, and death anxiety. The compound increased quality of life, life meaning, and optimism. Six months after the final session of treatment:

• About 80% of participants continued to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety, with about 60% showing symptom remission into the normal range
• 83% reported increases in well-being or life satisfaction
• 67% of participants reported the experience as one of the top five meaningful experiences in their lives
• About 70% reported the experience as one of their top five spiritually significant lifetime events

Link here.

Science Says Happiness Can Change Your Brain

This is not a question of not experiencing emotions; it’s a question of not being enslaved by them. Let emotions arise, but let them be freed from their afflictive components: distortion of reality, mental confusion, clinging, and suffering for oneself and others.

Great virtue comes from resting from time to time in pure awareness of the present moment, and being able to refer to this state when afflictive emotions arise so that we do not identify with them and are not swayed by them.

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Afflictive mental states, on the other hand, begin with self-centeredness, with an increased gap between self and others. These states are related to excessive self-importance and self-cherishing associated with fear or resentment towards others, and grasping for outer things as part of a hopeless pursuit of selfish happiness. A selfish pursuit of happiness is a losing situation: You make yourself miserable and make others miserable as well.

Inner conflicts are often linked with excessive rumination on the past and anticipation of the future. You are not truly paying attention to the present moment but are engrossed in your thoughts, going on and on in a vicious circle, feeding your ego and self-centeredness.

This is the opposite of bare attention. To turn your attention inside means to look at pure awareness itself and dwell without distraction, yet effortlessly, in the present moment.

Link here.

Fidget spinners, weighted blankets, and the rise of anxiety consumerism

Anxiety is now the most common mental illness in the US

Anxiety is quite possibly the defining characteristic for not only my own generation, but everyone alive at this particular time in history. It is already the most common mental health disorder in the US, affecting 18.1 percent of Americans each year and nearly one-third of Americans over their lifetimes, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America and the National Institute of Mental Health. And it’s quickly getting worse among college students: The American College Health Association found in its annual survey that in 2011, half of undergraduates reported they felt “overwhelming anxiety.” By 2017, 61 percent did.

Link here.

Why You Can’t Stop Creating Problems in Your Mind

If you feel like you can’t stop worrying, can’t stop creating problems for yourself, can’t stop shifting your anxiety from one corner of your life to the next, can’t just sit back and enjoy and be grateful and happy, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you. There’s something wrong with your understanding of the human brain and happiness.

We weren’t built to be “happy” in the way we think of happiness: carefree, grateful, excited.

We were born to survive, which is to create.

Suffering dissolves when we focus on creating rather than feeling. Instead of being at the whim of how the world makes us feel, we focus on how we can create what we want from what exists.

Good and bad become irrelevant when the focus isn’t “What can I enjoy?” But, rather, “What can I create?”

Link here.

People Like You More Than You Think, a New Study Suggests

Several factors are likely driving the liking gap, Cooney says. For one thing, people may be so hyper-focused on their side of the conversation that they can’t accurately gauge how the other person is feeling. “We don’t know what other people are thinking, and so we substitute our own thoughts about ourselves for what other people think,” Cooney explains. “We’re basically projecting what we think of our own performance, and assume that’s what other people think of us.”

People tend to be harder on themselves than they are on new acquaintances. After a conversation, you can look back on everything you said wrong and mentally correct it, or remember instances when you were funnier, kinder or more eloquent. You don’t have the same mental catalogue for someone you’ve just met, so you may “take them more at face value and be much more charitable,” Cooney says.

That’s a potential problem, since underselling yourself socially may promote sadness and anxiety, or cause you to miss out on valuable personal interactions, Cooney says. While the study didn’t look into strategies for overcoming the liking gap, Cooney says simply knowing it exists is a good place to start.

“We always have this post-mortem with ourselves. That little voice in your head turns on, and you start thinking about your conversation,” Cooney says. “Be suspicious of this voice and its accuracy.”

Link here.

Hume the humane

While Hume was lying aged 65 on his deathbed at the end of a happy, successful and (for the times) long life, he told his doctor: ‘I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.’ Three days before he died, on 25 August 1776, probably of abdominal cancer, his doctor could still report that he was ‘quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing books’.

When the end came, Dr Black reported that Hume ‘continued to the last perfectly sensible, and free from much pain or feelings of distress. He never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with affection and tenderness … He died in such a happy composure of mind, that nothing could exceed it.’

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Hume saw human beings as we really are, stripped of all pretension. We are not immortal souls temporarily encased in flesh, nor the pure immaterial minds Descartes believed he had proved we were. Humans are animals – remarkable, highly intelligent ones – but animals nonetheless. Hume did not just bring human beings down to Earth, he robbed us of any enduring essence. Arguing against Descartes’s claim that we are aware of ourselves as pure, undivided egos, Hume challenged that when he introspected, he found no such thing. What we call the ‘self’ is just a ‘bundle of perceptions’. Look inside yourself, try to find the ‘I’ that thinks and you’ll only observe this thought, that sensation: an ear worm, an itch, a thought that pops into your head.

Hume was echoing a view that was first articulated by the early Buddhists, whose ‘no-self’ (anattā) view is remarkably similar. He also anticipated the findings of contemporary neuroscience which has found that there is no central controller in the brain, no one place where the sense of self resides. Rather the brain is constantly executing any number of parallel processes. What happens to be most central to consciousness depends on the situation.

Link here.

Harmony - Part 1 Zhi Yi (538-597)

When entering Zen meditation the first thing which you the practitioner must do is, if you wish to enter samadhi (mental state of concentration focusing on one object) is to properly regulate the body. This must be done outside the state of meditation. Working, resting, walking, stopping, in motion or rest, whatever you do, you must in all things choose with care and discretion.

If your actions are coarse and rough, then your breath and Qi energy will follow in accord, i.e., your Qi energy will become coarse, the heart-mind will be dissipated and hard to control, and when it's time to sit in meditation you'll find it a bother; the heart will not be at peace. Because of this, even when you are outside the state of meditation, you must still use your heart-mind in a way not contrary to the "skillful means" (Upaya) of meditation.

Link here.

Wu Wei