Meditation - short term craze or long term opportunity for the growth of Buddhism?

Suddenly everybody’s meditating  - from stressed-out film stars and business executives, to senior citizens trying to slow down the effects of ageing. We’re all suffering from information overload, and a favorite way to bring order to the chaos of our minds is to meditate.

Although most of the meditation techniques are based on Buddhist methods, they are usually presented in a secular manner.  The marketing ploy seems to be: ‘Although the Buddhists have by some accident discovered techniques for calming and healing mind and body, let’s forget about their theories and all that religious stuff, and just concentrate on the practical methods for the here and now’. 

But can such secular meditation lead on to spiritual meditation? Can meditation for mundane purposes introduce people to the Buddhadharma?  Is this an opportunity for the growth of Buddhism in the West?

 
Tangled mind 
People are often motivated into taking up meditation by the realisation that their overloaded thought-processes feel like this…
 

Information overload

What they’re hoping to do is to sort them out into something neat and tidy like this....
 

Tidy thoughts

But what they might eventually experience, as they untangle their minds, is something like this, where they become aware of a clear central core to the mind…

The Core of Awareness

 
 


















 
That central core (the 'root mind' or 'pure awareness') is non-physical and continues onwards when all the other strands, threads and processes of the mind have come to an end.   The core of the mind is like an optical fiber - clear and illuminating. It is the clear, pure awareness that is central to other thought processes.

Secular mindfulness meditations allow the meditator to catch a glimpse of this clear core by parting the tangled threads of peripheral thought processes.   However, only more advanced meditations, especially the Tantric-style ones, allow the meditator to actually manipulate this central core and its contents. For like a clear optical fiber, it carries information onwards from the end of this life to all our future lives. 


Mindfulness meditation primes the mind for spiritual experiences
From The Huffington Post 
"The practice of mindfulness dates back at least 2,500 years to early Buddhism, and since then, it's played an important role in a number of spiritual traditions.

While the stillness and connecting with one's inner self cultivated through mindfulness are certainly an important part of a spiritual practice, feelings of wonder and awe -- the amazement we get when faced with incredible vastness -- are also central to the spiritual experience. And according to new research, mindfulness may actually set the stage for awe.

Mindfulness is the key element of the spiritual experience in a number of different religions.

Awe is defined as a feeling of fascination and amazement invoked by an encounter with something larger than ourselves that is beyond our ordinary frameworks of understanding. Previous research has shown that spirituality, nature and art are the most common ways that we experience awe.

"You can't digest [the object of awe] with your cognitive structures -- it's too big for you," University of Groningen psychologist Dr. Brian Ostafin told the Huffington Post. "So there's a need for accommodation, to change your mental structures to understand what that is. This is the key element of the spiritual experience in a number of different religions..."
 

Progressing from secular meditation to the dharma
Mindfulness meditation is probably not a temporary craze, but is here to stay, since information overload is not going to decrease, and our lives or not going to get any less busy. Buddhists need to show that the dharma starts where secular meditation techniques leave off.   It will require skillful presentation to introduce spiritual ideas to an increasingly secular audience, without scaring them off with 'religion', and its associated bad vibes.


Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

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How to meditate on the peaceful clarity of your own mind

Analytical and Placement Meditation

How to meditate
 
Daily Lamrim

What to Meditate on 

Sitting in Meditation 

Preparing for Meditation 

The Meditation Session 

A Meditation Schedule

Meditation Retreat

Kadampa Working Dad 

Kadampa Life

Could meditation apps help the growth of Buddhism in the West?

The recent growth in the popularity of meditation has given rise to a range of meditation apps for phones and tablets.   Most of these are secularized introductions to mindfulness-style meditations designed for stressed-out commuters (there doesn't yet seem to be a Lamrim app!) . 

Nevertheless, there appears to be some potential here, both in terms of stimulating interest in meditation by way of mindfulness as described previously, and also the development of more specifically dharma-based apps.

So maybe it's time for the sangha to get programming!    I'd do it myself but my programming skills don't extend much beyond FORTRAN, and I haven't yet found a mobile phone with a built-in punched-card reader.


See also
Man behind meditation app goes from monk to millionaire
Ten best meditation apps 
Growth of Buddhism in the West - SWOT analysis

Buddhism and secular meditation - conflict or cooperation?

Traditional Buddhist Meditation Methods

Meditation is all the rage at the moment in academia, business, the medical profession and also with ordinary stressed-out individuals suffering from information overload.

The clinical and business meditation techniques that have become so popular are based on traditional Buddhist practices. However, they are usually marketed with all the spiritual content stripped out, to make them appeal to a non-Buddhist and increasingly secular public.

From a secular, academic, medical and business viewpoint, the aspects of meditation that are evoking interest are:

(i) Somatic effects - effects on the structure, growth, neuroplasticity and ageing of tissues, cells and cellular structures, such as grey matter of the brain and telomeres of the cell nucleus [1, 2, 3, 4 ] .

(ii) Biochemical effects - effects on hormones and metabolic systems. [1, 2, 3, 4 ]

(iii) Healing - effects on the immune system [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

(iv) Physiological - effects on stress, blood pressure, pain control etc [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]  

(v) Neurological - measurable changes in brain activity [1, 2, 3]

(vi) Psychological - effects on personal well-being, clarity of mind and interpersonal relationships with family, friends and colleagues [1, 2, 3, 4]

Of course what's left out are any spiritual aspects.   The medical profession and academia are for the most part only interested in physical and chemical effects that are measurable under laboratory conditions. As a result of the prevailing materialistic philosophy in academia, spiritual aspects are dismissed as non-existent, or reduced to just another aspect of psychology.
 
Corporations are interested in practical methods for improving the health and mental performance of their employees as individuals,  and improving their relationships with their co-workers as members of a team. But companies probably don't want their employees becoming too interested in spirituality, or maybe they'll freak out and go and join some New Age commune.

 
Competition or complementarity?
So what are Buddhists to make of this secularisation and high powered marketing of their traditional practices. Have they been plagiarized? Are Buddhists facing competition from an ersatz and inferior product? 

Should they be resentful?  Well that would be un-Buddhist! 

The right response should be to rejoice in the good fortune of all those people who are having their mental and physical health improved by meeting with Buddhist methods, even if they don't know they're Buddhist in origin.

And of course there's an opportunity for spreading the Buddhadharma.  Since all the spiritual aspects have been stripped out of commercially marketed meditation courses, there's a fairly obvious gap regarding any explanation of what's actually going on in the mind of the practitioner.  This is likely to arouse interest and curiosity in investigating meditation further, and exploring the philosophical basis of the practices.     

Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

 

 

Buddhism reduces religious intolerance - even among non-Buddhists.

Monotheistic intolerance

From The Pacific Standard

by Tom Jacobs

"Love Religion, but Hate Intolerance? Try Buddhism
 
New research finds that, unlike those of monotheistic faiths, Buddhist concepts do not inspire prejudice toward outsiders.

Does religion do more harm than good? Considerable research suggests the answer depends upon the type of “good” you are considering. Many studies have linked religiosity with mental and physical health, as well as a stronger tendency to help those around you. Others have found it inspires prejudice against perceived outsiders.

A newly published paper reports this trade-off may not be universal. It finds calling to mind concepts of one major world religion—Buddhism—boosts both selfless behavior and tolerance of people we perceive as unlike ourselves.

Reminders of Buddhist beliefs “activate both universal pro-sociality and, to some extent (given the role of individual differences), tolerance of people holding other religious beliefs or belonging to other ethnic groups,” writes a research team led by psychologist Magali Clobert, a visiting postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.
“After being primed with Buddhist words, participants reported lower explicit negative attitudes toward all kinds of out-groups.”

In the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Clobert and her colleagues concede that the mention of mantras or meditation don’t impact everyone in the same way. Indeed, they have little if any effect on people with strong authoritarian tendencies.

But for the rest of us, having Buddhist ideas on the brain appears to not only evoke caring, but also reduce prejudice. This dynamic was found in three experiments featuring, respectively, people raised in a Christian society, people raised in a Buddhist culture, and Western converts to Buddhism... more

Chaplain's Corner - Rev. Scott Kershner

From  The Crusader

'When I was a junior in college, I left southern Minnesota and studied for a semester in Thailand.

The study of Buddhism there changed the course of my life forever. I had been raised as a Christian, but had not reflected much about what that meant to me. My encounter with Buddhism opened expansive, life-giving questions. What did it mean to be selfless? Is that possible? What did it mean to live in community? What is freedom? What is prayer? I found there was much to admire and learn from in Buddhism. I couldn't have named it then, but I had begun to gain what is called "appreciative knowledge".
 
In fact, what I discovered was that Buddhism helped me return to the Christian faith of my family and cultural background with fresh eyes. After I returned, I found, to my great surprise, that the faith tradition under my own feet was deep and life-giving soil if I would give my roots some time to grow. Thus began my journey of return to Christian faith and eventually my ordination as a Lutheran pastor.

Our spiritual lives can be greatly enriched by encounters with other traditions. As we see human lives and admire teachings in traditions and cultures other than our own, we develop appreciative knowledge, and our lives are forever enriched. For the gift the Buddhist tradition has been to me, I can only say: Thanks be to God.'

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Buddhist Practices for Peace of Mind

The Rational Basis of Buddhism

Buddhist Philosophy

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Family Values - Christians and Buddhists meet in Bodh Gaya

Interfaith Meeting in Bodh Gaya

From Vatican Radio  

"Fifteen delegates from the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, and fifteen representatives of the three main Buddhist denominations - Theravada, Vajrayana, and Mayahana - met at Bodh Gaya, a Buddhist site in Bihar (India), on Wednesday  to discuss the family, understood both as the "basic cell of society," as well as the expression of "global solidarity" between the different religions. After the gathering, set to end on Friday, the Vatican delegates will travel to Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh) for a similar event with Hindu and Muslim spiritual leaders.

Mgr Felix Machado, bishop of Vasai, president of the Office for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences (FABC) and of the Office for Inter-religious Dialogue of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI), is present at the event along with Mgr Salvatore Pennacchio, apostolic nuncio to India. "Both of our religious traditions and cultural experiences affirm the beauty of the family," the prelate told AsiaNews. "By reflecting on this, our leaders can examine and propose ways to support and revitalise family life in order to make human society prosper."

"The aim of our bilateral dialogue is to support each other in the work of strengthening the family, the basic unit of society, the nation and global solidarity," Mgr Machado added. The issue of "The family and children does not touch only Catholics," he explained. "In almost all cultures of the world, and in most religions, concerns have been raised about attacks against the institution of the family."

Spiritual leaders are expected to focus in particular on the difficult situations in which many children find themselves. "My thoughts," said the Bishop of Vasai, "go to those born out of wedlock who experience depression or develop long term psychosomatic disorders that result from divorce; not to mention the children victim of human trafficking or abuse." In view of this, "We intend to look for new ways to help our children."

Bodh Gaya is a religious site associated with the Mahabodhi Temple Complex and the Bodhi tree. Here, according to tradition, Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment and became the Buddha."

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Buddhist Practices for Peace of Mind

The Rational Basis of Buddhism

Buddhist Philosophy

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Historical Sites Recall When Kazakhstan Was Buddhist

 
By Michelle Witte in Kazakhstan Tourism on 9 February

'ASTANA – Kazakhstan today is a mostly Muslim country, but the Silk Road that crossed it was an important conduit for religions, including Buddhism, and some of Kazakhstan’s historic carvings and monuments are neither Muslim nor animist, but homages to Buddhas, bodhisattvas and the monks who carried their teachings from India and China across the Eurasian landmass.

Buddhism gained a large following in Central Asia between the second century B.C. up to the coming of Islam to the region around the eighth century, and many of the Turkic peoples living in Kazakhstan adopted it. Though now the Buddhist population of Kazakhstan is small – only about 0.5 percent of the population as of 2007 – the country has the largest number of Buddhists in Central Asia. It is also dotted with remnants of its Buddhist past, particularly in the Zhetysu (“seven rivers”) area of modern-day southeastern Kazakhstan, which includes today’s Almaty oblast and historically extended into Kyrgyzstan.

Within that area are the Tamgaly-Tas (“Stones with Signs”), one of Kazakhstan’s most popular tourist destinations and a UNESCO World Heritage site...'    Full article

Meditation helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease

Meditation can help ward off Alzheimer’s disease by keeping the mind younger for longer

From the Daily Express


"Research appears to show those practising the technique can boost the grey matter in their brains.

Scientists believe this could lead to a new tool to combat the growing rate of mental illness in an ageing population.

We can start to lose some functional abilities from as early as our mid-20s.

But tests appear to show the process is slowed up by contemplation.

Dr Florian Kurth, of the University of California, Los Angeles, said his team was surprised by the difference in brain volume among participants who had meditated for years and those who had not...."   FULL ARTICLE


This example of 'mind over matter', where thought processes affect the structure of the brain (rather than vice versa), demonstrates the mysterious phenomenon of 'downward causation', which really shouldn't happen if the mind is just an epiphenomenon or emergent property of the brain. 

Disembodied minds and consciousness without the brain

Does the mind need the brain in order to function?  Can there be such things as disembodied minds?  Can minds exist without matter?

According to Buddhist process philosophy, there is no logical reason why not...

Process Philosophy and the Mind
Process philosophers claim that processes, rather than things or substances, are at the basis of reality.  There are no basic building blocks of the world, because when those potential building blocks are examined in sufficient detail, they are all found to be processes rather than things  (they are dynamic wave-functions which only behave as particles under specially constrained circumstances).

Similarly, minds are not ‘things’, they are processes.  Buddhist meditators claim that the mind is a continuous process which is subtly conscious even in the deepest dreamless sleep. According to Buddhist teachings, the mind is also conscious after death (‘for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil…’)


Two Types of Process - Mechanistic and Mental
According to process philosophy, there are two types of processes in the universe - mechanistic and mental. This view is known as ‘process dualism’ and should be carefully distinguished from Cartesian ‘substance dualism’, which believes in a body which is inhabited by a soul.

Mechanistic processes are those that can be modelled by a Turing machine, or combination of Turing machines (such as the instruction-set of a computer). Mechanistic processes include all the laws of physics (see the Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle), plus any algorithms you care to mention, whether they correspond to anything physical or not.

Mental processes are those that cannot be modelled by Turing machines or computers, and consist of subjective phenomena known as ‘qualia’ (qualitative experiences such suffering and pleasure) and ‘intentionality’ (meaning, attention, ‘aboutness’ and semantics),  plus possibly also some intuitive mathematical perceptions such as Gödel’s Theorem).


The Hard Problem
Although mechanistic and mental processes interact in the brain and are obviously closely correlated, there is no known mechanism (and maybe there is no possible mechanism)  for physical events in the brain to produce mental events (this mystery is known in the trade as ‘The Explanatory Gap and/or ‘The Hard Problem’). 

Buddhist philosophers claim that the mind is a permanently active process rather than a passive recipient of neural events, and has to actively observe changes of neural states to turn them into mental experiences.  The mind is said to ‘go to’ its object.

This is given credence by the fact that although is seems impossible to envisage any mechanism for the neural events to produce mental events, the converse is not the case.   A plausible (though admittedly controversial) mechanism known as the Quantum Zeno Effect has been proposed for interfacing mental attention (an aspect of intentionality) with neural firings. 

So, in any contest for ontological primacy between the mental and the physical, it could be that the mental has a slight advantage. But anyway, let's not go there in this particular post.   Let's just accept that mental and physical processes are different but equal, though both types have ontological primacy over 'things', substances and material appearances (which are all reducible to processes).



Disembodied Physical Processes.
Nowadays we know that disembodied processes can exist and operate in the physical world. These are processes with no need for supporting matter, medium or substrates. They are standalone processes that do their things with no visible means of support.  

The first such disembodied process was identified in 1887 by Michaelson and Morley, who proved that the luminiferous (‘light-bearing’) aether simply did not exist.   This came as a shock to the Victorians.  After all, light was known to be a process of oscillating waves, and waves had to propagate through some sort of medium like the waves on the sea, or sound waves through the air.   

The acceptance of independently functioning processes caused a major rethink of classical physics and led to the Theory of Relativity.

Another  even worse surprise came when it was found that particles of matter, when examined carefully at a small enough scale, also behaved as waves, and interfered with each other and even with themselves.  But waves travelling through what?  They couldn’t possibly be propagating through matter, because they were matter!
 
Consequently, all notions of matter being a fundamental aspect of the world disappeared from physics by mid twentieth century, and process metaphysics ruled supreme.




Equal Opportunities for Mental Processes!
So, if physical processes can operate in the complete absence of any material basis, substrate, medium or means of support, then why shouldn’t mental processes be able to do the same?  I appreciate this is an argument from analogy, with the use of Occam's razor ("entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity") to cut down the superfluous ontological apparatus of an unnecessary substrate, but it does demonstrate that there’s no logical reason that mental processes need to be embodied in matter (e.g. brains) in order to continue to function.  Indeed, recent evidence suggests that mental activity may continue when the brain has shut down.    

If the brain shuts down permanently, then the mental continuum (the root mind) may have to wander off and find another brain to associate with.    As the Buddhist philosopher and computer pioneer Alan Turing said  "When the body dies, the 'mechanism' of the body holding the spirit is gone, and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately." 

Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

The equation that explains everything?

My cheat sheet says the answer is 42

Did you know that we are nothing but biological machines governed by physical processes which, according to the leading materialist philosopher Sean Carroll, are completely modelled by the above equation?  (Hat tip Jayarava)

Now I wouldn’t claim to understand the various parts the equation, let alone the equation as a whole, but I’m pretty sure, assuming the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle to be true, that the whole equation consists of a concatenation of Turing Machines and nothing else.  The Turing Machine is a mathematical structure (not normally or necessarily instantiated as an actual physical device)  that completely describes the concept of ‘mechanism’ to any level of complexity, including computers and all phenomena that can be modelled by computers.  

This immediately flags up two yawning gaps in this model's claim to be a complete description of the world. This equation cannot deal with (i) qualitative phenomena (qualia) nor (ii) anything that involves meaning and semantics (intentionality), because Turing Machines can only process Boolean, quantitative and syntactical information, and  have zero capabilities with intentionality and qualia.  In fact, no matter how many zillions of Turing machines you concatenate, a zillion times zero is still zero.

And no matter how may megazillions of Turing Machines you concatenate or link in a network, you won't get any mind-like 'emergent properties' emerging from them, because emergent properties emerge from the mind of the observer, not from the data.  The materialists' claim that mind is an emergent property of mechanism seems to be an example of the logical fallacy of petitio principii or circular reasoning.

Is the bunch of cherries an emergent property of the 13x15 pixel array, or does it emerge from the mind of the observer?

Incompleteness and incoherence
So Sean Carroll's equation may be accurate, but it is incomplete. 
 
It may accurately describe all known physical processes, but it says nothing about non-physical processes such as the experience of qualia (and most significanty, from the Buddhist viewpoint, the pervasive experience of dukkha) neither does it address intentional awareness - such basic features of our world as attention and aboutness.                                 
 
The incoherence of materialism
Materialism claims that the basis of all phenomena is matter.  This is incoherent and unscientific and has been demonstrably so since the Michaelson-Morley experiment.   

Michaelson and Morley proved that the foundations of electromagnetic physics  are based on processes, not substances.    Prior to their experiment it had been assumed that light waves and the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum propagated in the same manner as sound and water waves, through a substrate.  Michaelson and Morley proved that this hypothetical substrate (known as the 'luminiferous aether') did not exist.  So light waves are pure 'disembodied' processes which function without any material support whatsoever, with no need for even the wispy and tenuous hint of matter or substance provided by the aether.

Subsequently, quantum mechanics dealt the death blow to the 'substantialist' interpretation of physics by showing that fundamental particles aren't 'things' at all, but are processes.   Electrons and protons etc only appear as 'things' at the moment of measurement.  (They are reified by the observer).  When left to themselves they propagate through space as probability waves, which are of course processes. Consequently, Sean Carroll's equation is not about substances and 'things in themselves', it deals with relationships and dynamics, in other words processes.

The incoherence of substance dualism
Substance dualism is an erroneous attempt to counteract materialism by claiming that there are non-material things and substances, such as souls and ectoplasm.   This fails as a model of the mental world for much the same reasons as materialism fails as a model of the physical world.  Mental phenomena, like physical phenomena, are ultimately processes rather than things.   The root mind is known is Buddhism as the 'mental continuum' or 'mindstream', and like Heraclitus' river is never the same thing for two successive instants.

The Hard Problem
So the Hard Problem of consciousness, which is normally stated as 'how does the mind interact with the body?', could be restated from a  Buddhist viewpoint as 'how do mental processes interact with mechanistic processes?'  One possibility, as suggested by Henry Stapp is by intentionality in the form of attention acting via the Quantum Zeno effect.



Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

The appalling reputation of religion

Ecrasez l'infâme!

In recent weeks we have seen the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the kosher deli massacre, the Quran-inspired atrocities of the Caliphate and the blogger being slowly and sadistically flogged to death for the crime of insulting Jihadism.  So is it any wonder that young people are becoming increasingly hostile to religion,  and many children have come to  regard religious people as dangerous and threatening?


Obviously the main culprit nowadays is Jihadism , but you don't need to look too far back into the history of most religions, with the exceptions of Buddhism, Jainism and Anglican Latitudinarianism (with its spin-offs such as Quakerism and Methodism) to find doctrinally mandated intolerance and incitement to genocide, homophobia, anti-intellectualism discrimination etc.   Even the supposedly liberal Pope Francis has recently endorsed physical attacks on blasphemers.  It seems that old habits die hard.

Guilt by association?
So should Buddhism continue to market itself primarily as a religion? Might this attract guilt by association and collateral damage?    Should Buddhism concentrate on its spiritual rather than religious aspects in order to appeal to modern youth?  

The term  'spirituality' is more acceptable among the young than religion (hence the rise of the 'spiritual but not religious' demographic).  In addition, Buddhism could market itself as a psychotherapy and philosophy.

 



















Is philosophy more acceptable than religion?
 
If Buddhism is referred to as a religion, it needs to emphasise that it is a uniquely special kind of religion - one founded on philosophy.  All other religions are based upon unreproducible instances of 'divine revelation', where unverifiable 'truths' are revealed to one person or a small group of people and claimed to be the word of God, valid for all time.  Critical thinking and doubt are not encouraged.

Hence the ramblings, ravings and rantings of a seventh-century psychopathic pedophile are still producing rape, pillage and genocide wherever they are taken literally 1400 years later.  'As dangerous in a man as rabies in dog', to quote Churchill.


The Kalama people of India had many similar charlatans and madmen trying to convert them by claiming their own divinely inspired doctrines were correct, and everybody else was wrong.

One day the Buddha turned up, and the Kalamas asked him why they should believe his teachings rather than all the cult leaders, conmen and false prophets whom they had already seen off.

The Buddha replied:

"It is natural that doubt should arise in your minds.

I tell you not to believe merely because it has been handed down by tradition, or because it had been said by some great personage in the past, or because it is commonly believed, or because others have told it to you, or even because I myself have said it.

But whatever you are asked to believe, ask yourself whether it is true in the light of your experience, whether it is in conformity with reason and good principles and whether it is conducive to the highest good and welfare of all beings, and only if it passes this test, should you accept it and act in accordance with it." 
 
So the Buddha is making a statement which is found in no other religion. Unlike all other religious leaders he is not claiming a hotline to God, a personal, non-reproducible revelation which appears to him and no-one else.

He was saying:

(1) Do not believe anything on the basis of religious authority, or 'holy' books, or family/tribal tradition, or even coercion and intimidation by the mob.

BUT

(2) Test the methodology against your own experience. Does it do what it says on the box?

(3) Is the philosophy rational? Or does it require you to believe six impossible things before breakfast?

(4) Judge the tree by its fruits. Is it beneficial, or does it tell you to act against your conscience and 'The Golden Rule'.


So maybe Buddhism needs to be marketed to an increasingly skeptical and anti-religious public as...

(1) An empirically testable psychotherapy.
(2) An ethical and humane spirituality'
(3) A belief system built upon a solid philosophical foundation.



Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

Controlling pain with mindfulness meditation

Vidyamala Burch

From the BBC

by Emma Tracey
 
"Vidyamala Burch is helping people in pain through the practice of "mindfulness", the act of paying more attention to the present moment. But it took her many years to discover it for herself first.

When people are having serious difficulties, it can bring out the extreme sides of people's personalities, says Vidyamala Burch, a 55-year-old pain management practitioner based in Manchester. "One is the denial, pushy, driven side and the other is the more passive, overwhelmed, depressive side."

Burch lives with chronic pain having acquired two spinal injuries at an early age. The first happened at 16 when she lifted somebody from a swimming pool during water safety practice. The second was the result of a car accident five years later...



...A lengthy period of rehabilitation followed in which she tried many different relaxation techniques. Three years later, she found that one, called Mindful Meditation, worked well for her.

"We have adapted the 'mindful movement' so that the primary emphasis is on being aware as you move, rather than how far you can move”

Now more widely known as mindfulness, it can be described as the act of focusing on the present moment, acknowledging thoughts, feelings and physical sensations. It is thousands of years old and Buddhist in origin, but has become popular as a therapy in the West in recent years.

Though perhaps most commonly associated with tackling mental health difficulties, and strongly promoted by the NHS for this, one of its first applications in this part of the world was to help with pain.

Burch says that when you have severe discomfort, there's a "rising up" in your body that exclaims "this hurts and I don't like it".

"The intuitive response is to turn away from it and try and get on with life in spite of your pain," she says. "With mindfulness, what we do is we turn towards it, to investigate what is actually happening in each moment."

In 2000, now ordained as a Buddhist, she found herself struggling to find paid work which she could physically manage. The idea occurred to her that she might be able to help others with pain on a professional basis.

She started a social enterprise called Breathworks where people with chronic pain take an eight-week course to learn how mindfulness could help them cope better with their physical symptoms..."

Read it all here



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Life after death: mental processes continue after brain processes shut down

From The Telegraph 

First hint of 'life after death' in biggest ever scientific study
"Southampton University scientists have found evidence that awareness can continue for at least several minutes after clinical death which was previously thought impossible.

...The largest ever medical study into near-death and out-of-body experiences has discovered that some awareness may continue even after the brain has shut down completely.

It is a controversial subject which has, until recently, been treated with widespread scepticism.

But scientists at the University of Southampton have spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria.

And they found that nearly 40 per cent of people who survived described some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted.

 One man even recalled leaving his body entirely and watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room.

Despite being unconscious and ‘dead’ for three minutes, the 57-year-old social worker from Southampton, recounted the actions of the nursing staff in detail and described the sound of the machines.

“We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating,” said Dr Sam Parnia, a former research fellow at Southampton University, now at the State University of New York, who led the study.

“But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.

“The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.

“He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”

Of 2060 cardiac arrest patients studied, 330 survived and 140 said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated.

Although many could not recall specific details, some themes emerged. One in five said they had felt an unusual sense of peacefulness while nearly one third said time had slowed down or speeded up.

Some recalled seeing a bright light; a golden flash or the Sun shining. Others recounted feelings of fear or drowning or being dragged through deep water. 13 per cent said they had felt separated from their bodies and the same number said their sensed had been heightened...
 

Mental processes don't depend on mechanistic processes
What this study demonstrates is that there are two kinds of processes at work in our lives: mechanistic and mental. 

Mechanistic processes explain the working of all machines including computers, and all the classical laws of science including biology, chemistry, and physics. The brain is a physical machine no different in principle from a computer, and carries out mechanistic processes.  However mental processes are completely different.

Mental processes consist of irreducible aspects of consciousness that have no mechanistic explanation, for example qualia (qualitative experiences such as pleasure and pain) and intentionality or aboutness (the power of minds to be about, to represent, experience, cognise or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs).    

When mechanistic processes shut down, mental processes can still continue.

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Delusions in Buddhism

The basis of Buddhism is that we all suffer from delusions, and only by reducing, and eventually completely removing those delusions, will we find happiness.

Most people, on first meeting these teachings, are likely to be extremely skeptical. After all, most of us don’t see pink elephants,  think that we’re Napoleon, or believe politicians' promises. So in what way are we deluded?


The basic delusion of ‘inherent existence’ or ‘svabhava’

The basic delusion is that we believe that all substances, objects and people have an unchanging, stable, defining nature ‘from their own side’ that makes them what they are. This delusion of intrinsic nature, is known as ‘svabhava’  (Sanskrit for ‘inherent existence’), and can be refuted philosophically by the 'emptiness' argument, and scientifically by recognising the process nature of reality.

In Buddhist philosophy, all functioning phenomena exist dependently upon (i) their causes, (ii) their parts and (iii) the mental designation by an observer.   There is no extra or more fundamental ‘essence’ that makes a thing what it is beyond or beneath these three attributes of existence.  

Although we may understand intellectually that inherent-existence is impossible, nevertheless we still have great difficulty of ridding ourselves of this delusion.  The reason that svabhava is so deep-rooted, pervasive and systematic is that our brains and perceptual systems have evolved to use svabhava as a useful working approximation (or ‘conventional truth’) to represent commonsense reality. 

This ‘working approximation’ functions quite well in our everyday life, and only breaks down when we analyse phenomena in depth, either philosophically, or scientifically as with particle physics, where we are forced to realise that the observer is an inextricable part of the system. 

Why is the delusion of inherent existence so strong?

Our brains have evolved to present a useful model of reality to our minds as quickly  and efficiently as possible.   To do this they must sample reality, rather than monitor it continuously.    By analogy, think of  a movie camera that takes a series of frames as  samples of continuous reality, or a CD that samples a continuously varying soundtrack as a series of discrete numbers.  Sampling is essential because continuous monitoring would produce an information overload.

Our brains do a similar sampling job, along spatial and conceptual dimensions as well as along temporal ones.  Hence we normally see the universe as composed of discrete things, rather than continuously varying processes.

But if we analyse carefully, and on a long enough timescale, we realise that everything in the universe is impermanent, and part of continuously changing processes.   Even the universe itself is a process, starting out from the big bang.  At the other end of the scale, subatomic particles are processes - continuously varying wavefunctions, which only appear as distinct particles at the moment they are sampled.

However, our brains haven’t evolved for philosophical reflection. They have evolved  to present a workable view of reality which identifies threats, opportunities and resources as rapidly as possible.   Natural selection cannot select directly for true beliefs, but only for advantageous behaviors. 

So the brain is giving us a picture of the world that is merely fit for purpose, rather than one that represents some true underlying reality.      This is the explanation for the two truths - conventional truth versus ultimate truth.    Conventional truth applies to those entities in the world that are stable and persistent for long enough for us to regard them as things.   The ultimate truth is that all those things are actually impermanent when viewed on a long enough timescale, and have no defining existence within themselves.   

As Wiki puts it:
Ignorance isn't just an inability to apprehend the truth but an active misapprehension of the status of oneself and all other objects—one's own mind or body, other people, and so forth. It is the conception or assumption that phenomena exist in a far more concrete way than they actually do.
Based on this misapprehension of the status of persons and things, we are drawn into afflictive desire and hatred [i.e. attachment and aversion]... Not knowing the real nature of phenomena, we are driven to generate desire for what we like and hatred for what we do not like and for what blocks our desires. These three—ignorance, desire, and hatred—are called the three poisons; they pervert our mental outlook. 

Conventional truth enables us to go about our daily business. Ultimate truth enables us to perform philosophical analysis.  For further discussion  on this  topic see Evolution, Emptiness and Delusions of the Darwinian Brain.  





For general background see Buddhist Philosophy