A friend wrote: HOW TO BECOME A BORE .....Ph.D. candidate Rimma Teper studied mindful individuals to see how they respond to feedback. Mindful individuals are those meditation types who can focus on themselves for hour after hour. Due to being so self-centered they develop the talent to care less about other people. .....According to this article about Ms. Tepers study more specifically they care less about positive feedback from other people or, it appears, having fun. So imagine the rather questionable nature of hanging out with a guru. Say youre at a bar with touchy feely legend Deepak Chopra. You might say something like, Nice robe, Deep. And hed ignore you. Ask him if hed like to down a few shots and then hit the dance floor and hed mumble something nearly incoherent like Your proposed movement meditates on a symphony of potentiality. .....So to become a self-centered bore meditation may help. ...to which another friend wrote: .....I disagree with your interpretation of the text in the article but do feel free to have your opinion. The problem is in generalization. Something to ponder, meditation in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism does not involve thinking about yourself but about having no thoughts whatsoever. This doesnt mean other forms of meditation, yoga whatever is the same. .....Though ... I do agree... Mindful people are pretty boring...they dont get angry or respond to negativity. Insults are like a free gift, if you dont take it, then it still belongs to the giver. So trying to push a button of a mindful person does nothing ... Boring .. Same for positives I suppose as a mindful person doesnt need positive reinforcement to be happy it is sort of wasted on them. Nice Robe you could say... To the mindful monk, it is but a robe serviceable and suitable. It is neither nice or not nice... It is but a robe... How boring ! Want to do some shots... The boring mindful one would not partake in intoxicating drink ... Bored out again I am afraid. .....Yes the mindful are a boring lot who mostly just sit in the corner smiling... .....There is no causality between mindfulness and caring for others, compassion and empathy. ...to which I responded: .....I would add...meditation, the work of becoming mindful, is not as simple as having no thoughts, except maybe for the 180 year old guru whos finally reached that level. It is the practice of reducing chaotic mental activity so that what DOES happen in the mind is clearer and more effective. .....The path to that appears to the uninitiated, and is explained to the lay, as clearing the mind for ease of developing a simple set of steps for the beginner to follow. .....What happens, actually is that we all have the capacity to solve our own problems, however the chaos of attention spent on never ending incoming stimuli keeps our mental processes busy sorting useful information from useless information. .....The result of systems breaking down is seen by us every day when uneducated people hold up random stupid crap as explanations of some more complex set of physical interactions that we know are based on ignorance. .....Einstein and many others kept a note book beside their bed because many of their best ideas came either while sleeping, or just at the twilight zones before or after sleep, while chaotic thought was at a minimum, and access to intuition was better. .....What we do in meditative states, at least in the beginning, is to try to clear the mind, as the brain continues its untrained habits of continually puking up thought after random thought, we practice acknowledging that thought, then once the thought is acknowledged we can once again attempt to set it aside. For most people thoughts will not set aside until they have been acknowledged. .....You want to give your mind the peace and quiet it needs to solve your problems, much like our example of Einstein found in his pre- and post-sleep times, but with more efficiency, by practicing the creation of that quiet consciousness which allows the deeper more specific regions of the brain to do the type of work they have become good at, specialized at analyzing. .....And our brains do this best when the chaos-handling areas, frontal awareness, or consciousness, is not flooding the other areas of the brain with inconsequential garbage. .....This is why our civilization is keeping us distracted. They are keeping us stupid by not allowing us the time for the deeper complex and intuitive thought that only comes when we arent being overwhelmed by superficial stimuli that keeps much of our mind working overtime to sort good from bad information. .....This is why meditation is the path to enlightenment, not because we dont think, but because we allow other areas of our brains, smarter areas of our brains, to do the thinking. Areas with better access to specific maps of specific types of experience, instead of doing our thinking in regions closer to our conscious level where we can monitor the activity from consciousness and feel more comfortable in our awareness that we are actually thinking. .....Its the same reason that all programmers now put hour glasses or the little tail chasing round-snakes on the screen beside loading tabs for web pages...to give the stupid human feedback that processing is occurring. When if the programmer didnt have to write that bit of code he could have spent his time more efficiently writing other deeper code that actually did increase efficiency, and processing time is not wasted on showing a dumb little hourglass...(Problem of course being that if something does go wrong we wouldnt know it. And computers are relatively stupid and need to be fixed often). But human brains dont crash as often as Flash or Javascript does. And the monitoring of brain processes reduces the effectiveness of our thinking much more than the a tiny spinning astrix at the top of our i-phone screen interferes with our phone downloads. .....Just know there is more going on in your head that you could ever be aware of, and that trying to be aware of it often kills the process or at least makes it less efficient. Full conscious awareness of all mental activity is not only impossible, but interferes with quality thinking, and meditation is the way to achieving that mindfulness. .....Another afterthought...this is probably the reason that christian authorities want their flock meditating in church and dont suggest that they do it in their secular life, so their flock will have a clear mind and absorb, as in a hypnosis, the information the priest wants them to about god and being a good obediant sheeple. .....It makes me wonder if the multiple times-a-day of meditation, as practiced by Muslims, helps them be more thoughtful, (problem being, that as far as Ive been told, they are only supposed to meditate on Allah, just like christians are only supposed to meditate on approved christian things), but I imagine by focusing consciousness on Allah not only is the conscious awareness distracted by this certainty, (kind of like the meditation that occurs when performing a well practiced skill, like the kinds of thinking and brainstorming we can do while driving, or performing other, mindless, tasks), but other parts of the mind are freed to do their processing. .....Anyway, I could keep going on for hours, but Ill just leave it at that. medicalxpress/news/2013-11-mindful-individuals-affected-rewards.html
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 18:34:26 +0000
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