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 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. 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. MINDFULNESS MEDITATION 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: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 19:30:44 +0000
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