Tag: mind

Commonalities of Buddhism & Weightlifting

~ cafebedouin

I have been reading Jack Kornfield’s book about spirituality and Buddhism A Path With Heart. As a short summary of Part 1: The Fundamentals, he starts with basic questions.

What is your goal? He suggests a path with heart is the goal of spiritual practice. Are we in touch with our fundamental goodness? Are we loving well? Have we learned to forgive and live from the spirit of love rather than from a spirit of judgment?

Cultivating goodness and love means stopping the war within ourselves, which leads to wars with others. Stopping the war means “taking the one seat”, finding a single spiritual tradition and following it through the pain and conflict. We can use this to make our mind, body and heart healthier, which allows us to progress spiritually.

Going through, I keep being reminded of how much this is exactly like weightlifting. What is your goal? Get strong. To get strong, you have to be open to pain. The war within is our desire and tendency to avoid pain. This is impossible when lifting weights. No pain, no gain.

What about taking the one seat? There are many different ways to train, and which is best depends on your goals. If your goal is to get strong, as opposed to say aesthetics, there are established methods, such as Starting Strength. Adopt one, stick to it, and you will see progress, often quick progress. The key is consistency. Do one practice. Do it several times a week for an hour or more, and you will improve.

What is true of the body in weightlifting is also true of the mind and heart. If we train our mind with a standard practice, like focused meditation on the breath, do it consistently, daily, we train our mind to be focused. It develops insight into the workings of the mind and leads to greater concentration.

But, perhaps most important, at least in my case, is development of heart, connecting to feelings of love and remaining, open, vulnerable to the world. Maitrī, or loving-kindness, can be developed, like a muscle. We start with the loving-kindness we already have for those closest to us, and through meditating on others try to expand this feeling from our close circle to the entire universe.

I was once at a Quaker Meeting, where someone said, “When learning to love, don’t start with Hitler.” Strangely, some people find it hard to love themselves, believe that they are bad, Hitler-adjacent. But, if we are unable to love ourselves, with all of our intimate knowledge of our failings, we will find it difficult to learn to love others, without making idealized, fictionized versions of them, which is not real love.

In summary, weightlifting provides an interesting parallel to Buddhism. Training the mind and heart is no different than training the body, receptive to the same techniques. A well-rounded person needs to train mind, heart and body — all three.

The Top Idea In Your Mind

~ cafebedouin ~ 2 Comments

“I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.”

-Paul Graham, “The Top Idea In Your Mind.” paulgraham.com. July 2010

If your top ideas are getting money, arguing with someone, the past, how stupid you are and so forth, then your mind is working on destructive bullshit.

Meditation Without Meditating

~ cafebedouin

“Over the past several decades, studies examining the potential for meditation to curb mental anguish and increase wellbeing have yielded promising, if complicated, results. For patients, complications can arise when meditation is marketed as a ‘happy pill, with no side effects’. This commodification and oversimplification is at the root of a conundrum for Jay Sanguinetti and Shinzen Young, the co-directors of SEMA Lab (Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness) at the University of Arizona. In the early stages of developing a technology that they believe could lead to meditative states without the need to meditate – a Silicon Valley-ready concept if there ever was one – the duo now must navigate the intricate ethics of introducing such a powerful product to the world. This short film from The Guardian follows Sanguinetti and Shinzen in their quest to ‘democratise enlightenment’ via ultrasound technology, while also attempting to ensure that, when the time comes, it will be properly implemented as a therapeutic tool.”

—Lina Lyte Plioplyte, “‘Meditation without meditating’ might be possible. Can it also be made ethical?” Aeon.com via TheGuardian.com. August 16, 2021.

Amazon.com: Out of Your Mind (Audible Audio Edition)

~ cafebedouin

“In order to come to your senses, Alan Watts often said, you sometimes need to go out of your mind. Perhaps more than any other teacher in the West, this celebrated author, former Anglican priest, and self-described spiritual entertainer was responsible for igniting the passion of countless wisdom seekers to the spiritual and philosophical delights of Asia and India.

Now, with Out of Your Mind: Essential Listening from the Alan Watts Audio Archives, you are invited to immerse yourself in 12 of this legendary thinker’s pinnacle teaching sessions about how to break through the limits of the rational mind and begin expanding your awareness and appreciation for the Great Game unfolding all around us.”

—https://www.amazon.com/Out-of-Your-Mind/dp/B0162WIRKY/

Rearranging Our Minds

~ cafebedouin

Open Question: Should we make an effort to change our minds in some fundamental way? And if so, how?

There are a number of stories of people suffering a traumatic brain injury that results in the brain being rearranged in a way that gives them a new ability. Generally, this involves some skill with art, understanding music, improved memory or doing calculations in math. Although, a few also involve different kinds of experience, such as synesthesia.

It’s not limited to injuries. There is also the question of psychedelics. Scott Alexander makes this point in an article in his blog Slate Star Codex:

“The third possibility is the one that really intrigues me. A 2011 study found that a single dose of psilocybin could permanently increase the personality dimension of Openness To Experience. I’m emphasizing that because personality is otherwise pretty stable after adulthood; nothing should be able to do this. But magic mushrooms apparently have this effect, and not subtly either; participants who had a mystical experience on psilocybin had Openness increase up to half a standard deviation compared to placebo, and the change was stable sixteen months later. This is really scary. I mean, I like Openness To Experience, but something that can produce large, permanent personality changes is so far beyond anything else we have in psychiatry that it’s kind of terrifying.”

Scott Alexander, “Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?” Slate Star Codex. April 28, 2016.

Anyone that has been around people that have taken a lot of LSD know that they are different. Often, they are different in ways that make it more difficult to function in society, not easier. But, the opposite can also be true.

There was also a lot of discussion a few years ago about how people in Silicon Valley were microdosing LSD in an effort to boost their creativity. Clearly, in this case, psychedelics were being used to improve performance in a particular context and probably without full consideration of the effects beyond creativity.

There has also been research done in using electrical impulses to change mental states in people. The U.S. military, for example, is using electrical brain stimulation to enhance skills. Of course, there has been a dark side to this as well, as any discussion of Electroconvulsive Therapy will invariably bring up.

Meditation is also said to have effects on our mental states. A meta-analysis into meditation research by the medical community described it as follows:

“Results indicate that meditation leads to activation in brain areas involved in processing self-relevant information, self-regulation, focused problem-solving, adaptive behavior, and interoception. Results also show that meditation practice induces functional and structural brain modifications in expert meditators, especially in areas involved in self-referential processes such as self-awareness and self-regulation. These results demonstrate that a biological substrate underlies the positive pervasive effect of meditation practice and suggest that meditation techniques could be adopted in clinical populations and to prevent disease.”

M. Boccia, L. Piccardi, P. Guariglia. “The meditative mind: a comprehensive meta-analysis of MRI studies.” Biomed. Res. Int. 2015:419808. 10.1155/2015/419808

It seems like meditation is a good idea and has many positive aspects, but it also fundamentally changes the biology and the functioning of our brains. Should we be doing it?

You could probably make arguments that music, creating art, exercise and many other activities have dramatic and important effects on the mind and likely change it on a biological level. But, should we be striving to reorganize our minds to achieve some goal or mental state? And what techniques should we be using and why? This strikes me as a fundamental unanswered question about human life that warrants investigation.

Reference: Might be useful to consult Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” to get a sense of how psychedelics are currently being used.

Riccardo Manzotti & The Spread Mind Hypothesis

~ cafebedouin

An hour long presentation on the “Spread Mind Hypothesis,” or that consciousness isn’t located in our head but in the objects in the physical world.

I haven’t listened to this presentation yet, but it seems like an attempt to reformulate materialism to integrate our current understanding of forces like gravity into a physicalist theory of mind. I’m adding it as a post here as something I’ll want to dig a little deeper in the future.