BellaOnline Forums Religion and Spirituality Buddhism Spiritual Practice and Our Brain

To all or none,

A thought is like a stream of a river,without any staying power;as soon as it is produced it breaks up and disappears.A thought is like the flame of a lamp,and it proceeds through causes and conditions.A thought is like lightning,it breaks up in a moment and does not stay on...
Searching for thought all round,he does not see it within or without.He does not see it in the skandas,or in the elements,or in the sense-fields.Unable to see thought,he seeks to find the trend of thought,and asks himself:WHENCE IS THE GENESIS of thought?

And it occurs to him that "where there is an object,there thought arises" Is then the thought one thing ,and the object another?
No,what is the object ,just that IS the thought.If the object were one thing,and the thought another,then there would be a double state of thought.SO THE OBJECT ITSELF IS JUST THOUGHT.

From the book by TNH,The Miracle of Mindfulness.

Loong
Sharing his findings

and the trick is to experience this, to realize it directly, not simply to philosophically understand it. if we understand it in our mind, it becomes another object in our mind.

To all or none,
a thought is like the steam of a river,without any staying power;as soon as it is produced it breaks up and disappears.A thought is like the flame of the lamp,and it proceeds through cause and conditions.A thought is like lightning,it breaks up in a moment and does not stay on.

Loong'comment:Same principle applies to our body,each nanosecond
or a Now ,all our body dies and re-births,because at every now ,
all our cells changes,we are never the same person ,to me this is part of the wheel of Samsara.

Loong
simple Buddhist.

Fascinating interview by Jon Stewart with Michio Kuko, a theoretical physicist on current brain research and technological advances:

The Future of the Mind

As he puts it, science is coming close to creating a 'downloadable brain' - our memories and responses can be recorded and externalized. This is how paraplegics like Stephen Hawking are able to type and operate wheelchairs - a chip is placed near their brain that actually picks up on their thoughts and acts upon them (Stephen Hawking's is in his glasses.)

Of course, as Kuko readily admits, consciousness itself is still a mystery. This is the part meditation accesses - consciousness itself, apart from all the functions and data of our brain. So they may be able to download all the 'contents' of someone's brain onto a disc some day, but will that be them? Is that consciousness? I would say no, but that is the debate going on in science these days. Science and spirituality are meeting at the forfront of this discussion...

Just found this great quote from Kuko that encapsulates the way science and spirituality are coming together in his estimation:

"...the laws of physics, carefully constructed after thousands of years of experimentation, are nothing but the laws of harmony one can write down for strings and membranes. The laws of chemistry are the melodies that one can play on these strings. the universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace."

In Buddhism, in many ways we study the laws physics and chemistry as they function in our own brain and mind. Through this we unravel all the layers that we usually are entrapped by, until we are free of all of that, and living in the 'mind of god' as he has defined it here...

This quote from the Dalai Lama says a lot about modern Buddhism...

"If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."

― Dalai Lama, in the The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality

It's a perspective not all religions share, although Buddhism isn't a 'religion' in the sense of others, since there is no supreme deity. But to the extent that awakened mind has a corresponding 'brain' state, and we now can see how meditation changes the brain, we may someday understand the enlightenment/awakening process from a neuroscientific perspective. I don't think that will ever explain it because I think consciousness is beyond the brain, but that is one of the hotly contested issues in neuroscience today...

I was just reading about some new research related to meditation that I had not been aware of before. I was reading about it in a book called 10% Happier by ABC Nightline co-anchor Dan Harris. Jud Brewer, a researcher at Yale, has invented a real-time neuro-feedback mechanism that shows when a meditator has shutdown the 'Default Mode Network' of their brain - the 'self' region of the brain that generates most of our ego-based mind chatter. When the ego part of the mind is busy with thoughts, red displays, and when it is quite blue displays. The color is gradated depending on how deeply quiet and aware this part of the mind is (deep blue) or if it's just starting to quiet (a purplish hue.) The researcher's vision is that one day a machine like this could actually help people meditate, by giving them real-time feedback.

The researchers are also approaching the idea of enlightenment in this way - that awakening or enlightenment is a retraining of the mind, to respond to the world in a different way, and to live in this state - the 'blue' state - and live from this level of awareness, all of the time. That this begins in meditation, and then over time that one can retrain the mind to live from this place. It is a kind of scientific definition of enlightenment.

I was just reading another article on studies done on brain changes from meditation related to handling stress. In this study, MRI images of participants brains were taken, along with other measurements (both medical and self-reported) of their stress levels. Then the participants meditated daily using mindfulness meditation (MBSR, or mindfulness-based-stress-reduction). Most participants reported feeling less stressed (regardless of whether anything in their life had changed.)

In those that reported feeling less stressed, the density of their amygdala region of the brain had decreased. This is the part of the brain linked to our 'flight or fight' response to threatening situations. Decreased density there indicates less triggering of this stressed feeling. This is very significant because as in other studies, it indicates meditation actually leads to physical brain changes, not only a decrease in stress hormone production (like cortisol and adrenaline, which scientists already knew decreased with meditation.)

Dear Lisa,

Compassion can be seen two ways ,thinking about it (meditation)
and really living it.

loong

I agree, but did you mean this in response to the Sharon Salzburg quote on the other thread? I am not sure how it relates to this one...