CosmicWise

...lighting the candle of personal awareness & becoming ...

So Why Meditate?

Because it increases your sensitivity to your own anger, fear, sadness etc.. In meditation, you learn to be aware. As that happens, you become aware of your own emotions and feelings along with everything else in your experience, right as they happen.

And you will probably find that you're in some sort of discomfort most of the time, and that most of it comes from within.

As you get more aware, you see that each negative thing you create for yourself is a process. It starts off with hearing somebody say something you don't like. You have an emotional response. Your body gets tense. Your thoughts sprint into looking for a response. It's a whole process, not just one event.

The more aware you are, the sooner you notice that it's happening. If you notice it quick enough, you can re-route things. Just stopping to look at what's actually happening during a moment of negativity can change it's course.

Do it enough, and you may find that you get the habit of not completing your negative patterns.

If your negative patterns don't go anywhere, you might find that as the brain parts that support negativity become less active, the sense of self these same brain parts support will also change.

According to one Buddhist tradition, the Buddha became enlightened through:

"....the Middle Path of moderation based on the practice of virtue (sila), concentration of the mind (samadhi), and the intensive analysis of all psycho-physical phenomena that finally leads to full understanding of things as they really are (panna). "

Virtue could easily mean the supression of negative thoughts and feelings. Not by tensing up while they happen, but by choosing different responses when they occur. Respond to anger by choosing to think about things that evoke compassion. Respond to sadness, anger, or fear by looking at what your body is feeling when they happen. Negative thoughts are not prevented so much as ignored in both of these practices. Mental concentration refers to meditation, but not for it's own value. Rather, it sharpens one's alertness so that the transition from angry feelings to angry words becomes explicit. While the transition is happening, anger can be re-routed. But it takes an adroit mind and a certain amount of training. Seeing things as they really are refers to the new, non-linguistic sense of self, whose perception is no longer filtered through their inner dialog.

Let me offer a metaphor.

Evolution (I mean Darwin's theory, not the spiritual kind) works by selecting the members of a species best suited to their situation. They live longer. They breed more. They get away from tigers better. Whatever.

The species changes in response to the reality of death. Without any planning of who they want to be, each species focuses on death, according to how it's most likely to appear for them, in order to avoid it.

Each species ends up being whatever it is. No planning to their bodies, behaviors, and minds. Each feature is a response to something in their evolutionary history. It helped them survive. Right at the time it appeared. "In the moment", so to speak.

It happens because the priority is avoiding death.

When the priority is really being in one's life; LIVING in each moment, without negative thoughts or feelings, the same thing happens. If the person avoids anything that feels like it goes against that the way a gazelle avoids a leopard or a brush fire.

In time, that individual is going to become a different person.

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The idea that meditation 'works' by starving negativity rather than feeding virtue is supported by a recently-published study.

A group of meditators were given questionnaires that asked how often they experienced a range of altered-state experiences. Surprisingly, the study found that the whole group, no matter how long they had been practicing, were no more prone to altered state experiences than anyone else. Their practice was transforming them, but they were not experiencing meditation-like moments in their daily lives. So what changed as they 'grew' in their practice?

The answer, for which the group was not queried, may be that they experience less negativity; fewer moments when they become caught up in fear, anger, sadness, etc.

If we accept that meditation is conducive to enlightenment, and that the moments when meditation appears "in daily life" are moments when negative states are wholly absent, then we get a new definition of enlightenment.

The complete absence of all unpleasant subjective states. This is why it takes such unrelenting efforts. Fear, for example, is a powerful adaptive ally. Each thing that enters our perception is 'scanned' to see if it's a threat or not. A threat to our social status, self-esteem, livlihood, authority, or even our lives, when we have to. Becoming enlightened would mean not doing this any longer. To stop 'scanning for danger' will mean changing the bunches of pathways ("matrices of neurons") that support the human sense of self, because both 'you' and 'your fear' share crucial brain parts.

In all but a very few human brains, seeking enlightenment is looking for water to flow uphill.

However, the appearance of a few brains in the population for whom the experience is easy, or impossible to avoid, is also bound to happen. The spectrum of human 'types' is very wide, and if there are those whose negativity is special enough that they need to be locked away, then there will also be those whose positivity will be equally special. And the most extreme among them might be prone to buddhahood. But, life can improve a lot for those who do not indulge in fear, anger, and sadness. That way MIGHT lead to final liberation, but it SURELY leads to less of what the Buddha called "suffering", the discomfort intrinsic to being alive.

The absence of negativity as a definition for enlightenment is consistent with most Hindu and Buddhist teachings, even though it is, in fact, a different definition. Most older meanings for the word come from the bliss and freedom, or the truth. Or the appearance of a new self. Or the elimination of the old one. At best, these aren't very clear. They all sound quite exalted, but any of them could be used to talk about several states, not just the one the Buddha attained.

One clue for looking at the enlightened state in terms of the brain is that it can happen gradually or suddenly. The Zen Buddhist tradition even goes so far as to categorize enlightenment in these very terms.

Gradual enlightenment is easily explained in terms of more ordinary neural mechanisms. The consistent practice conditions the individual to suppress negativity, so that more positive (and adaptive) emotional and cognitive responses can appear. Over time, changes on the smallest levels of brain activity (such as synaptogenesis, kindling, synaptic dropout, etc.) alters the sense of self that relies on our thoughts and feelings.

Change the brain parts where 'self' happens gradually, and you will slowly change the sense of self. Change them quickly, and 'you' will, too.

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