The Role of Mindfulness in Overcoming Suffering

The four foundations of mindfulness are the body (breathing, changes in posture, activities), feelings (the senses of pleasantness, unpleasantness, and neutrality), the mind (in particular, its moods and attitudes), and the objects of mind (which include the five senses but also other mental states, such as volition, tranquility, rapture, equanimity, and even mindfulness itself.

In the beginning of one’s meditation practice, the difference between ordinary experience and what one comes to consider “mindfulness” is not very clear, and it takes some training to distinguish between being lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are. In this sense, learning to meditate is just like acquiring any other skill. It takes many thousands of repetitions to throw a good jab or to coax music from the strings of a guitar.

With practice, mindfulness becomes a well-formed habit of at-tention, and the difference between it and ordinary thinking will become increasingly clear. Eventually, it begins to seem as if you are repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No matter how terrible the dream, the relief is instantaneous. And yet it is difficult to stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time.

The Buddha taught mindfulness as the appropriate response to the truth of dukkha, usually translated from the Pali, somewhat misleadingly, as “suffering.” A better translation would be “unsat-isfactoriness.” Suffering may not be inherent in life, but unsatisfac-toriness is. We crave lasting happiness in the midst of change: Our bodies age, cherished objects break, pleasures fade, relationships fail.

Our attachment to the good things in life and our aversion to the bad amount to a denial of these realities, and this inevitably leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. Mindfulness is a technique for achieving equanimity amid the flux, allowing us to simply be aware of the quality of experience in each moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant.

Most people seem to believe that we have only two ways to think about death: We can fear it and do our best to ignore it, or we can deny that it is real. The first strategy leads to a life of conventional worldliness and distraction–we merely strive for pleasure and success and do our best to keep the reality of death out of view. The second strategy is the province of religion, which assures us that death is but a doorway to another world and that the most important opportunities in life occur after the lifetime of the body.

According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist. This is stressful- and spiritual life is a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end.

The psychophysical situation seems tailor-made to distinguish the frontier between the conscious and unconscious components of vision, because the input remains constant–each eye receives the continuous impression of a single image–while somewhere in the brain a wholesale change in the contents of consciousness occurs every few seconds. This is very interesting and yet subjects experiencing binocular rivalry are conscious throughout the experiment; only the contents of visual awareness have been modulated by the task. If you shut your eyes at this moment, the contents of your consciousness change quite drastically, but your consciousness (arguably) does not.

The right and left hemispheres of all vertebrate brains are connected by several nerve tracts called commissures, the function of which, we now know, is to pass information back and forth between them. The main commissure in the brains of placental mammals like ourselves is the corpus callosum, the fibers of which link similar regions of the cortex across the hemispheres. The evolutionary history of this structure is still a matter of dispute, but in human beings it represents a larger system of connectivity than the sum of all the fibers linking the cortex to the rest of the nervous system.

The independence of the hemispheres in a split-brain patient comes about because most nerve tracts running to and from the cortex are segregated, left and right. Everything that falls in the left visual field of each eye, for instance, is projected to the right hemisphere of the brain, and everything in the right visual field is projected to the left hemisphere. ‘The same pattern holds for both sensation and fine motor control in our extremities. Thus, each hemisphere relies on intact commissures to receive information from its own side of the world.

The right and left hemispheres of our brain show differences in their gross anatomy, many of which are also found in the brains of other animals. In humans, the left hemisphere generally makes a unique contribution to language and to the performance of complex movements. Consequently, damage on this side tends to be accompanied by aphasia (impairment of spoken or written lan-guage) and apraxia (impairment of coordinated movement).

People usually show a right-ear (left-hemisphere) advantage for words, digits, nonsense syllables, Morse code, difficult rhythms, and the ordering of temporal information, whereas they show a left-ear (right-hemisphere) advantage for melodies, musical chords, environmental sounds, and tones of voice. Similar differences have been found for other senses as well.

The right hemisphere is dominant for many higher cognitive abilities, both in normal brains and in those that have been surgically divided. It tends to have an advantage when reading faces, intuiting geometrical principles and spatial relation-ships, perceiving wholes from a collection of parts, and judging musical chords.4 The right hemisphere is also better at displaying emotion (with the left side of the face) and at detecting emotions in others.

We now know that at least two systems in the brain- often referred to as “dual processes” govern human cognition, emotion, and behavior. One is evolutionarily older, unconscious, and automatic; the other evolved more recently and is both conscious and deliberative. When you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently funny, you are experiencing the percolations of System 1. The heroic efforts you make to conceal these feelings out of politeness are the work of System 2.

Your conscious memories of practicing a musical instrument, driving a car, or tying your shoelaces are neurologically distinct from your learning how to do these things and from your knowing how to do them now. People with amnesia can even learn new facts and have their ability to recognize names and generate concepts improve in response to prior exposure, without having any memory of acquiring such knowledge.

Source – Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris

Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18774981-waking-up

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