This talk was given as part of a weekend program at BCBS called “Cognitive Science and the Buddhist Understanding of Mind” in January, 2005. As I think we all know, Buddhism and cognitive science are increasingly coming into dialogue with one another these days. For this interchange to be successful, something from Buddhism or something from cognitive science (depending on which side you’re looking from) should affect the other in a way that really changes that field’s mode of operation. … [Read more...]
Mind and Brain
There are generally two approaches to understanding the relationship between the mind and the brain. By mind we mean the subjective side of things, the full range of lived experience, both conscious and unconscious, including such things as thought, cognition, memory, desire, emotional states, and even perhaps the sense of transcendence. By brain we refer to the objective side, the physical stuff between our ears, with its complex architecture of inter-related neurons and the electro-chemical … [Read more...]
Mind Changing Brain Changing Mind: The Dharma and Neuroscience
The knowledge of neuroscience has doubled in the last twenty years. It will probably double again in the next twenty years. I think that neuropsychology is, broadly, about where biology was a hundred years after the invention of the microscope: around 1725. In contrast, Buddhism is a twenty-five-hundred-year-old tradition. You don't need an EEG or MRI to sit and observe your own mind, to open your heart and practice with sincerity. I don't think of neuropsychology as a replacement for … [Read more...]
Buddhism, Body, Mind-Problem?
Many of the key questions scientists will be trying to answer in this century revolve around the mind and its relation to other entities. Is the mind the brain? Is the mind the body? Is the mind the body in the environment? Or is the mind some abstract entity that lives outside space and time altogether? I believe that Buddhist philosophy can help the process of reconciling these issues. Science is based on the assumption that there is a single “real” reality that we each see through … [Read more...]
Perennial Issues
Toward the end of World War II, Aldous Huxley published an anthology, The Perennial Philosophy, proposing that there is a common core of truths to all the world’s great religions. These truths clustered around three basic principles: that the Self is by nature divine, that this nature is identical with the divine Ground of Being, and that the ideal life is one spent in the quest to realize this non-dual truth. In the years since Huxley published his anthology, the idea of a perennial … [Read more...]
The Sixth Sense
We are used to thinking of ourselves as autonomous agents experiencing an objective world that is out there, separate from us in here. This is as natural to us as breathing. Unfortunately such a view of the self inevitably brings with it a great deal of suffering. The Buddha has shown us how to overcome this suffering by teaching us how to see our experience of self more clearly. Following his guidelines, we can learn to see how we construct a sense of self from the raw material of experience. … [Read more...]
Post Copernicus
Remember how people used to naively think the earth was at the center of the universe, and that the sun and all the stars revolved around us? And then Copernicus came along and declared the radically counter-intuitive truth that the earth in fact orbited the sun. This launched a scientific revolution that focused on studying everything from an objective stance, as if we could hover outside ourselves and get a disembodied perspective on it all. This way, as the story goes, our view is not … [Read more...]
Mapping the Mind
For the last couple of years I have been participating in and contributing to the Mind & Life Institute's Mapping the Mind initiative. Among scientific researchers this topic primarily involves mapping out the wiring and firing of various neural networks in the brain, and indeed for those with strong materialist inclinations (which includes most scientists) mapping the mind can only really mean mapping the brain. For practitioners of Buddhist meditation, however, the situation is entirely … [Read more...]
Secular mindfulness: potential & pitfalls
This article is based on a presentation at last year's conference at BCBS on Secular Buddhism. Introduction Imagine for a moment that you are a health & fitness trainer—you work with people who go the gym regularly and work out daily, to support them in their efforts to cultivate a perfectly-toned body. Over the past few years you've noticed that many other people in society are beginning to do some exercise—they don't work out daily, but perhaps they attend a weekly yoga class or go … [Read more...]
Neuro-Bhavana: A Video Series with Rick Hanson
Welcome to a new turn in Insight Journal offerings. For some time, it has been our aspiration at BCBS to offer our teachings through new media via the internet. Rick Hanson, whom as you may know has taught at BCBS several times, encouraged us to offer his teachings from April of this year as one of our initial projects. The course in total runs 240 minutes, edited into 11 videos, from a weekend course by Rick Hanson that took place at BCBS in April of this year. It includes several … [Read more...]