Good news from Buddha
Закончил курс на Coursera "Buddhism and Modern Psychology". Ниже, финальное задание, эссе на тему: "Подтверждает ли современная наука буддистские идеи о человеческих затруднениях и разуме?" Может, кому будет интересно. Вообще, крутой курс, мозгопрочищающий.
Good news from Buddha
The buddhist view on our troubles is simple. There are unpleasant feelings in humans, they are numerous and arise in every aspect of life. The cause of these unpleasant feelings is a human tendency for craving and clinging. We rush to fulfill our wants and stop our pains - but get new ones, no less desirable and painful, and never get enough satisfaction. Some good news are revealed by buddhists also. A way to escape this loop exists. One just has to change his craving and clinging attitude, and things start going much better - up to full liberation from unpleasant feelings. The way is named Noble Eightfold Path which, besides common human virtues, contains two prescriptions for mediation: right mindfulness and right concentration.
What is interesting here that the claim above was made 2500 years ago and it sounds pretty up-to-date not only by the common sense but in view of recent scientific studies of the human mind. Let’s check some evidences from the modern science.
A first evidence can be found in evolutionary psychology. The natural selection shaped our brains the way that we are not supposed to sit satisfied for a long time. Things have to be done, genes have to be transferred to the next generations, get up and act. Those who fail don’t leave descendants. An experiment with measuring dopamine response in monkeys on tasty juice shows that pleasure from juice is short and quickly fades out by repeated juice delivery, and is eventually transformed in a penalty for not getting the expected juice. That nicely corresponds with the buddhist diagnosis that unsatisfactoriness wins. We can consider any pleasure in our own life instead the juice to prove this point.
A second evidence can be found in a modular view of mind that gains more and more supporters in the academic field. The basic idea here is that our brain has not solid hierarchy with CEO known as “I” at the top. It consists of different bits, modules, or programs of behavior, which take the control depending on internal and external environment. The theory of modular mind has been well told in the book “Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind” by Robert Kurzban. A major conclusion here is that we can’t trust our feelings and thoughts because they generated with different purposes by different modules and are subject to constant changes and contradictions.
Let us turn back to Buddhism. One of its key concepts is Not-self, compactly stated in Anatta-lakkhana Sutta. In the sutta Buddha takes different parts of human nature - form, feelings, perception, consciousness and investigate whether self can hide in one of those. For example, a human cannot rule and change perception by his will, it is a highly impermanent process and often cause dissatisfaction and suffering. So, there is no Self in perception. The same logic is applied to other parts of human mind: form, feelings, consciousness. Hence there is no Self in the mind at all. ‘This is not mine, this is not I, this is not my self', as Buddha puts it. And this can be said about everything that pops up in our mind. And when one gets the Not-self idea, he become detached from feelings, form, perception and consciousness. His passion fade out and thus he become liberated from craving and clinging. As Sutta says, in the end of the speech monks who had been listening became enlightened.
Indeed, it looks like Buddha described in the sutta if not the modern theory of modular mind itself but something very close to it. There is no Self, I, CEO that is in charge, and thoughts and emotions should not be taken too seriously. They are not reliable guides in the reality. It is notable that during meditation practice people usually report that they can actually observe the fluidity of all mental states, thoughts and feelings and even can trace their origins from different modules, like sex module, or social status module.
In the end, I’d like to set a major question openly. Is complete erasing of negativity possible? Does nirvana exist? Or the cost would be erasing of positive things as well and getting in a state of vegetation and disinterest. Depending on the materials of the course “Buddhism and the modern psychology”, I would say that the point of pure satisfaction (or nirvana) exists like a mathematical limit where a function of negativity approaches zero (but maybe never gets), and we are moving there bit by bit throughout our life, tuning natural biases of the mind, and finally get more satisfaction than before. That’s good news, bhikkhus.
Good news from Buddha
The buddhist view on our troubles is simple. There are unpleasant feelings in humans, they are numerous and arise in every aspect of life. The cause of these unpleasant feelings is a human tendency for craving and clinging. We rush to fulfill our wants and stop our pains - but get new ones, no less desirable and painful, and never get enough satisfaction. Some good news are revealed by buddhists also. A way to escape this loop exists. One just has to change his craving and clinging attitude, and things start going much better - up to full liberation from unpleasant feelings. The way is named Noble Eightfold Path which, besides common human virtues, contains two prescriptions for mediation: right mindfulness and right concentration.
What is interesting here that the claim above was made 2500 years ago and it sounds pretty up-to-date not only by the common sense but in view of recent scientific studies of the human mind. Let’s check some evidences from the modern science.
A first evidence can be found in evolutionary psychology. The natural selection shaped our brains the way that we are not supposed to sit satisfied for a long time. Things have to be done, genes have to be transferred to the next generations, get up and act. Those who fail don’t leave descendants. An experiment with measuring dopamine response in monkeys on tasty juice shows that pleasure from juice is short and quickly fades out by repeated juice delivery, and is eventually transformed in a penalty for not getting the expected juice. That nicely corresponds with the buddhist diagnosis that unsatisfactoriness wins. We can consider any pleasure in our own life instead the juice to prove this point.
A second evidence can be found in a modular view of mind that gains more and more supporters in the academic field. The basic idea here is that our brain has not solid hierarchy with CEO known as “I” at the top. It consists of different bits, modules, or programs of behavior, which take the control depending on internal and external environment. The theory of modular mind has been well told in the book “Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind” by Robert Kurzban. A major conclusion here is that we can’t trust our feelings and thoughts because they generated with different purposes by different modules and are subject to constant changes and contradictions.
Let us turn back to Buddhism. One of its key concepts is Not-self, compactly stated in Anatta-lakkhana Sutta. In the sutta Buddha takes different parts of human nature - form, feelings, perception, consciousness and investigate whether self can hide in one of those. For example, a human cannot rule and change perception by his will, it is a highly impermanent process and often cause dissatisfaction and suffering. So, there is no Self in perception. The same logic is applied to other parts of human mind: form, feelings, consciousness. Hence there is no Self in the mind at all. ‘This is not mine, this is not I, this is not my self', as Buddha puts it. And this can be said about everything that pops up in our mind. And when one gets the Not-self idea, he become detached from feelings, form, perception and consciousness. His passion fade out and thus he become liberated from craving and clinging. As Sutta says, in the end of the speech monks who had been listening became enlightened.
Indeed, it looks like Buddha described in the sutta if not the modern theory of modular mind itself but something very close to it. There is no Self, I, CEO that is in charge, and thoughts and emotions should not be taken too seriously. They are not reliable guides in the reality. It is notable that during meditation practice people usually report that they can actually observe the fluidity of all mental states, thoughts and feelings and even can trace their origins from different modules, like sex module, or social status module.
In the end, I’d like to set a major question openly. Is complete erasing of negativity possible? Does nirvana exist? Or the cost would be erasing of positive things as well and getting in a state of vegetation and disinterest. Depending on the materials of the course “Buddhism and the modern psychology”, I would say that the point of pure satisfaction (or nirvana) exists like a mathematical limit where a function of negativity approaches zero (but maybe never gets), and we are moving there bit by bit throughout our life, tuning natural biases of the mind, and finally get more satisfaction than before. That’s good news, bhikkhus.