Photo by Pixabay Something I wish I had known earlier: When you're stressed and you sit with your emotions, simply allowing them and resisting the urge to push them aside by drinking alcohol, doomscrolling, stress-eating, and the like, your brain eventually gets tired of running the usual doom-and-gloom scripts. You let go, reach some sort of flow state, and then you just know what to do about the situation, or at least know what the best next step to take would be. If you're only beginning to practice this, it feels counterintuitive. You will feel restless. Your mind will be screaming, "Why the fuck are you just sitting there doing nothing when we have something urgent?!" The unpleasant emotions will be magnified and it will be hella painful. But if you just stay with it and resist the urge to numb the pain, clarity will eventually wash over you. Insights will come flooding in that will make you think, "Oh my god, why didn't this occur to me before?" Th...
This is my final paper for Buddhism and Modern Psychology ! I got a good grade on it as well. ☺ Does modern science lend support to the Buddhist ideas about the human mind? The specific topic that comes to mind for this would be the Buddhist idea of anatta , or the not-self. In the video lecture named “the Buddha’s Discourse on the Not-Self,” we learned that the Buddha does not consider the five aggregates – consciousness, form, feeling, perception, mental formations – to be self because they lack the two attributes that he believes the self should have, namely permanence and control. The modular theory of mind and the idea that what we call “self” may be more of a press secretary than the CEO supports the Buddha’s teachings on anatta . We can recall that in Week 3, we learned that modern psychology professes that there is no single self that decides how you should behave. Instead, mental modules do this. The modules grow stronger the more attention is paid to them and the...