![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSo, I have a question about Buddhism.
It's a given in the neurological and psychological sciences that we are fundamentally emotional beings. People whose emotional response centers have been damaged lose the ability to make decisions; they prevaricate back and forth between choices, never settling on one. The "modular" structure of our brains, the one that adjusts the knobs of our personalities (sometimes radically) in response to stimuli— hunger, exhaustion, desire, jealousy— is more or less a given. We also know that this varied, modular design is what gives rise to distraction: we aren't "in control" of our thoughts, for if we were, they wouldn't wander whenever we were bored. Buddha took this to a logical extreme: if your "self," whatever it is, can't command your thoughts to behave, then perhaps there is no "self" at all, only a phenomenal collective of thoughts and their organic origins that, having only one body, appears to be a whole human being to other human beings.
In the Buddha's view, all of civilization is a pantomime, and our evolutionary emotions dedicated to keeping us alive (fed, warmed, in a tribe where we can shine individually so long as we all keep the water running and the herd fed collectively) and getting us laid, are at the core of who and what we are. We suffer (the word is overused in Western Buddhism; Buddha meant something closer to a sense of perpetual anxiety and dissatisfaction, with 'suffering' as an extreme of the daily discomfort and alienation we experience) and we desire to alleviate that suffering through food, drink, sex, drugs, fame, power, and any number of tools.
Okay, all good. The technology (technology: "a collection of knowledge, methods, skills, and applications used in the production of goods and services toward human flourishing") Buddha gave us was the Three Meditations: Concentration, Mindfulness, and Insight— and in that order. The purpose of mindful meditation was to give us an insight into our own brains. After some mastery of concentration, we are to observe how it works, to monitor its behaviors, to tally and catalog whether our thoughs are to accomplishment, or anticipation, or rumination, or anxiety, and learn that each of those thoughts isn't the thinker. That we can observe this lack of self-mastery, this tendency for the mind to wander, and be mindful of who "we" are without having to regard every thought we're having as being part of our "selfhood."
Buddhism then asks you to go a bit deeper, and inquire about the observer. If none of those thoughts, about what you did yesterday, about what you might do tomorrow, about who might criticize you, and about who you might desire, are you, but clearly they're thoughts about things you want, or want to learn from, then what is doing the observing of these thoughts?
Dig deep enough, Buddha claimed, and you'll find that confident, concentrative, mindful "you" isn't really "you" at all, either; it's just another thought.
So let's turn this onto its neurological head: what emotion keeps you on the cushion? We are at our base emotional creatures. Buddha encouraged us to get a grip on those emotions, to marshall them. In this, Buddha and Zeno, the founder of Stocisim, found both the symptom of our problems and the solutions.
But what emotion drives a practicing Buddhist or Stoic to their daily meditations? What happens when you are finally satisfied with your Buddhist practice?
It's a given in the neurological and psychological sciences that we are fundamentally emotional beings. People whose emotional response centers have been damaged lose the ability to make decisions; they prevaricate back and forth between choices, never settling on one. The "modular" structure of our brains, the one that adjusts the knobs of our personalities (sometimes radically) in response to stimuli— hunger, exhaustion, desire, jealousy— is more or less a given. We also know that this varied, modular design is what gives rise to distraction: we aren't "in control" of our thoughts, for if we were, they wouldn't wander whenever we were bored. Buddha took this to a logical extreme: if your "self," whatever it is, can't command your thoughts to behave, then perhaps there is no "self" at all, only a phenomenal collective of thoughts and their organic origins that, having only one body, appears to be a whole human being to other human beings.
In the Buddha's view, all of civilization is a pantomime, and our evolutionary emotions dedicated to keeping us alive (fed, warmed, in a tribe where we can shine individually so long as we all keep the water running and the herd fed collectively) and getting us laid, are at the core of who and what we are. We suffer (the word is overused in Western Buddhism; Buddha meant something closer to a sense of perpetual anxiety and dissatisfaction, with 'suffering' as an extreme of the daily discomfort and alienation we experience) and we desire to alleviate that suffering through food, drink, sex, drugs, fame, power, and any number of tools.
Okay, all good. The technology (technology: "a collection of knowledge, methods, skills, and applications used in the production of goods and services toward human flourishing") Buddha gave us was the Three Meditations: Concentration, Mindfulness, and Insight— and in that order. The purpose of mindful meditation was to give us an insight into our own brains. After some mastery of concentration, we are to observe how it works, to monitor its behaviors, to tally and catalog whether our thoughs are to accomplishment, or anticipation, or rumination, or anxiety, and learn that each of those thoughts isn't the thinker. That we can observe this lack of self-mastery, this tendency for the mind to wander, and be mindful of who "we" are without having to regard every thought we're having as being part of our "selfhood."
Buddhism then asks you to go a bit deeper, and inquire about the observer. If none of those thoughts, about what you did yesterday, about what you might do tomorrow, about who might criticize you, and about who you might desire, are you, but clearly they're thoughts about things you want, or want to learn from, then what is doing the observing of these thoughts?
Dig deep enough, Buddha claimed, and you'll find that confident, concentrative, mindful "you" isn't really "you" at all, either; it's just another thought.
So let's turn this onto its neurological head: what emotion keeps you on the cushion? We are at our base emotional creatures. Buddha encouraged us to get a grip on those emotions, to marshall them. In this, Buddha and Zeno, the founder of Stocisim, found both the symptom of our problems and the solutions.
But what emotion drives a practicing Buddhist or Stoic to their daily meditations? What happens when you are finally satisfied with your Buddhist practice?
