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The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition.
Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the context of this book.
A rational approach to spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and from the lives of most of
leave this earth
suggest a connection between self-transcendence and living ethically. Not all good feelings have an ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely exist.
have no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel extraordinarily good just before they detonate themselves in a crowd.
Spiritual life begins with a suspicion that the answer to such questions could well be “yes.” And a true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self.
Joseph Smith,
MINDFULNESS
It is always now.
We often fail to appreciate what we have until we have lost it.
For beginners, I usually recommend a technique called vipassana (Pali for “insight”),
this method of introspection can be brought into any secular or scientific context without embarrassment. (The
It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
Mindfulness
is “clear awareness.”
The Satipatthana Sutta is not a collection of ancient myths, superstitions, and taboos; it is a rigorously empirical guide to freeing the mind from suffering.
four foundations of mindfulness,
for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the reali...
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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 vo...
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The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts.
Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed.
dukkha
unsatisfactoriness.”
I have posted guided meditations of varying length on my website.
years practicing meditation, the purpose of which is to cut through the illusion of the self.
concepts such as self and ego and I.
center of consciousness that exists somehow interior to the body, behind
To see how the feeling of “I” is a product of thought—indeed,
contemplatives.
conventional sense of self,
But we all talk to ourselves constantly—most
Who are we talking to?
But my suffering was entirely the product of my thoughts.
Every moment of the day—indeed, every moment throughout one’s life—offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.
am not advocating that we be irrationally detached from the reality of our lives. If
Many people on earth at this moment can’t even imagine the freedom that you currently
“stimulus-independent thought.” The primary method of studying
No stimuli from the five senses
subjects reported being lost in thought 46.9 percent of the time.1 Anyone who has
Walking, eating, playing, dreaming. Etc
The authors concluded that “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Anyone who has spent
Resting mode
while
thinking about oneself increases it. These results appear
EGO
a physical connection between the experience of being lost in thought and the sense of self (as well as a mechanism by which meditation might reduce both).
meditation
Or any reduction in mental activity - ?? Mental retardstion
review of the psychological literature suggests that mindfulness in particular fosters many components of physical and mental health: It improves immune function, blood pressure, and cortisol levels; it reduces anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and emotional reactivity. It also leads to greater behavioral regulation and has shown promise in the treatment of addiction and eating disorders.
being hostage to one’s thoughts and being freely and nonjudgmentally aware of life in the present.
Hostage on the train of thoughts
In the broadest sense, however, meditation is simply the ability to stop suffering in many of the usual ways, if only for a few moments at a time. How could that not be a skill worth cultivating?
But here lies one of the central paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present. As we have seen, there
The constant stream of unpleasant thoughts, like a never ending train
But the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—and to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to
