Anatta

Anatta outside of Buddhism


The ego is not master in its own house. - Sigmund Freud



Re: Anatta outside of Buddhism
“Clearing” (in the English version most of us are using) translates Lichtung. “In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing.” (Martin Heidegger)



"The 'self' is a clearing in which phenomena occur." (Bob Budny)

“I may venture to affirm the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” (David Hume)

Selflessness - The Core Of All Major World Religions - Has Neuropsychological Connection, MU Study Finds

21 Dec 2008

All spiritual experiences are based in the brain. That statement is truer than ever before, according to a University of Missouri neuropsychologist. An MU study has data to support a neuropsychological model that proposes spiritual experiences associated with selflessness are related to decreased activity in the right parietal lobe of the brain. The study is one of the first to use individuals with traumatic brain injury to determine this connection. Researchers say the implication of this connection means people in many disciplines, including peace studies, health care or religion can learn different ways to attain selflessness, to experience transcendence, and to help themselves and others.

This study, along with other recent neuroradiological studies of Buddhist meditators and Francescan nuns, suggests that all individuals, regardless of cultural background or religion, experience the same neuropsychological functions during spiritual experiences, such as transcendence. Transcendence, feelings of universal unity and decreased sense of self, is a core tenet of all major religions. Meditation and prayer are the primary vehicles by which such spiritual transcendence is achieved.

"The brain functions in a certain way during spiritual experiences," said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the MU School of Health Professions. "We studied people with brain injury and found that people with injuries to the right parietal lobe of the brain reported higher levels of spiritual experiences, such as transcendence."

This link is important, Johnstone said, because it means selflessness can be learned by decreasing activity in that part of the brain. He suggests this can be done through conscious effort, such as meditation or prayer. People with these selfless spiritual experiences also are more psychologically healthy, especially if they have positive beliefs that there is a God or higher power who loves them, Johnstone said.

"This research also addresses questions regarding the impact of neurologic versus cultural factors on spiritual experience," Johnstone said. "The ability to connect with things beyond the self, such as transcendent experiences, seems to occur for people who minimize right parietal functioning. This can be attained through cultural practices, such as intense meditation or prayer or because of a brain injury that impairs the functioning of the right parietal lobe. Either way, our study suggests that 'selflessness' is a neuropsychological foundation of spiritual experiences."

The research was funded by the MU Center on Religion and the Professions. The study - "Support for a neuropsychological model of spirituality in persons with traumatic brain injury" - was published in the peer-reviewed journal Zygon.

"Our research focused on the personal experience of spiritual transcendence and does not in any way minimize the importance of religion or personal beliefs, nor does it suggest that spiritual experience are related only to neuropsychological activity in the brain," Johnstone said. "It is important to note that individuals experience their God or higher power in many different ways, but that all people from all religions and beliefs appear to experience these connections in a similar way."

Consciousness

Here's a couple of thousand articles. Let's talk. I don't know if the blog is set up for open posting. Stay tuned, until I work it out.

Buddhism & Existential Phenomenology

This could have been heard from the Buddha:

Existential phenomenology (glosses are mine)

Basic themes of existential phenomenology are "lived experience," "modes of being," "ontology," and "lifeworld."

In his last work The Crisis of the European Sciences (1936), Husserl had already turned phenomenological analysis away from the transcendental ego and consciousness, to the prereflective lifeworld of everyday experience. Especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty radicalized this turn toward the existential world as we live and experience it.

(i.e., 'things as they really are,' impermanent and without essence.)

With Heidegger this turn toward the lived world became an ontological rather than an epistemological project. Instead of asking how the being (essence) of things are constituted in consciousness Heidegger asked how the being of beings (things) show themselves to us as a revealing of Being itself. For Heidegger the phenomenological question became: How can we let that what shows itself be seen in the very way that it shows itself from itself? Phenomenology requires of its practitioners a heedful attunement (mindfulness) to the modes of being of the ways that things are in the world. Heidegger's existential phenomenology is also often referred to as ontological phenomenology (concerned with being) while Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is epistemological (concerned with knowledge and the cogito).

Merleau-Ponty provides an existential interpretation of Husserl's program in his 'Preface' to the Phenomenology of Perception. Instead of Husserl's description of a disembodied consciousness that constitutes the meaning of things at the ideal level of the transcendental ego, Merleau-Ponty describes consciousness as embodied awareness of primordial experience. Consciousness is existence in and toward the world through the body. While Husserl's phenomenology is oriented to transcendental essences, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is existential, oriented to lived experience, the embodied human being in the concrete world. The purpose of phenomenological analysis for Merleau-Ponty is not the intuition of essences but rather it is "concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world." Instead of striving for certain knowledge Merleau-Ponty believed that phenomenological inquiry can never yield indubitable knowledge. "The most important lesson that the reduction teaches us," he says, "is the impossibility of a complete reduction." While Mearleu-Ponty held a chair in psychology and pedagogy, for him phenomenological method resembles more closely an attitude than a psychological research method: "Phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner or style of thinking... We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology... Phenomenology is accessible only through a phenomenological method." (such as meditation, vipassana?)

Buddhism and Politics

Here is a timely quote from bhikkhu bodhi's The Nobel Eightfold Path:
The most basic defilements are the triad of greed, aversion, and delusion. Greed (lobha) is self-centered desire: the desire for pleasure and possessions, the drive for survival, the urge to bolster the sense of ego with power, status, and prestige. Aversion (dosa) signifies the response of negation, expressed as rejection, irritation, condemnation, hatred, enmity, anger, and violence. Delusion (moha) means mental darkness: the thick coat of insensitivity which blocks out clear understanding.
Capitalism could be about providing jobs, raising the general standard of living, reducing poverty, and making a buck doing it. But the oil companies, wall street, the auto makers, the housing industry, became possessed by greed and here we are.
The right co-opted "Christianity" ignored the gospels, focused on "revelations" (added to the bible to bring Christianity in line with the "peace through war" ideals of the roman empire), and turned "Christianity" into a hate group. Obviously, these observations don't apply to all. Delusion & ignorance? Need go no further than the bush white house. Even Obama has hired a homophobe hater to pray at his inauguration.

Hello

Hello from a blog virgin.
I've got a variety of esoteric interests and have made friends on forum globally. The web is good.

Topics of interest include:

• Buddhism, theory & practise primarily from the perspective of the Pali Canon.
• Psychology orientation: person-centered-psychodynamic-cognitive-mindfulness-meditation.
• Philosophy, especially existentialphenomenology.
• Physics & cosmology.
• Classical Literature.
• Music: Jazz, "20th21st Century," improvisational in any context, percussion & rhythm.
• 'Women of the world"
• Cultural diversity
• Politics (I'm a bleeding heart liberal)
• Ethics
• Comparative religion
• Art especially abstract expressionism
• Film
• Poetry especially Robert Creeley & Bukowski
  
• International food, clothing.
• Third-Wave Feminism
• Consciousness