💝 Making Mindfulness Meditation Work For You Part 2 - The Noble Eightfold Path - Right View 💝

soulsistashakti (63)in #meditation • 7 years ago (edited)

Making meditation to work for you essentially requires creating an ethical foundation for life that is critical to your happiness, success, mental health and cultivation of wisdom. In this essay we will look at the Eight Fold Path and another aspect of the brain involved in perception.

The Noble Eightfold Path

Right View
Right Intent
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration

In the previous essay, Making Mindfulness Meditation Work For You Part 1, I included explanations of negative and positive neuroplasticity as well as exercises to trigger positive neuroplasticity and avoid negative. Another way to gradually take advantage of positive neuroplasticity and avoid succumbing to the negativity bias is to follow The Eightfold Path.

My teaching is not a dogma or a doctrine, but no doubt some people will take it as such ~The Buddha

These are in no particular order but eight facets of life. These steps on the path are not commandments. These are guidelines that are to experimented with and experienced. The Eightfold Path is also known as The Middle Way. Meaning without going to extremes on our quest to relinquish our lower selves and realize our higher selves we walk the path.

I must state clearly that my teaching is a method to experience reality and not reality itself, just as a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. A thinking person makes use of the finger to see the moon. A person who only looks at the finger and mistakes it for the moon will never see the real moon. ~The Buddha

I will go over each step on the path individually as they are each rich with layers of meaning.

Photo by Philippe Bourhis on Unsplash!

Right View

In first step on the path encompasses The Four Noble Truths. They are:

the truth of suffering
the truth of the cause of suffering
the truth of the end of suffering
the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering

Right view means that we no longer view reality in a distorted way or as we wish it to be but as it really is. This takes some effort. Through meditation as we learn to observe the contents of our mind, and by that I mean our thoughts and feelings, while not becoming attached to them or identified with them we begin to realize that the “I” that we thought was us, meaning our thoughts and feelings is not really us but a story about our place in the world.

This is not an easy task for sure. It takes a lot of sittings of observing and not identifying to have the realization. This is one of the reasons why teachings are so important. To continuously reiterate these truths because it is so easy to get pulled in by the content of our thoughts and feelings and re-identify with the story they create and think it is real and it is who we are. These are our patterns and they are habits that are very familiar to us so it’s easy to be deceived.

Photo by Sidney Perry on Unsplash

A Scientific Perspective

A professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, Donald D. Hoffman, was interviewed by journalist Amanda Gefter for The Atlantic in an article called The Case Against Reality about how we perceive reality. The beginning of the dialogue went like this:

Gefter: People often use Darwinian evolution as an argument that our perceptions accurately reflect reality. They say, “Obviously we must be latching onto reality in some way because otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago. If I think I’m seeing a palm tree but it’s really a tiger, I’m in trouble.”

Hoffman: But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I
devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

But what does this mean?

Robert Wright author of the new book Why Buddhism is True who is a teacher of where evolutionary biology and religion interface explained it in an interview with NPR more simply saying:

"I think of mindfulness meditation as almost a rebellion against natural selection," he says. "Natural selection is the process that created us. It gave us our values. It sets our agenda, and Buddhism says, 'We don't have to play this game.' "

He goes on to say:

This was in the Buddha's first sermon after his enlightenment is that a big source of our suffering is that we crave things, we want things, but then the gratification tends not to last. So we find ourselves in a state of almost perennial dissatisfaction. And, in fact, people may have heard that Buddhism says that life is full of suffering, and it's true that suffering is the translation of the word dukkha. It's a respectable translation, but a lot of people think that that word would be just as well translated as "unsatisfactoryness."

So, the central to the teachings of the Buddha is the negativity bias!

Wright goes onto say in this interview:

evolutionary psychology explains that, indeed, a lot of the feelings we have are not worth following, for various reasons. They may have literally been designed to mislead us to begin with by natural selection. ... We live in an environment so different from the environment that natural selection designed us for that we have these counterproductive feelings, like fear of public speaking. So evolutionary psychology gives a back story, explaining why it is that we so often are misled by feelings ... and then Buddhist meditation tells us what to do about that.

I’ve included a lot of quotes here by Wright but I feel he explains things so clearly and simply…I enjoy his explanations so much I’ve seen him speak 6 times. That is another thing about overcoming the negativity bias. We have to engage of repetition of these exercises and teaching so they sink in and we can start experiencing the inner freedom we have to potential to claim.

Conclusion

The first taste of the essence of our being without all the noise and the luminescent quality of clear mind and Right View is quite a delightful surprise! It is so well worth the effort. I hope you stay with me on this journey and are encourage to do your own research and practice and I truly hope you are inspired and the path of your life is illuminated by this wisdom.

What do you think?