Q&A #2
In this lesson, Sam answers the following questions:
- Are there proven benefits to meditation? I’ve been practicing for many weeks and my behavior and emotional life appear totally unchanged.
- How do you understand the idea of nirvana in Buddhism?
- Can you talk about the relationship between attention and consciousness?
- During one of your lessons, you briefly entertain the notion that we might have some sort of "soul." How would you fit this into your understanding of consciousness and free will?
- You've spoken about one of the benefits of mindfulness being shorter-lasting bad moods—claiming that bad moods are the product of thoughts. But clearly some things aren't like this. For instance, you have tinnitus (ringing in your ears), which
doesn't go away if you stop thinking about it. And while I assume mindfulness helps with your reaction to the tinnitus, it doesn’t make it last less long. Could it be that there are other mental phenomena like tinnitus, such as certain types of depression,
that the brain keeps generating in a way that is unconnected to thought, and something other than mindfulness would be needed to avoid their constant presence?
- Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and other public intellectuals seem skeptical about meditation. How do you deal with the disconnect between you and your colleagues who think that meditation is a bit like astrology?
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