Buddhism Essay Final PDF

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The essay was written for the Buddhism and Modern Psychology course on CoursEra....

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Does modern science lend support to the logic behind Buddhist meditation practice?

We all have had those days when we are just not in the right state of mind. Distracted and just unable to devote our focus to the particular task. When someone asks you, “What’s on your mind?” You snap back to reality and respond, “Nothing.” Essentially there is something but what is that. Well, it is the default network mode of your brain. The researcher, Dr. Josipovic, has stated that the brain is divided into two networks, extrinsic network and intrinsic/default network. We explored this in the course, and learnt that it becomes active when your mind doesn’t have anything to do. Even when you have tasks at hand, it is possible that something greater has been assigned a priority in your mind hence you end up thinking about that the whole time. The idea of self-reflection comes from this network and is responsible for the most popular task of Gen Z: Overthinking. The default network, according to me, can be imagined as a room full of mirrors. The mirrors reflect light (thoughts) again and again in different directions and within seconds there are infinite reflections of you. It is a chain reaction and draining but you can’t help getting lost in the web of overthinking. When you ask professionals about what to do to avoid getting caught up, they suggest meditation which is in fact the Buddhist meditation practice. Through this essay I will be exploring the scientific validity of the idea of meditation in Buddhism and why is it so important. Let us try this. Just close your eyes and sit. Be there simply as you are. Can you say that you meditated? No. Since when you closed your eyes your intrinsic network got activated and you wandered away in your thoughts. Meditation is a difficult task which explains why monks take decades to master the skill and attain enlightenment. My statement, ‘Be there simply as you are’ is the aim of meditation. To be there like a piece of rock, with no thoughts and be in the moment. That means we have to shut down the intrinsic network and what helps in that? Meditation. Scientists have done MRI scans on Buddhist monks and meditation practitioners and have noticed that their default network shows much less activity when the individual is left idle. 1 In another research, the Attentional Focus and Emotional Reactivity was studied for two categories of meditators: novice (ones with 19000 hours of meditation) and expert (ones with 44000 hours of meditation). The results were that the expert required much less effort to achieve complete focus when compared to a novice meditator and as for the emotional reactivity it was inversely proportional, therefore the spontaneous reactions were much less in an expert meditator.2 These results exhibit how meditation helps in following the Buddhism proponents. The ceasing of the default network activity is a way to eliminate the idea of self and helps in being in the moment. The individual can let go of the biases and all notions about himself since recent studies have shown that the essence of you might be derived from the intrinsic network or sometimes referred to as System 1. The decrease in emotional reactivity helps in cessation of dukkha since it allows an objective approach and doesn’t form immediate judgements. These findings also satisfy the eightfold path of Buddhism which is Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration. All these are covered and the main practice followed is meditation. Along with accomplishing traits like high focus, all other factors begin to fall in place and rearranging. Hence when you see a person who has gone for a meditation retreat, a 1 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-12661646 2 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944261/

significant glow can often be observed because the person has changed as a whole and not only certain characteristics about him. Buddhism has preached meditation and nowadays even professionals are doing the same, therefore there must be something there to experience. With the backing up with scientific experiments, there is additional evidence. The people have the way to become peaceful from within served to them on a platter, the choice is theirs: to be or not to be....