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Showing posts from November, 2017

Mindfullness Meditation and Depression - in a pod cast

Over the last 3 years I have found that meditation has really assisted me, in resolving the depression I have had. I have planned to write about my experience for a while, and hopefully will get around to doing that. However today having listen to the latest podcast by Dan Harris on 10% happier, so many things just clicked in to place, so I want to share it. To understand what is covered in the podcast I would recommend you understand what mindfulness meditation is, and what the default mode network in the brain is (see links below). Listen to the pod cast - but here are some extracts (which I do not have permission to publish - and will remove if asked). Link to podcast: tumello.com/listen/H11a5NYJf; or itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/10-happier-with-dan-harris/id1087147821 Chuck Raison, a psychiatrist and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, and Vlad Maletic, a clinical professor of neuropsychiatry and behavior sc

The doomed perpetual quest for happiness and consciousness

We are made so The quest for happiness is doomed. If we are not happy we want to be happy. If we are happy we want to stay happy which is impossible, since you cannot be in that state of happiness forever. Happiness moment are brief. This is the Dukkha of life that the Buddha spoke about. Sometime translated as suffering it is more unsatisfactoriness. In Robert Wrights book “ Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Enlightenment ” he makes a case for the fact that if you wanted to create a system for a being to pursue pleasure the best way to design that being is to make pleasure transient. So the joy of eating a great meal must only last for a short while otherwise we would starve. This means we can only have transient happiness, otherwise we would always be happy. That is why each goal we achieve is only important if we do not achieve it, and once achieved its significance fades, so we can pursue the next goal and pleasure. The problem is that we need to realise