(July 6, 2016 at 1:29 am)Jörmungandr Wrote:(July 5, 2016 at 10:17 pm)Whateverist the White Wrote: Interesting. But I think mindfulness is something to be brought into as much of your life as possible .. cooking, walking, whatever. I think of it as being in a receptive/noticing state rather than a directed/expressing state. The idea of doing specific repetitive but essentially meaningless motions (or no motion) in order to achieve an effect seems kind of desperate. Or like going on a short term diet to lose weight. Much better to just change the way you eat or live. Or maybe I'm just covering up for lack of discipline?
My personal view of meditation is that it differs from simple mindfulness. Mindfulness in ordinary activities does little to restructure the way our brains process information. In ordinary consciousness, the different centers of thought in our brain compete for overall attention, firing off largely unrestricted. My view is that in intense meditation, the brain is learning to focus activity in a few select portions of the brain. It is a form of training our mind how to do that. Once the skill is acquired through intense meditation, it can be harnessed in less rigorous circumstances. Mindfulness to me is like meditation lite -- it can alter the way the brain processes things for that short time period, but does little to retrain the mind overall. (in my opinion) So in my view there is a reason for the rigors of practice which are not met by simply trying to live mindfully.
I totally agree that proper, long-term, trained meditation is different from meditation lite... especially after I learned recently that it causes structural/connectivity changes in the brain. I think that's wonderful news for neuroscience because I think it will help reveal the nature of focus/attention once that structural/connectivity change is fully mapped/understood. I don't know anything about it yet... I haven't looked into it at all, but I was just so excited by the mere fact that it does cause physical changes, because that opens it up to examination and scrutiny, similar to how brain damage helps reveal what's missing.
