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148 pages

English

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A View From A Lake: Buddha, Mind and Future explains how to train our minds to attain lasting contentment. Drawing on the original and most powerful source of mind training - the word of the Buddha - Neil Hayes takes the reader on a journey from ancient India to contemporary Western psychology and the Internet age. It may be unusual for a non-fiction book to have a villain, but this one does, and it is the thinking mind, or the voice in our heads. This troublesome guest's ruses are exposed as being the source of our own unhappiness, and, if unmanaged, a threat to our mental health. Although Western education and science encourage a model of mind in which thinking is at the helm, we generally receive no education in how to manage such a powerful resource safely. A compelling and more beneficial alternative view of mind is offered, based on the natural awareness already present in our minds. The central point of the book is that there is a wager we must all make: for the small stake of some rewarding mental training, we can attain perpetual happiness. Indeed, we learn that to do otherwise makes no sense. This thought-provoking new book gives a detailed practical guide to meditation using the techniques that the Buddha himself used, and explains his psychology clearly and in the context of what psychologists know about the mind today. The beauty of this mind training is that it delivers benefits immediately, so the reader need take nothing on trust. The book is suitable for the popular psychology market, and for more serious students of mind, meditation, and the Buddha's teaching. A View From A Lake is both a valuable source of mind management techniques and a message of hope for our species.

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Mind

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 avril 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781784628611
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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A VIEW FROM
A LAKE
BUDDHA, MIND AND FUTURE
NEIL HAYES
Copyright © 2015 Neil Hayes
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Matador® 9 Priory Business Park Kibworth Beauchamp Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299 Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277 Email: books@troubador.co.uk Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
eISBN 978 1784628 611
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
For my family
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE: BODY AND MIND
The Feeling in My Body
The Voice in My Head
Awareness and Choice
PART TWO: TRAINING OUR MINDS
Meditation
Reflection
Hindrances
PART THREE: MODERN DELUSION, ANCIENT WISDOM
Going Forth
The Everyday Model of Mind
The Contracted Mind
The Mind of Awareness
PART FOUR: THE PATH AND THE WHEEL
An Ancient Path
A Wheel That Won’t Stop Turning
PART FIVE: CARING FOR OUR MINDS
The Everyday Model of Mental Health
Ancient Light, New Perspective
Your Mind, Your Choices
PART SIX: STILL TRAINING OUR MINDS
Body and Mind Again
Meditation Again
Poison and Antidote
PART SEVEN: MIND-MADE IS THE WORLD
Thinking and Oblivion
Evolution of the Species – The State of the Art
Psychological Evolution – The Art of the Possible
A View From a Lake
Acknowledgements
Introduction
On the day of my birth, the world was on the brink of full-scale nuclear war. This situation was created entirely by human minds. Although war was averted, there was no apparent impetus to understand how minds might have generated this situation and thereby avoid its reoccurrence.
Half a century later, I took delivery of a new sofa, and with it came an operating manual. Although I recycled this volume unread, I assume that it contained instructions telling me how to sit down without injuring myself. I was grateful that a fellow human being had taken the trouble to consider this matter on my behalf, but it struck me as incongruous relative to the potential nuclear destruction thing.
So many thinking minds throughout our history have considered it appropriate to indulge in thought that might ultimately cause the destruction of the very planet that we inhabit, and yet still the thinking mind roams free. There is a pressing need to understand the thinking mind, because thinking is the cause of so much suffering. This book will take the reader on a journey from ancient India to the Internet age, ending in a wager that we must all make: for a small stake of some highly rewarding mental training, we can bring about both a personal and a communal peace. We will learn that to bet against this outcome by leaving our minds to do what they will makes no sense at all.
The thinking mind is the most formidable apparatus that we will ever wield, and yet we receive little or no education in its safe operation. Of course, very few minds spend their time creating terrible weaponry or plotting global warfare, but generally minds settle for making themselves and others very unhappy. For most of us, all that we notice of the profound delusions in our minds is a constant feeling of some mismatch between where we find ourselves and where we would prefer to be. This perception drives much of our behaviour throughout our lives, and is the primary cause of our own suffering and the harm we do to others. Sometimes, it causes us to think ourselves into debilitating states of anxiety and depression.
Our thinking minds spend much of their time in competition and conflict with other minds. Even the most cursory consideration of this fact suggests that something is wrong, because we are all of the same nature, facing the same challenges. We are born of the same astral matter, and bound by the same fate to become stardust again. Whilst our education system serves to allow us to pour knowledge into our minds, generally the important issues of mind care and mind management are ignored, or rather they are supposed simply to be a matter of acquiring more knowledge. Neither do we receive any practical instruction in the complex subject of how to relate to other minds. We are left to work out for ourselves how we can be happy, and how we can best play our part in the whole universe of being that surrounds us. It is truly bizarre that we are furnished with excessive instruction in how to wield the simplest gadget without causing harm, or indeed how to sit on a sofa, but for the minds we are born with we are on our own.
In order to work out a functional relationship between our thinking minds and the world around us, the tool we use is the thinking mind itself. In addition to the obvious assumption that the thinking mind is capable of understanding itself, there is another, more dangerous, assumption here that for some reason we do not challenge. We assume that if the thinking mind identifies a problem with its own way of relating to the world, then it will work out a solution and implement a change for the better. This may sound plausible in principle, but what if the thinking mind itself is the problem? Or worse, what if the thinking mind is the problem and has a vested interest in not being fixed? The starting point for this book is this very worst case – a thinking mind that by its very nature denies us sustained happiness and harmony, and whose tyranny is opposed to being unseated by more harmonious states of being.
Until we truly understand the nature of our thinking minds, we cannot be free of the suffering that they create. This is not a new insight or starting point, as it is the fundamental principle underlying the teaching of Siddhartha Gautama – who became known as the Buddha, which means “the awakened one” – over two and a half millennia ago. Much of this book draws on the teaching of the Buddha, although it is not intended to be a book about Buddhism. Rather, the Buddha’s teachings are used as the most complete and practical guide to mind management that is available today to enable us to understand the nature of mind and how suffering can be transcended. Our journey together will also take in some aspects of contemporary psychology, ideas about the evolution of the thinking mind, and a measure of science fiction, but always with the emphasis on practical guidance to improve our happiness and mental health. The overriding intention is to give a message of hope to all troubled minds that once the task is started it becomes self-sustaining, and naturally leads to increased contentment and compassion.
Psychological theories of mind have until recently been looking in the wrong place for the seat of our wisdom and the most appropriate means of responding to the world around us. They have looked to the thinking mind, the voice in the head, the conscious verbal “I” within us that seeks to control our mental activity and run our lives. We will examine this view closely, and show that the thinking mind is a useful resource to be called upon, but also a tyrant to be tamed. We will expose it as an invader, usurper, deceiver and subjugator, whose expansionist tendencies need to be understood for the good of our species and indeed all beings. However, we will also show that the thinking mind can serve us well once we learn to forge an appropriate relationship with it. We will explore a different mental model and a way of training our minds that leads to lasting happiness, increased wisdom, and better relationships with other beings and the planet as a whole.
Although this book is not about the science of psychology as such, its main purpose is to help break through unhelpful aspects of our psychological make-up that cause us unhappiness and disharmony with the world. To this end, a significant amount of psychological theory and analysis will be imparted, some personal in origin but most from the work of others. Unhelpful and unskilful processes of mind make our mental health fragile, and many of us feel that with the slightest additional impetus we may lose control. The very concept of what it means to be “in control” is difficult for us, because we know that whenever we approach this elusive state it will not last. Even when we are feeling stable, there may be a voice in the head giving us reasons to doubt the tenuous grip on it all that we think we have. Psychologists cannot reassure us here, for their experiments would confirm that although we may think we can predict the future and explain the past, we are often relying on an understanding that is fundamentally false.
If the Buddha were to have been asked about how we can establish the control we seek, he would almost certainly have said that the question is one that does not need to be answered. This is one of the many joys of the Buddha’s method: if a question does not help us move towards our liberation from suffering, he taught that we should spend no time in considering it, as to do so would just be unnecessary thinking. “Control” is a largely pointless concept in a universe whose very nature is to change. Nothing, absolutely nothing , is stable or lasting, and it is this truth that underpins the whole of the Buddhist relationship with mind.
The mindfulness teachings of the Buddha and their use in modern psychological therapy are themes that are increasingly familiar on our bookshelves and in our mental health organisations. This is unsurprising because consideration of the Buddha’s teaching