Hack Your Default Settings!

American Buddhist monk meditating with electrodes attached in PBS’s the New Medicine (photo courtesy of Middlemarch Films/TPT)

Dr. G. reporting…. In the last year, I’ve noticed a big push to bring mindfulness into education at all levels — corporate, K-12 and even the narrow, hallowed halls of academe.  Thanks to the efforts of John Kabat Zinn at Mass General in Boston and more recently Dan Siegal of Mindsight in L A. and Soren Gordhamer of Wisdom 2.0, the trickle down theory of revolution is now sending legions of Noble Warriors (a term coined by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) into hospitals, schools and corporate board rooms, translating the ancient wisdom of “mindfulness” into modern day practices to greet and handle the tragic existentialism and stress flooding from recession economics.

Discussing the roots of American mindfulness with GGI brain awareness interns, it became clear that a simple lesson in the neural “hacking” of The Four Noble Truths — a core concept of Mahayana Buddhism, might help to illuminate the grand raison d’etre of the new mindfulness revolution.

First, what are The Four Noble Truths?  Grounded in a theory of reincarnation and offered as a robust method to attain existential enlightenment, The 4 Four Noble Truths are said to be “noble” because they speak eloquently and simply to basic experiential insights into the nature of human suffering and the liberation from suffering —  insights that can be shared by all sentient human beings throughout the world. It is the collective experience and belief in the universal value of these insights that The Four Noble Truths have been translated and transmitted in languages throughout the world, from the ancient Pali and Sanskrit to the many languages of the AsiaPacific region, Europe, South America and the US.  I take my translation from the many English language annals of Buddhist history and practice as handed down through my late 20th century teachers and influencers in the U.S. (Professor Masao Abe, D.T. Suzuki, Allan Wallace, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Ajahn Amaro, The Dalai Lama):

1.  Every sentient being is afflicted by existential suffering.

2.  The truth of existential suffering grows from desires and needs to “be” and the misery and disappointment that comes from “not being” i.e, from the desire of living and accumulating to the pain that comes from having to let things go — aging, losing things and loved ones, death itself.

3.  The truth of existential suffering can be eliminated.

4.  The truth of elimination is illuminated by engaging the path or method of dhyanna (mindful sitting practice).