Habits and the Brain

[Limp Budgie of Mellowness (Franca)]

A friend sent me a great link to a NYT article on habits and the brain — how the brain develops new synaptic connections when we do things differently. In other words, getting out of your rut makes your brain grow. Hooray! The article quotes a couple of experts who talk about "three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress. Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occur." Like meditation practice: work the edge, don't go into panic mode, but don't sit comfortably zoning out on your pillow either. Here's a link to the article.

[Leslie (Mature Stapler of Fulsome Absenteeism)]

Here's another interesting piece in the NY Times. The Neural Buddhists talks about how researchers are coming to the opinion that "the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships" and discusses new directions in the religion-science debate. Interesting.

[Chou Dog of Dis-illusioned Allegory]

An interesting recent book in this connection is 'Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain' by Sharon Begley.

[Chou Dog of Dis-illusioned Allegory]

It seems to me that the whole of 'Mind Training' (as in 'Seven-point Mind Training') is about forming new habits to replace harmful old ones. In Enlightened Courage, his commentary on the Seven-point Mind Training, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche wrote this about the 'power of familiarisation', one of the Five Strengths: 'In the beginning, meditation is difficult but it becomes easier if we perseerer in it. For as the saying goes, "There is nothing that one cannot get used to."' (p. 59; on the Unfettered Mind website this is point 4.1.1, where Ken refers to it as training).

[Chou Dog of Dis-illusioned Allegory]

Sorry: 'perservere', not 'perseerer'.

[Limp Budgie of Mellowness (Franca)]

Although some instructions in "7 Points" deal with replacing negative habits with positive ones (such as 4.1.1, 2.2.2, and 3.4.1), others point directly to awareness (such as 2.1.4) or provide criteria for making decisions about one's practice in life (my favourite, 7.4.2). So I would disagree with the statement "the whole of Mind Training is about forming new habits to replace harmful old ones" (my italics).

Habits are here to stay: they come with our brain, part of our corporeal gift box set. All habits, followed blindly, produce suffering, even "good" ones. The point is awareness. The problem with "harmful" habits is that they consume lots of energy. Our attention, which needs energy too, is starved: there just isn't enough free attention to see our way to letting go. When we learn less negative habits, a little bit of the flow is freed. The more important message of "7 Points" is to pour that energy into awareness, and not simply into the new habits.

I belabour this point because it's so easy to fall into the trap of simply stopping at character reform, becoming a "good Buddhist" and never really rattling one's own cage sufficiently to get past that.

That said, I wonder: I am equating neural pathways with habits, and equating habits with patterns, and equating patterns with conditioning in the Buddhist sense. I hold awareness to be distinct from conditioning. But is awareness distinct from neural pathways? Have I tricked myself with false inferences?

[Chou Dog of Dis-illusioned Allegory]

Your points are valid and well made, O Limp Budgie of Mellowness. I think I have been using my own mental shorthand here: Mind Training as a way of completely changing how you look at the world. Thus once you get past the starting point of the groundwork (and that's not a very good statement because I think you continue to do the groundwork, in some form or other, throughout your life), the very next point tells you to 'Look at all experience like a dream'--which suggests to me fundamentally changing the way you look at everything, which in my aforementioned mental shorthand came out as changing a habit. Your elaboration is I think both more accurate and more elegant; but I hold to my point that Mind Training is all about changing. Some of the changes are done on the level of everyday patterns, and some on the level of our entire way of apprehending what we are pleased to call 'reality'; but it's all about changing our false way of seeing and doing 'things' to an accurate understanding and appropriate doing.

[Leslie Ellestad]

Franca,

If awareness is "deathless" then does this make it distinct from neural pathways? If not, how can there be a transitory state(bardo), between death and birth?