Buddhist psych exam 1

metta meditation

• aka loving kindness meditation

• cultivating emotional states of warmth, compassion, and goodwill

• actively shaping your mindset

• replace anger, self critiscism, and resentment with stable sense of connection and empathy towards yourself and others

watching the breath mediattion

• mindfulness of breathing

• about attention and awareness

• training ability to stay present, notice wandering mind, build focus, clarity, and non judgemental awareness

How does metta and watching the breath stabilize each other

• breath stabilizes your attention, making it easier to stay with the feelings of metta instead of being distracted

• metta stabilizes emotional state, making breath mediation less frustrating

  • less likely to judge yourself if your mind wanders

• balance awareness and emotional cultivation (shaping how your relate to and see the world and people around you)

Mindfulness as the seed and the fruit

• seed: begin with a small intentional effort to pay attention

  • like watching your breath

  • initial act gets everything started

• fruit: repeated practice, the seed grows into a more stable and natural state

  • more constantly aware, less reactive,better able to notice thoughts and emotions without getting overwhelmed by them

• as you practice mindfulness, it becomes easier to be more mindful

Dukkha

• suffering

• fundamental unsatisfactoriness or instabuility of the human experience

  • includes obvious suffering like loss, subtle disatisfaction (things aren’t good enough), and existential unease (you can’t rely on anything because everything is changing)

Is the translation of Dukkha a good translation

• no, suffering can be misleading (too narrow and intense)

  • other translations like stress are incomplete

• best left untranslated becuase then it can have a layered meaning that is not restricted by language. it’s not locked into one meaning and encourages deeper understanding over time

Skandhas and the self

• 5 words to describe the self (form, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness)

• self is a flow (each part is constantly changing and not fully under your control)

• explain why the idea of a permanenet self is considered illusion (anatta)

• undertstanding this reduces dukkha because you start clinging to these changing parts of “me” and you experince less suffering when you change

karma

• not everything is shaped by karma

• karma is intentional action

  • what you do, say and think leave imprints and infulence future experinces

• karma is less fate, more cause and effect shaped by intention

• explains patterns in our experinces and tendencies (why we have certain habits)

• emphasizes responsibilty for our actions

• leaves room for freedom (we influence what happens next with our actions)

Is the translation of shunyata as no-thing-ness a good defintion

• no

• usually translated as emptiness but it doesn’t mean that nothing exists

  • things do not exist as fixed, independent, self contained things

  • everything arises from dependet causes and conditions (dependent origination)

• objects and people and experinces exist but do not have independent and permament nature

• this definition may encourage a mistaken idea of emptiness as a absence of being

How would I describe shunyata to family

• usually translated as emptiness but it doesn’t mean nothing exists

  • things do not exist as fixed, independent, self contained things

  • everything arises from dependet causes and conditions (dependent origination)

• objects and people and experinces exist but do not have independent and permament nature

Relationship between prajnapramita and shunyata

• P- perfection of wisdom

  • group of texts and wisdom that emphasizes deep insight into the nature of reality

• S- emptiness

  • key teaching in the texts

  • things arise dependent on each other, no independent existence

• if you have the wisdom, you understand shunyata

Skillful means and language

• buddhist idea that teachings and practices are adapted to the needs, capacities, and situations of different people rather than being one fixed, literal set of instructions

  • flexible teachings tailored to the audince

  • reduce suffering even if they are not complete expression of truth

• language and concepts are necessary tools for teaching and practice

  • allow communication of the dharma (teachings)

  • guide people towards ethical behavior, mindfulness, and insight

  • without launguage, would be difficult to practice

• language is limited

  • language freezes things into fixed categories but buddishm says that everything is changing

  • language can reinfirce illusion of fixed things

  • people may cling to teachings as absolute truths rather than using it as a tool

System 1 and 2

• 1: automatic and habitual

  • driven by habit (samskaras/ mental formations)

  • quickly producs greed, aversion, and delusion (root afflictions)

  • creates emotional reactions

  • much suffering from system 1 taking over before we think about it

• 2: mindfulness awareness

  • notice what’s going on in the mind

  • puase before reacting

  • reflect

• meditation strengthens system 2 capacity so we are not contreolled by system 1

• not fully eliminatting system 1 becuase we need it for like walking, but preventing it from running unchecked

Explain “if you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating on this sheet of paper”

• sheet of paper does not exist independetly

  • many non paper elements that made it like tree, cloud that gave rain, sun that helped the tree grow

• nothing exists on its own (dependant origionation and shunyata)

  • paper is empty of independet essence

  • not an isolated things

  • causes coming together

Anatman and impermance and interdependence

• everything is constantly changing

  • including the self (anataman)

• the self does not exist on its own

  • depends on conditions and causes

Multitasking and mindfulness

• attention is a limited resource

  • fragmented attention which reduces performance quality because switiching attention back and forth

  • everytime you switch, brain has to reorient and suppress previous task

    • drops in spped, accuracy, and memory retention

  • shallow processing

    • encode info poorly, mind wanders

• mindulfness helps expose attention drift and strengthens single task awareness (sustained attemtion, early detection of distraction, return to present task without being hard on yourself)

Implicit bias and system 1 and 2

• system 1 acts first and system 2 comes in late or doesn’t engage

  • biases are automatoc and learned through repition and triggered quickly

  • largely system 1 process

• system 2 helps you notice judegments and you see it as conditioned habit rather than truth

• metta practice is good for this because you wish goodwill towards people and reduce automatic hostitility and distancing