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Friday, March 14, 2008

I Found it When I stopped Looking

As I get older, I am more and more prone to misplacing things like keys, eyeglasses, books, files etc.
and when I search for them, I usually don't find them- until I stop looking.

Last week my grand daughter was here- she decided to spend Spring Break with us. It's the first time she's been with us since she was about 11 and she'll be celebrating her 20th birthday in a couple of weeks. About two weeks before she arrived I had misplaced my "good glasses" these are a pair that I bought originally about five years ago. They have titanium frames (really unbreakable) and a new pair of tri-focal no line lenses. Cost to replace today about $400 . I searched everywhere for them and eventually stopped looking. I knew they were somewhere in the house and someday they would turn up. Camille was idly perusing my "stacks" when her hand happen to fall on a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Standing close to her, my eyes followed the movement of her hand, I was curious to see which book had attracted her attention. As she pulled the book from the shelf "I spied, with my little eye" - my "good glasses"!
I
I've looked, for a long time, for something that could explain the meaning of Buddhism to people like me who are "anti-theistic" but deeply involved in the practice and philosophy of Buddhism. Yesterday, totally by chance I found a short work that, I think is exactly what I was looking for - when I wasn't looking.

The title is Buddhist Meditation and Depth Psychology. The author is David Burns and it is published online by the Buddhist Publication Society.
You can view and download it (38 pages and it"s FREE!) at:http://www.dharmaweb.org/index.php/Buddhist_Meditation_and_Depth_Psychology

Even if you never read anything else about Buddhism or meditation

You must read this.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Using standard MRI to produce detailed images of the structure of participants' brains, the researchers found that regions involved in the mental activities that characterize Insight meditation were thicker in the meditators than in the controls, the first evidence that alterations in brain structure may be associated with meditation. They also found that, in an area associated with the integration of emotional and cognitive processes, differences in cortical thickness were more pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation could reduce the thinning of the cortex that typically occurs with aging.

1000myths said...

Thanks for adding that. In "Train Your Mind to Change Your Brain" Sharon Begley epands on that idea.