Emotional Intelligence – Stories From the Ground.

How to Have a Good Meditation Retreat: In Theory and Practice

“If you practice for a result, then it becomes a hindrance.” – Dipa Ma (common advice to students)

“What is important is not the experiences we have but how we get transformed by them.” – Sayadaw U Jagara (recounted by Joseph Goldstein in Reflections on Nibbana)

Thwarted Desires

In Buddhism, there’s a saying that the path is “good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.” Upon starting a meditation practice, many of us notice surprising benefits. Encouraged by these benefits, we may then seek to take the practice further, setting aside days, weeks, or months to retreat from the world, dedicate ourselves to meditation, and reap the fruits of deep stillness.

Reason’s Emotional Roots

Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing? – Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it. – Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error

Critical of Critical Thinking

Rationality has always faced an uphill battle. It stirs few passions and obeys no creed, meaning that when it challenges ethnic, religious, or political loyalties, it can typically be subdued with a simple appeal to the human heart. Some people ignore reason more eagerly than others but we are all, to some extent, averse to rationality.

Are We Ruled by Thought or Emotion?

[NOTE: I plan on editing this essay to make it more reader-friendly. I like the ideas in here, but the writing could be fixed. I therefore recommend reading “Can Reason and Bias Coexist?” before this one.]

“… no sharp line divides thinking from feeling, nor does thinking inevitably precede feeling or vice versa (notwithstanding the century of debate within psychology over which comes first).” – Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“I’m hooked on a feeling; I’m high on believing.” – Blue Swede

Deceptive Dichotomies

As we puzzle out the world, we are often slow to grasp how the pieces fit together. Our picture of reality is a perpetual work in progress, consistently undergoing revision. This revision frequently requires us to reassess relationships between phenomena, as we learn which parts of nature directly affect each other, and which do not. We humans are easy to fool, regularly overlooking even the most basic connections around us. For instance, we rarely notice how seemingly separate concepts, such as inside and outside, up and down, and left and right, are actually interdependent: the existence of an outside entails an inside, up only exists relative to down, and left delineates right. Our mental landscapes are peppered with such dichotomies, tricking us into thinking that interrelated phenomena are entirely exclusive.

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