SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT 397: Buddha’s the best psychologist!
"Good morning, dearest people. You know, I think a lot about the relationship between the terminology we use in the neuroscientific model of the mind and the modern psychological views and the Buddhist one. So I think it's easy for us to hear the Buddhist one as, oh, that's religion. You know, that's not kind of, that's not psychology. It's kind of like not real. It's just spiritual. It's different. But it's not the way Buddha thinks at all, you know. I mean, Buddhism, Buddha was his person. He's not a creator. He doesn't posit a creator. We don't need creating, he says. We do find creating our own mess and our own happiness. You know, he came from these amazing Indians, more than, these genius Indians, more than 3,000 years ago. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, they were the ones who began the investigation into the nature of self. You know, not Freud a hundred years ago, as we think. I mean, these astonishing, amazing thinkers, yogis, meditators, scholars, and they're the ones who created this ingenious psychological skill called single-pointed concentration that enables you to plumb the depths of your own mind to totally subdue all the neurotic, the mental and neurotic states, the uncontrolled thoughts, the crazy thoughts, as well as the sensory, to access a more subtle level of mind, laser-like focus. Which you use then to unpack and unravel the chaos in here and turn it into something brilliant and marvelous. This is, that's psychology. Don't call that religion. That's psychology, you know, brilliant. So when we look in the modern view, I listen to the different terms, OCD, for example, ADHD and all the variations, bipolar, manic depression, as it used to be called, you know, personality disorder, neurodiverse. All of these terminologies we come up with, and always in Greek for some reason, always in Latin, one or the other, that is variations of what Buddha already has discovered, you know, and the Indians too, about the crazy mind. So having an uncontrolled mind, I mean, it's not as if we've invented that. This is completely normal behavior. But what Buddha has, which we do not have in the modern world, I mean, we're using Buddha's views to the best of our ability, is his ability to completely calm the mind, steady the mind, control the mind, transform the mind. So when we hear it in this way, it's much more grounded rather than, oh, I'm going to meditate, something magical will happen. But it's up to us to look into it, you know. Think about that."
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SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT 397: Buddha’s the best psychologist!