Tagged: Flow
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Bronkhorst - The Buddhist Noble Truths (2023)
1The Buddhist Four Noble Truths can be interpreted as scientifically plausible psychological claims when viewed through modern neuroscience and psychology. In this framework, suffering arises from the conscious awareness of conflicting, unresolved needs, a state often masked by temporary distractions like mental "flow." These conflicts and their associated desires, or "thirst," are rooted in entrenched emotional memories that form our personality, functioning like "mini-addictions." The cessation of this suffering and desire is therefore possible through memory reconsolidation, a process where reactivating these core memories allows their emotional charge to be permanently erased. The path to this goal involves accessing these otherwise hidden memories, which the author proposes could be achieved through deep mental absorption, thereby enabling the reconsolidation process to resolve the underlying conflicts at their source.
Polak - The Pleasure of Not Experiencing Anything (2023)
2Grzegorz Polak's article reconstructs the philosophical basis for the early Buddhist claim that the pleasure (*sukha*) of nibbāna lies in the absence of experience (*vedayita*). The author argues that *vedayita* and the five aggregates (*khandhas*) do not represent all cognition but a specific type of introspectable, reportable "access consciousness" that is inherently fabricated (*saṅkhāra*) and tied to a mistaken sense of self. Drawing on modern cognitive science, the paper posits that this form of consciousness is not continuous and its very generation is correlated with a subtle tension and fundamental discomfort (*dukkha*). Consequently, states of deep absorption or "flow" are pleasurable due to a lower frequency of this self-conscious awareness. The ultimate psychological transformation, therefore, involves ceasing to identify with one's consciousness, which allows for its absence to be realized not as annihilation, but as a profound, non-introspectable comfort (*sukha*) while the organism remains intelligently and receptively engaged with the world.