Why do I get angry? What am I paying attention to? Where did I leave my car keys?<\/p>\n
Mental phenomena like these pass through my mind a hundred, a thousand, times every hour. I usually find them so intoxicating that I rarely see the need to answer the question as being separate from the thought that expresses the question.<\/p>\n
Bringing awareness to our mental life, seeing how thoughts and emotions rise and fall, is a valuable meditation practice and one that I am making slow, steady progress on. However, other meditation practices await anyone willing to explore. Robin sent me this link to a recent NY Times article (“A Master of Memory in India Credits Meditation for His Brainy Feats”<\/strong><\/a>) about the astounding memory of a Jain monk in India. The monk describes his powers of concentration as nothing special, “I have sacrificed everything, and that is why I can do this,” he said. “Anyone can do this, it is not a miracle. My message is this: When you know your own capacity, when you get rid of your distractions, the power of your mind is immense.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why do I get angry? What am I paying attention to? Where did I leave my car keys? Mental phenomena like these pass through my mind a hundred, a thousand, times every hour. I usually find them so intoxicating that I rarely see the need to answer the question as being separate from the thought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":442,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions\/442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}