Debt Management: 5 Reasons Paying Down Your Debt Might Be Even More Important Than You Realize
Debt Management: 5 Reasons Paying Down Your Debt Might Be Even More Important Than You Realize |
- Debt Management: 5 Reasons Paying Down Your Debt Might Be Even More Important Than You Realize
- Debt Management: 5 Reasons Paying Down Your Debt Might Be Even More Important Than You Realize
- Meet Wildmind’s iPhone app!
- Early Morning Buddhist Spirituality Inspiration - 6/21/2013
- "Heterophenomenology." Not a sex act. Way of studying consciousness.
- Having gratitude for our enemies
- Meditation reduces the risk of depression in schoolchildren
| Debt Management: 5 Reasons Paying Down Your Debt Might Be Even More Important Than You Realize Posted: 21 Jun 2013 10:00 AM PDT  It's something that we Americans have been eager to pile on and slow to pay off. A 2012 survey by Bankrate.com suggests that 25 percent of Americans carry more credit card debt than emergency savings. And according to NerdWallet.com, the average amount of credit card debt per indebted household stood at a staggering $ 15,216 as of June, 2013. If just looking at those numbers makes you squeamish, you're not alone. Carrying mass amounts of debt is bad for us in more ways than one and can have severe long-term effects that go well beyond our finances. Read more »  Read More @ Source |
| Debt Management: 5 Reasons Paying Down Your Debt Might Be Even More Important Than You Realize Posted: 21 Jun 2013 10:00 AM PDT It's something that we Americans have been eager to pile on and slow to pay off. A 2012 survey by Bankrate.com suggests that 25 percent of Americans carry more credit card debt than emergency savings. And according to NerdWallet.com, the average amount of credit card debt per indebted household stood at a staggering $ 15,216 as of June, 2013. If just looking at those numbers makes you squeamish, you're not alone. Carrying mass amounts of debt is bad for us in more ways than one and can have severe long-term effects that go well beyond our finances. Read more » Read More @ Source |
| Posted: 21 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT
This is our first attempt at an app, and it's very simple. It simply takes the blog and presents the most recent posts from the news, on practice, reviews, and quote of the month categories. So it's simple, but it's a nice way to read the blog. And I like to think it looks nice, although I did the graphic design, so I'm biased. The app was put together for us by Tony Paine, who is a software engineer in the Bay Area, and also a Buddhist Spirituality who used to be part of the sangha at Aryaloka, my local Dharma center, until he went out west. Incredibly, Tony did the app development at no charge, and taught himself how to code iPhone apps just so that he could help us out. There's an FAQ page for the app here, if you want more information beyond what you'll learn in iTunes. We hope that version 2.0 will have additional features:
We're also hoping to have an Android version at some point. So, please download our app to your iPhone (it'll work on an iPad, but you have to enlarge it by hitting the x2 button) and please give us a rating! Obviously I'd be happiest if you gave it a five star rating, but please be honest. And please give us feedback and feature requests through the App Support page. Read More @ Source |
| Early Morning Buddhist Spirituality Inspiration - 6/21/2013 Posted: 21 Jun 2013 07:00 AM PDT  "Only the present moment contains life." ~Thich Nhat Hanh      Read More @ Source |
| "Heterophenomenology." Not a sex act. Way of studying consciousness. Posted: 20 Jun 2013 11:00 PM PDT I've learned a new word: heterophenomenology. Was immediately attracted to it, even before I knew what it meant. Had an exotic sensuous ring. "Hey, hot thing, I'd really like to do some heterophenomenology with you. Are you up for it?" Turns out, though, that what Daniel Dennet is talking about in his new book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, isn't a sex act, but a means of investigating subjective consciousness. Or at least, what people usually think of as subjective consciousness. Dennett has an interesting take on how it is possible to investigate experiences that are usually regarded as utterly personal. Like a mystical experience. Like an experience of God's presence. Like an experience of feeling one with the cosmos. Dennett writes: Heterophenomenology is the study of first-person phenomena from the third person point of view of objective science. Obviously the key difference between experiments with rocks, roses, and rats on the one hand, and experiments with awake, cooperative human subjects on the other, is that the latter can communicate in language and hence can collaborate with experimenters, by making suggestions, interacting verbally, and telling them what it is like under various controlled conditions. That is the core of heterophenomenology: it exploits our capacity to perform and interpret speech acts, yielding a catalogue of what the subject believes to be true about his or her conscious experience. This catalogue of beliefs fleshes out the subject's heterophenomenological world, the world according to S, the subjective world of one subject. I think Dennett is on to something here. He has systematized a way of thinking about issues that come up all the time on this blog. Meaning, someone makes a claim about something they have experienced. "I have seen the light and sound of God, so I know God exists." I always think, OK, I accept that you believe you have had that experience. However, this is different from actually having the sort of experience you are claiming to have had. Dennett lists four kinds of evidence, or interpretations of experience: (a) Conscious experiences themselves I'm not sure what the difference between (c) and (d) is. Doesn't matter. The most interesting thing is the difference between (a) and (b). First, if (a) outruns (b) -- if you have conscious experiences you don't believe you have, then those extra conscious experiences are jiust as inaccessible to you as to the external observers. Second, if (b) outruns (a) -- if you believe you have conscious experiences that you don't in fact have, then it is your beliefs that we need to explain, not the nonexistent experiences. ...Mermaid sightings are real events, however misdescribed, whereas mermaids don't exist. Similarly, a catalogue of beliefs about experience is not the same as a catalogue of experiences themselves. Well, after reading this I still didn't understand how it is possible to tell whether a conscious experience actually exists, or whether only a belief about a conscious experience exists. Wikipedia helped me out. I'm sure many philosophers and neuroscientists consider heterophenomenology to be a meaningless approach to consciousness research, but it seems on the right track to me. Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another not oneself") is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bent, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how the subject sees the world him- or herself, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted. Heterophenomenology is put forth as the alternative to traditional Cartesian phenomenology, which Dennett calls "lone-wolf autophenomenology" to emphasize the fact that it accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subjects authoritative only about how things seem to them. It does not dismiss the Cartesian first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence. The method requires a researcher to listen to the subjects and take what they say seriously, but to also look at everything else available to them, including the subject's bodily responses and environment, evidence provided by relevant neurological or psychological studies, the researcher's memories of their own experiences, and any other scientific data that might help to interpret what the subject has reported. Dennett notes this method is actually the normal way that anyone will choose to investigate aspects of the mind. He writes: "heterophenomenology is nothing new; it is nothing other than the method that has been used by psychophysicists, cognitive psychologists, clinical neuropsychologists, and just about everybody who has ever purported to study human consciousness in a serious, scientific way." The key role of heterophenomenology in Dennett's philosophy of consciousness is that it defines all that can or needs to be known about the mind. For any phenomenological question "why do I experience X", there is a corresponding heterophenomenological question "why does the subject say 'I experience X'". To quote Dennett, "The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding environment, comprise the total data set for a theory of human consciousness. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness." |
| Having gratitude for our enemies Posted: 20 Jun 2013 10:00 PM PDT
"Since my adversary assists me in my Bodhisattva way of life, I should long for him like a treasure discovered in the house and acquired without effort. "…patience arises only in dependence on that malicious intention, so he alone is a cause of my patience. I should respect him just like the sublime Dharma." The 8th century Indian teacher Shantideva gives us a rationale for feeling grateful to those who wish us harm: our enemies give us an amazing opportunity to practice patience. This can actually work! This morning on a social network something I'd said attracted the attention of a guy whose communication started off as rather brash but quickly degenerated into graphic threats of violence against me. There was a momentary urge to write something nasty (but subtle!) back to him, but then I realized this guy was a "troll" — someone who gets their kicks from barging into discussions and causing a reaction. And I actually felt some gratitude and affection toward the guy for having given me an opportunity to be more mindful, wise, and compassionate — which manifested as refusing to respond to him at all. After a short reflection on gratitude, all anger for this person totally vanished. Right now I feel like I want to hug him, in fact! We may generally wish that people who don't like us would just go away, or start liking us, or stop being so unreasonable, but since we can't force other people to change it seems that Shantideva's approach has some merit. There are going to be people who hate us, dislike us, or make life difficult for us. We can't entirely alter the world so that it suits us. But we can change our attitude toward them. Now everyone has some positive qualities, to some degree. I can think of people it's hard to like because they're destructive, violent, and narcissistic. But not every single thing that they do is intended to cause harm. They have some restraint, some patience, some tenderness — or at least the potential for these things. But it can be hard to get beyond our dislikes and find something to appreciate in someone we feel antagonistic toward. Shantideva's approach short-circuits this. When cultivating mudita — joyful appreciation — for the people we find difficult, it's their challenging behaviors themselves that we appreciate. We don't appreciate those qualities because they are harmful, but because they test us, chellange us, and allow us the opportunity to go deeper into our practice. This is a difficult thing to remember in the heat of the moment! When someone "flames" you in a discussion forum, it can feel like a sharp object has been jammed into a sensitive part of your body. The first instinct is to retaliate. So we need to practice cultivating this attitude when our amygdalas are not red-hot and throbbing (the amygdala being the ancient part of your brain that sparks off the "fight or flight" reflex).  If you benefit from the work I do, please consider supporting Wildmind. Click here to make a one-time or recurring donation. So right now, think of someone you tend to get annoyed by, or someone who has hurt you, or someone you tend to criticize a lot. And see if you can feel a sense of generosity and appreciation toward them for testing you. See if you can regard them as being like a particularly challenging climbing wall, or sudoku or crossword puzzle, or like a tricky mystery story that's designed to baffle you (please translate to your challenge of choice). Seeing the enemy this way, we take them less personally. We see them less as a personal affront, and more as a puzzle to be solved. It's good to be challenged! Life without challenges becomes gray and insipid. It crossed my mind that there's a mirror image of this in the way that when we're first in love with someone their "faults" are seen as endearing. We appreciate our loved one and take their odd habits not as a personal affront but as a reason to feel even more appreciation. But once the infatuation wears off, we're left with being annoyed by our beloved's faults. Shantideva walks this process back — we no longer take the faults as being a personal affront, and start to feel appreciation, and perhaps appreciation, because of them. PS. You can see a full list of our 100 Days of Lovingkindness posts here. Read More @ Source |
| Meditation reduces the risk of depression in schoolchildren Posted: 20 Jun 2013 09:00 PM PDT
Teaching children a form of meditation called 'mindfulness' – a psychological technique which focuses awareness and attention – can reduce a pupil's stress levels meaning their mental health improves. The technique can also improve their academic performance, the researchers found. Scientists at the University of Exeter, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and the Mindfulness in Schools Project (MiSP), taught 256 pupils aged between 12 and 16 the MiSP curriculum. The curriculum involved teaching the children nine lessons in how to better control their… Read the original article » Read More @ Source |
Wildmind's first iPhone app is now available for download from iTunes. And it's FREE!
Emma Innes, Mail Online: Children who are taught meditation are less likely to develop depression, a new study has revealed.| You are subscribed to email updates from BuddhaRocks ☸ To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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