Brains

Developing mindfulness and compassion requires playing with your brain.

Conscious, intentional lives are the constant interplay of consciousness with brain (thought) and behavior (action). We all awake in adulthood to find we are working with a brain which is used to and preconditioned by our genetics and experience. In every moment, we are faced with the situations of life on a planet, crowded with humankind and complicated by the products of other brains. Our brains are more like racing speed boats without navigation systems than hi-tech ocean liners. The trick is to stay behind the wheel and keep on course.

Many people go through life impulsively, compulsively and reactively. Like players of a video game, they frantically push buttons in their brains to react to situations and people. Most are disappointed in the end by the choices they make. Few face their deaths with a sigh of satisfaction and completion. I know. I have been at hundreds of death beds.

Mastery of your own brain's triggers and patterns is a lifelong process, a practice.

Sobriety, honesty and reflection are necessary tools. Controlling and changing behavior is the first step to mastering the brain. This is the path to proactive living. Indulging impulses and compulsions is the road to disaster. Mindfulness and compassion emerge with understanding and acceptance of one's own mortal humanity.

Principles

I recently heard an author on the radio bemoaning her conscience and principles, instilled in her brain by parents, teachers and ministers. Her quest, apparently, is to become unprincipled. While I understood her resentment over certain sexist aspects of her conditioning, I think she is perhaps throwing the (well raised) baby out with the bath water.

While I no longer subscribe to my native Christianity, I do appreciate the one central commandment of the mythic Christ: Love thy neighbor as thyself, or, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the basic principle of all compassion and mindfulness. And, if followed, naturally leads to right thought and right action in its practitioner.

Perhaps this is the key to secular humanist morality and ethics. No harsh paternal figure required. No flames of hell as deterrent. No heavenly virgins as reward.

Being human in the most mindful and compassionate way in the moment when alone or with others as a practice is perhaps a higher standard of behavior than the standard of religions which offer ritual absolution for routine, mindless, hateful behaviors without a requirement of subsequent intellectual or behavioral changes.

My principles are my practice. If I proceed with intentional mindfulness and compassion through each day to the best of my ability, I feel it will be unnecessary to fret over the dictates of any religion, social trend or social pressure, which may be at odds with being a truthful, loving and open member of the human family.