The solution to greatly improve happiness and mental health
The brain is composed of giant networks of electrically conductive cells.
Communication between brain cells shapes perceptions of the physical world and creates the human mind.
Pictures of past experiences are stored in these networks.
Over the course of one’s life, these pictures of past experiences mold the brain, forming pathways that trigger reactive thought patterns, habitual behaviors, fears, and addictive processes that are not in alignment with who we really are.
Conflicts between these internal patterns of stored past experiences are what create stress, pain, and anxiety.
Because of the enormous demand on the mind, the circuitry where these pictures are stored is always activated.
As a consequence, people find it impossible to create an enormous amount of random thinking.
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This makes walking around the world seem like stepping through a room covered with mouse traps.
The solution to greatly improve happiness and mental health is not to comply with the thoughts, desires, and habits that are triggered.
This only exacerbates the problem, and indeed etches those patterns more deeply into a person’s neural architecture.
The true solution is to remove the mental pictures, which are the triggers for these thoughts, attachments, fears, and judgments.
In modern neuroscience, this practice is called extinction learning.
Meditation is extinction learning, done on such a massive level, that one uncovers their true nature by wiping away their pictures of the past.
The infinite universe mind that is uncovered once enough pictures have been removed, is what remains.
One also learns that their self, before the meditation practice, was simply an emergent property of a massive accumulation of pictures of the past.
