Wednesday 14 March 2012

Recession driving people to meditation


Recession makes people question their values


Recession driving people to meditation, says Croydon Buddhist centre leader
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Croydon Advertiser

MONEY worries are driving a record number of Croydonians to seek security and serenity through meditation, according to a leading Croydon Buddhist.

The number of people attending classes at the Buddhist Centre Croydon on the High Street has doubled in the past two years.

And sessions have become so popular that the shrine rooms are no longer large enough to hold the meditators.

Buddhist leader Dhammavijaya, 47, of Plough Lane, Purley, has noticed a significant increase in attendees at his meditation and Buddhism classes.

Dhammavijaya, who has been an ordained Buddhist for 23 years, believes people in Croydon are turning to the religion in an attempt to find a more meaningful way of life after the country sunk into recession.

He said: "People are very aware that the things they relied on for security aren't as stable as they thought they were and so are looking for other ways of security that doesn't depend on material things."

Attendance at classes has doubled in the last two years, and they attract a wide range of ages, from 17 to 70.

The most popular class is, in fact, the only one that is completely centred on Buddhist beliefs, and regularly sees more than 30 people attending weekly..."  Read the rest here


---


---



Saturday 3 March 2012

Mind the Gap





From Rational Buddhism

The 'Explanatory Gap', or 'The Hard Problem', is science's inability to demonstrate, by logical chains of cause and effect,  how brain activity produces mental experiences.

The mind/brain gap has been recognized for at least 140 years, and since that time none of the scientific progress in biology, neurology or information science has brought us any nearer to closing it.

If attempting to bridge the gap from the physical side hasn't worked, then maybe we should try from the mental side.

Or perhaps understanding the problem is simply beyond human intellectual abilities. Or maybe the problem is so self-referential that it leads to an infinite recursion.  Or possibly it is a kind of problem for which no discursive description or solution is logically possible.

Read the full article here.


---


---