Abstract
As interpersonal, racial, social, and international conflicts intensify in the world, it is important to safeguard the mental health of individuals affected by them. According to a Buddhist notion “if you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion,” compassion practice is an intervention to cultivate conflict-proof well-being. Here, compassion practice refers to a form of concentrated meditation wherein a practitioner attunes to friend, enemy, and someone in between, thinking, “I’m going to help them (equally).” The compassion meditation is based on Buddhist philosophy that mental suffering is rooted in conceptual thoughts that give rise to generic mental images of self and others and subsequent biases to preserve one’s egoism, blocking the ultimate nature of mind. To contextualize compassion meditation scientifically, we adopted a Bayesian active inference framework to incorporate relevant Buddhist concepts, including mind (buddhi), compassion (karuna), aggregates (skandhas), suffering (duhkha), reification (samaropa), conceptual thoughts (vikalpa), and superimposition (prapañca). In this framework, a person is considered a Bayesian Engine that actively constructs phenomena based on the aggregates of forms, sensations, discriminations, actions, and consciousness. When the person embodies rigid beliefs about self and others’ identities (identity-grasping beliefs) and the resulting ego-preserving bias, the person’s Bayesian Engine malfunctions, failing to use prediction errors to update prior beliefs. To counter this problem, after recognizing the causes of sufferings, a practitioner of the compassion meditation aims to attune to all others equally, friends and enemies alike, suspend identity-based conceptual thoughts, and eventually let go of any identity-grasping belief and ego-preserving bias that obscure reality. We present a brain model for the Bayesian Engine of three components: (a) Relation-Modeling, (b) Reality-Checking, and (c) Conflict-Alarming, which are subserved by (a) the Default-Mode Network (DMN), (b) Frontoparietal Network (FPN) and Ventral Attention Network (VAN), and (c) Salience Network (SN), respectively. Upon perceiving conflicts, the strengthening or weakening of ego-preserving bias will critically depend on whether the SN up-regulates the DMN or FPN/VAN, respectively. We propose that compassion meditation can strengthen brain regions that are conducive for suspending prior beliefs and enhancing the attunements to the counterparts in conflicts.
Highlights
Conflicts are inevitable in a society whose members have diverse interests and ideologies
We aim to introduce relevant Buddhist concepts in the present work in order to identify an entry point for attunement-oriented interventions to safeguard personal well-being despite inevitable conflicts, such personal intervention is by no means a substitute for more socially active processes such as better journalism, better accountability of politicians, and better rule of law
While these results may suggest that concentration meditation could reduce potential vicarious distress due to the observation of others’ suffering, an alternative explanation may be that the practitioners have reduced their alarming signals, as the anterior insula is a key region in the Salience Network (SN), as part of the Conflict-Alarming component, because they have reduced ego-preserving bias when observing others’ suffering
Summary
Conflicts are inevitable in a society whose members have diverse interests and ideologies. The ultimate nature of mind is irreducible to physical forms, like a clear lamp shade is irreducible to light bulbs, the mind can be entrapped in an impersonal Bayesian active inference process and the brain, as explained in Sections “Incorporating Buddhist Concepts in a Bayesian Active Inference Framework” and “A Brain Model for the Social Cognition, Embodied Identity-Grasping Beliefs, and Compassion Meditation Effects.”. It emphasizes how to see conflicts (and other circumstances that are ordinarily upsetting or depressing) as reasons for happiness in the perspective of dependent origination, e.g., thinking that difficulties faced in day-to-day life are exhausting negative karmic results of one’s own non-virtuous actions in the past; how to transform a selfcherishing attitude into cherishing others, by contemplating the illusory nature of the self, the faults in self-cherishing, and the benefits that flow from cherishing others; the trainings are based primarily on the techniques for equalizing the attunement to self and others and exchange of self and other by taking other’s suffering and giving them self ’s happiness (Buswell and Lopez, 2013). Shade metaphor, the model of brain is not a model of clear lamp shade (the nature of mind), but a model of two light bulbs (two modes of mental factors), in which one light bulb would color the mind with the ego-preserving bias and the other would not
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