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I've been asked to speak about the cultivation

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of mental and emotional balance.

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Which I imagine many of us

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perhaps all of us here are interested in already

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But I'm quite sure everyone is interested in

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having a clear mind, having mental well being

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emotional well being, a sense of health.

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And the implication in the title here is that balance

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is a key to both mental and emotional balance

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so how do we go about cultivating that?

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I would suggest the key is attention.

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I think we all know from our own experience

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that our own minds

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can be our worst enemies

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they can drive us mad

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while sitting quietly in a room with no stimuli from

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the environment at all, we can be abjectly miserable

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just by the rumination, the thoughts going through our minds

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getting caught up, snared, in the grip of

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which i call rumination.

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In other words we know we can

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miserable all by ourselves with no help from outside

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it's an inside job

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and many, but perhaps not all, people know

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that it's also possible

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to be sitting quietly in your chambers

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quietly in a cave, quietly in a serene place in nature

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and with little or no stimulation from the environment

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to have a sense of being truely well, happy

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and you look around, and think, what's making me happy

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and you can't find anything outside

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that sense of well being is coming from

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inside

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so we should be sherlock holmes

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here

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tracing this to the source. now in this marvelous

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presentation I have the luck of being to listen to off stage

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causation the agent was uniformly attributed to the brain

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and there's no question the brain is implicated

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in all of our subjective experiences

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but the notion the only true explanation is a neurological one

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and i never heard the speaker say that

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i think, is limited.

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Sometimes i think we have a brighter light shed

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on what's going on in subjective experience

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by looking into subjective experience itself.

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looking for a psychological explanation

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so i suggested that attention is the key

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a person who can control his attention

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his or her attention

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can control the type of reality that person has a sense of

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experiencing and living. for after all,

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as William James, the great pioneer of modern psychology stated

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for the moment what we attend to is reality

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we take seriously, we count as real, only that which we attend to.

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so when our minds are caught up

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in attention hyper activity, whether or not it's clinical

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diagnosed, i think we all know what it's like,

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when the mind is like a runaway train

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like a elephant in rut

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to use on of the great indian

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classic metaphores

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it can give us

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an enormous amount of grieve, especially

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when this rumination

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this obsessive compulsive flow of thinking

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is negative.

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dwelling on passed misfortunes, the misbehaviour of other people

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negativeness of once or another and they

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catch us in their claws

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we really become victims of our own minds.

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so negative rumination. If we're looking for

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mental balance, emotional balance, in so far

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that our minds are still prone to do

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such negative rumination, such attention hyper activity

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where the mind really is out of control

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and we're kinda just being dragged along in its wake

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then, as long as we are prone to that,

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or to the extend that we are prone to that,

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mental and emotional balance will be an unreachable ideal.

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I call this OCDD

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this tendency.

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Not to be confused with the OCD obsessive compulsive disorder which is clinically diagnosed,

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the OCDD will not show up in the current version, the 5th version of

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the encyclopedia of mental diseases.

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Probably because all of the editors of DSM have it,

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as do most of us, if not all of us here in the audience

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i call it obsessive compulsive delussional disorder

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but see how familiar it sounds.

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obsessive and in the sense that you would like to be just quiet

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nothing to think about, nothing you need to think about

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you'd like to be quietly present

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simply attending to... your body, your mind another person

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you can't because the mind is like a chatterbox

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it always has something to say

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obsessively thoughts are flowing out, one after another

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and as much you would love to turn it off,

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at least have a respite once in a while

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a bit of quiet in the chamber of your mind

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it does not give you that option

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it always has an answer

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you want to be quiet. Good let's talk about it.

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It's obsessive.

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If you think you have control

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try to not think for one minute while your still awake

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and that's obsessive.

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well and if that's not enough

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it's also compulsive, that is the thoughts arise

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but don't just simply arise

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like images on a television screen

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they arise and we generally are compulsively drawn into them

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it's a syphon, as if it sucks our attention in

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and our focus is on the reference of the thought

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we are there and then thinking about this and that

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there was a really awfull image in that movie "little miss sunshine"

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remember where they tied the dog to the back of the station wagon

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and then forgot?

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yeah, it was a comedy so no animals were harmed in that sequence

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but nevertheless, we're the dog

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and the rumination is the stationwagon

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it draws us in, it drags us along.

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does that resonate with your experience?

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but it's worse than that.

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obsessive would be bad enough.

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compulsive is even worse

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but it gets worse

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it's delusional

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and that is when we get caught in the vortex of this kind of flow

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of rumination

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the general tendency

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and see for yourself, i'm not trying to tell you what your experience is like,

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i'm making a generalisation

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see whether the shoe fits.

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we tend to take seriously whatever we're thinking

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eventhough we're not thinking it

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it is thinking us

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the dog is not driving the car.

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but is it not true that when we're thinking about something

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fixating, ruminating, obsessing

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about something

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that there's a general tendency to think

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i think therefor it's true

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psychologist call that refractory period.

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where the mind gets caught in the grip of an emotion

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a memory, a desire, and we can't see outside of that filter system

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if i'm ruminating negatively about some person

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resentment is arising, maybe contempt or disgust is arising

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towards that person

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in so far as i am in the flow of that rumination

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that obsessive compulsive delusional disorder

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i cannot imagine that person has any good qualities

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or even any neutral qualities