Today (Sunday, 15 July) we talked a bit about the Foundations of Mindfulness and why we are interested in moment-by-moment awareness. I used the following article from Tricycle by Stephen Bachelor, who talked about why the Buddha stressed mindfulness of the breath, the body, feelings, mind, and objects of mind. It wasn’t just to become calm, but to understand and accept ourselves just as we are:
We then talked a bit about art: I got off on a bit of a tangent with a short discussion on Neandertal art. This started with me talking about how deep our conditioning likely goes: back into our evolutionary past. I always have thought that Neandertals have received bad press when they were quite sophisticated. And I just read a Scientific American article showing they were abstract thinkers as indicated by cave paintings:
Ancient Cave Paintings Clinch the Case for Neandertal Symbolism
Abstract images in Spanish caves date back 65,000 years—millennia before Homo sapiens set foot in Europe—settling a long-running debate over Neandertal cognition
Finally, I recommended that we try out new ways of “being in the moment”: perhaps by sketching and painting even if that’s not something we may think we’re any good at. It’s yet another way to be “in the moment.” This is the book I recommended to people, but Danny Gregory has written a number of them, and they’re delightful: