John Dunne’s class on the Facets of Mindfulness and Croissants
I never understood the value of learning valid cognition until taking John Dunne’s class on the Facets of Mindfulness this fall. By observing the process through which our mind makes coherent the vast array of sensory information it receives, the negative emotions which form based upon our feelings about these sensory experiences lose their foothold. By seeing through analysis that no two experiences can ever be the same, all the expectations of attachment and fears towards aversive experiences —which are based on comparison to “similar” experiences that caused such reactions in the past—no longer have a basis for arising. All negative emotions necessarily rely on memory of the past and expectation for the future, thus learning to look at the present moment with more and more subtle levels of awareness yields mindstates that are more free and open to see our experience with less and less mental and emotional baggage attached. One example that John used in...