The Buddha said he taught one thing: the causes of suffering and its end. How might it serve Buddhist practice to address the ways that these causes could be natural processes embedded in our evolved human neuropsychology? Studies are showing how the conscious and unconscious mental activities of central Buddhist themes – e.g., dukkha, tanha, sati, sila, metta, upekkha – depend upon underlying neural activities; mental/neural processes co-arise. Repeated patterns of mental/neural activity shape lasting neural structure: “neurons that fire together, wire together.” These new insights from neuroscience can support and enrich practice in many ways. For example, first, knowing that unwholesome mental states build unwholesome brain structure while wholesome mental states build wholesome structure helps strengthen conviction (faith) and motivation for practice. Second, it deepens insight and disenchantment to know that the coalition of millions if not billions of synapses that produces even the simplest experience, such as the sound of a bell, is fleeting, arbitrary, and selfless. Third, recognizing the brain’s evolved negativity bias – it is good at learning from bad experiences but bad at learning from good experiences – helps people both to disidentify more quickly from unwholesome states and to turn wholesome states into enduring neural structure (i.e., “neurobhavana”). Last, in neuropsychological terms, the craving that causes suffering arises largely from states of deficit and disturbance; through using neurobhavana to repeatedly internalize the felt sense of our three core needs – safety, satisfaction, connection - being met, experiences of deficit and disturbance decrease along with suffering, and there is more space in the mind for peace, contentment, and love – and for liberating insight.
