Houston Southard

James Kingsland - SIddhartha’s Brain

10% of children have diagnosable mental disorders that affect their ability to become happy adults. Author James Kingsland argues that emotional health is a better predictor of happiness than the typical causers like academic achievement, sociability or family background. He says that so many people demonstrably suffer from mental health issues suggests not that they’re discrete conditions like diabetes or asthma, but an extreme manifestation of the human condition. Even with identified physiological and neurological symptoms, Kingsland says these can be corrected through meditation (a buzzword rife with misunderstanding). People have come to think meditation excises people into zombies without desires, ambitions, and personalities, which they perceive to go against the grain of the western cultivation of self-advancement. It’s a misunderstanding because work does not mean suffering and peace does not mean inactivity, and the two aren’t antithetical. You can be completely at peace hard at work on something.

The need for meditation breeds another question, too. What went wrong in evolution that caused us to need meditation to fix us?

Kingsland wrote this book to recount the life of the Buddha, a self-disowning Hindu prince named Siddhartha Gautama, the changes his brain and behavior underwent on his journey to happiness, and how he did more good than any other human being in the history of the world in bringing the benefits of meditation to bear on our long-suffering species. It’s a book about the scientific basis of enlightenment as well as an exploration of how and why the mind developed the cognitive quirks that made practices like meditation popular and necessary for psychological well-being.

Cell suicide, telomere-lengthening, meditation's true father (fire), monotheistic prayer misattribution, strengthening the brain's posterior cingulate cortex by breaking its default mode network. This book has enough to delude you into faux enlightenment. This review continues (at length) in the book reports section of my website. If you haven't fallen into a deep calm sleep yet, that should be your next stop. Namaste.