Importance of Buddhist psychotherapy

Celebrated Psychologists like Carl Jung, William James and many others have understood the value of Buddhist philosophy and its positive impact on mental health. Their research programs have highlighted the importance of Buddhist psychotherapy in the treatment of depression, anxiety, factitious and addiction disorders, medically unexplained symptoms and various other psychological ailments. It is now increasingly used in psychotherapeutic practice in the western world.

Modern society has imposed many strains on human beings, and those in the psychological realm are perhaps among the most serious. As declared by the Buddha and emphasized by William James, the realities of the mind are more important than the realities of the body. Hence the significance of mental health and mental therapy as advocated in Buddhism has been recognised today by professionals.

Mindfulness

Historically, the Buddha was the first religious leader in the world to draw a distinction between physical and mental illness. According to the Buddha, it is hard to find a perfectly healthy person physically; it is harder still to find a person completely sound and healthy mentally.

Buddhist psychotherapy stresses the value of mindfulness and meditation. Instead of talking long hours about a mental problem with a psychotherapist until it virtually takes over one's consciousness, the Buddhist therapy tries to help the individual to awaken to his or her true nature, even if it means living outside of social convention. This is where Western and Buddhist psychotherapy differ.

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A Mental Sign Of Vitamin B12 Deficiency

Up to one-in-eight people may have a vitamin B12 deficiency.

Vitamin B12 is crucial to the production of red blood cells and the healthy functioning of brain cells.

Its effect on mental processes is likely down to its involvement in the production of myelin.

Myelin is a material that surrounds neurons (brain cells) and also the connections between them, known as axons.

Fortunately, vitamin B12 deficiency is easy to correct either with supplementation or a change in diet.

Foods high in vitamin B12 include dairy, beef, salmon, eggs and low-fat milk.

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New Issue: Journal of Conflict Resolution

The latest issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (Vol. 63, no. 9, October 2019) is out. Contents include:

• Articles
• Richard Traunmüller, Sara Kijewski, & Markus Freitag, The Silent Victims of Sexual Violence during War: Evidence from a List Experiment in Sri Lanka
• Shanna Kirschner & Adam Miller, Does Peacekeeping Really Bring Peace? Peacekeepers and Combatant-perpetrated Sexual Violence in Civil Wars
• Emily Kalah Gade, Michael Gabbay, Mohammed M. Hafez, & Zane Kelly, Networks of Cooperation: Rebel Alliances in Fragmented Civil Wars
• Ursula Daxecker, Jessica Di Salvatore, & Andrea Ruggeri, Fraud Is What People Make of It: Election Fraud, Perceived Fraud, and Protesting in Nigeria
• Patricia Justino & Bruno Martorano, Redistributive Preferences and Protests in Latin America
• Marina G. Petrova, What Matters Is Who Supports You: Diaspora and Foreign States as External Supporters and Militants' Adoption of Nonviolence
• Yoram Z. Haftel & Stephanie C. Hofmann, Rivalry and Overlap: Why Regional Economic Organizations Encroach on Security Organizations
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Supreme Court OKs Retaliatory Arrests For Engaging In Protected Speech

The Supreme Court has declared it's cool with cops engaging in retaliatory arrests… just as long as they have the probable cause to do so. Given the thousands of obscure laws we've been cursed with by legislators, most law enforcement officers will be able to find someway to shut up someone by putting them in cuffs. (Whatever they're wrong about can be salvaged by the good faith exception.)

In this case, plaintiff Russell Bartlett was arrested after not talking to police and telling other winter festival attendees to not talk to the police. The officer who arrested Bartlett claimed Bartlett was drunk and disorderly, hence the supposedly-justified arrest. Here's the background, as summarized in the Supreme Court's opinion [PDF]

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Meekness Is Not Weakness

Of all the Beatitudes, I'd guess that "blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" is the most misunderstood, mistrusted, and neglected. I think the reason why is because we don't understand the virtue of meekness and tend to think it indicates weakness.

Certainly, meekness didn't fit in with the values of the Greco-Roman world of the first century, where humility wasn't generally lauded as a virtue. Nietzsche, a great admirer of the Greeks, thought meekness was exactly the sort of false virtue that the weak would applaud because, well, it's about the only virtue they could actually pull off. Since the weak can't win by the standard rules, they change the rules.

I think most of us are far more Nietzschean than we'd like to admit. At least I am. When I hear the word meek, it seems too insipid, too accommodating, too spineless to be a virtue.

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How to Expand Your Possibilities

"Who you are tomorrow begins with what you do today." – Tim Fargo

If you feel a bit stagnated in life at this point and want to do something proactive to expand your possibilities, what can you realistically do? Here are some suggestions to consider:

Start with an open mindset.

You'll never know what you don't know if you automatically close yourself off to possibilities. Telling yourself that you lack the experience or education or background, or that you're from the wrong neighborhood, aren't outgoing enough, or possess various and sundry supposed character flaws is more an excuse than legitimate. Even if some of the negatives are true, a little resistance didn't stop many successful individuals, so why characterize yourself as incompetent, unlikely to succeed or undeserving of achievement.

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8 Things Autistic People Wished You Knew about April

Every April, autism takes a center stage in global awareness. All around the world, well-meaning, good-hearted people "Light it up blue" for Autism Awareness Month, and they decorate their social media with the puzzle piece frames and the jigsaw rainbow awareness ribbons.

And, every March, autistic adults are already dreading April. Many of them report feeling traumatized by previous Aprils. They begin to mentally prepare for what is ahead, feeling powerless to stop it. They're bracing themselves for what is on the horizon.

What autistic people wish their neurotypical allies knew going into April

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Law Student Makes Astute Points About Law School Before Just Going All Racist

In a now-deleted Reddit post in the law school subreddit, a soon-to-graduate Rutgers Law School student offers some advice for aspiring law students about the problems with the school. To the poster's credit, there are some good points in here that law students should take into account during the law school selection process. Then… things get all weird and racist.

The post was titled "AVOID Rutgers Law School at all costs. Extremely bad employment prospects." This isn't really true — at least compared to a lot of options out there.

That's not how this poster sees it:

Rutgers Law Student class of 2019 here to say that if you want to be employed when graduating (unlike 80%+ of our graduating class currently), or if you want to find employment beyond the 1 year state clerkship experience, avoid our school at all costs.

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Raw fruit and vegetables provide better mental health outcomes

That is the simple message from University of Otago researchers who have discovered raw fruit and vegetables may be better for your mental health than cooked, canned and processed fruit and vegetables.

Dr Tamlin Conner, Psychology Senior Lecturer and lead author, says public health campaigns have historically focused on aspects of quantity for the consumption of fruit and vegetables (such as 5+ a day).

However, the study, just published in Frontiers in Psychology, found that for mental health in particular, it may also be important to consider the way in which produce was prepared and consumed.

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I Actually Like New York’s Double Jeopardy Loophole The Way It Is, But We Can’t Have Such Nice Things

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is trying to close New York State's double jeopardy "loophole," in a clear attempt to protect prosecutions from possible Trump pardons of his cronies. Normally, prosecutions at the federal level do not preclude prosecutions at the state level. But New York has this weird rule where jeopardy attaches for state purposes if a defendant pleads guilty or a jury is sworn-in even for a federal case, subject to a few exceptions.

It means, potentially, that a person — say, Michael Cohen — who is tried by federal prosecutors, convicted, and pardoned by President Donald Trump could not later be prosecuted for state crimes, even though the president technically has no authority to pardon state crimes.

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Ethical Considerations For Artificial Intelligence

When people imagine a future of "robot lawyers," they tend to focus on employment and economic effects — for example, the implications for the lawyer labor market (e.g., "will the robots take our jobs"). Often overlooked, but no less important, are the ethical implications of artificial intelligence.

Last week, at the Global Privacy Summit of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), I attended a session tackling this very subject — "Machines That Can Learn: Can They Also Be Taught Human Values?" — with the following panelists:

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Are You Crippled by the Fear of Leaving No Legacy Behind?

Often the biggest existential distress that we carry is the idea that no-one will remember us when we are gone. Initially, we know that our friends and family will hold who we are, but after a generation, these people are likely gone too.

At the end of life, the pressure to leave an unquestionably relevant legacy can be crippling for people, particularly for young people. When coupled with the limited energy that people have when they are unwell, the very nature of what people expect to achieve in the world shrinks, and the really important pieces come into focus.

When time is seen to be limited, every moment can take on a weight that has never before been experienced.

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4 Things You Can’t Do without Systematic Theology

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Before we can understand why systematic theology is essential, we must first understand what it is. There's no single definition of systematic theology, but at its heart it's the discipline captured by the phrase "faith seeking understanding."

Systematic theology builds on the results of biblical theology. Biblical theology is the exegetical discipline that seeks to grasp the entirety of Scripture as the unfolding of God's plan from Genesis to Revelation. Starting with Scripture as God's Word written through human authors—our final authority (sola scriptura) for what we think about God, ourselves, and the world—biblical theology seeks to "put together" the entire canon in a way that's true to God's intent.

Systematic theology then applies the truths gained in biblical theology to every aspect of our lives. It leads to doctrinal formulation—what we ought to believe and how we ought to live—warranted by the canon and done in light of historical theology. 

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Virus-free. www.avg.com

A Beautiful Mind Seminar 2 Sept 10 am BMICH

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Every Book of the Bible in One Word

God reveals himself through his Word. When he speaks, he teaches us what he is like, how he acts, and how he desires us to respond. As a whole, the Bible is about God. It's about God the Father …

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New Books You Should Know (July 2017)

Editors' note: On average, we publish around 150 book reviews a year at The Gospel Coalition. Ecclesiastes 12:12 rings true: "Of making many books there is no end." It's impossible to read, let alone …

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Scientific Pantheism and the God of the Physicists

For the theist the large categories of being are God followed by Creation. God is eternal, while Creation began in time and is ontologically separate from God. Creation includes life in all its wonderful and myriad forms. Humans are a special category of life, bearing the imago Dei (Genesis 1:26-27) and uniquely able to worship God and contemplate the meaning of existence. God is transcendent, existing now, existing before the universe and existing forever. God is the "Alpha and Omega ... which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty" (Revelation 1:8 KJV). At the same time, the God of the Bible is personal and immanent in Creation and human affairs. For the scientific naturalist there is no personal God, so the most significant category of being is the cosmos—or, for some, the multiverse. As humans are part of the cosmos and its history, the cosmos for theists is not "Wholly Other" with respect to humans, to borrow the famous language of the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his book, The Idea of the Holy (1917).

But what about the scientific naturalist, for whom the Cosmos is the supreme entity or being? Sometimes language used by scientific naturalists suggests that the cosmos has a certain numinous quality, at least at the metaphorical level, but perhaps occasionally at a much deeper level. This is the case, for example, when Carl Sagan begins his 1980 book and documentary television series Cosmos with the powerful words, "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be" (p. 4). Sagan continues:

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World's Top New Testament Scholar - Christians Need To Read The Gospels Through Ancient Jewish Eyes

I've written here about New Testament scholar N.T. Wright and his most recent book, The Day the Revolution Began. The book was published recently and is now being made available in an online course format. The book (and the course) will bring insights to even the most seasoned student of the Scri...

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What Was Jesus Writing on the Ground?

As a Lawyer, my mind was scrutinizing what the Bible had said about these sins, type of witnesses needed and what really took place here. I was also curious about what Jesus was writing on the ground.

While I was listening to the exposition of John 8 with regard to the sin of adultery, courtroom scenario, the advocate and the conscience etc., as a Lawyer, my mind was scrutinizing what the Bible had said about these sins, type of witnesses needed and what really took place here. I was also curious about what Jesus was writing on the ground (some say sand).

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What is Unit 180 and why is it one of the biggest threats to world peace?

North Korea's main spy agency has a special cell called Unit 180 that is likely to have launched some of its most daring and successful cyber attacks, according to defectors, officials and internet …

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