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Showing posts from November, 2017

Mindfulness and Critical Thinking

Does eastern meditation help with critical thinking? The connection between meditation and logical reasoning might seem weird. The former refers to religious mysticism; the latter to rationality. Of course, there are different kinds of meditation. A person can pray, sing mantras, think about divinity or concentrate on actions or ideas. But behind all of these practices lies the same phenomenon. It is called mindfulness. One needs to pay full attention to some object. Actually, there is nothing mystical at all. If you read an interesting book full attention is a very easy thing. But what if you need to concentrate on a boring topic? You will notice your mind wandering around. Different thoughts will fly through your consciousness. It is not meditation yet. But here is a crucial element of a meditation. You need to train your mind to stay in focus. In one form of a meditation, a person just concentrates on his own breathing. He tries to stop every thought that appears in his br